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FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N v. AKINS

Opinion of the Court

counts Clause, which requires that “a regular Statement and
Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public
Money shall be published from time to time.”
418 U. S., at
167–169. The Court held that the plaintiff lacked standing
because there was “no ‘logical nexus’ between the [plaintiff ’s]
asserted status of taxpayer and the claimed failure of the
Congress to require the Executive to supply a more detailed
report of the [CIA’s] expenditures.”
Id., at 175; see also id.,
at 174 (quoting Flast v. Cohen, 392 U. S. 83, 102 (1968), for
the proposition that in “taxpayer standing” cases, there
must be “ ‘a logical nexus between the status asserted and
the claim sought to be adjudicated’ ”).

In this case, however, the “logical nexus” inquiry is not
relevant. Here, there is no constitutional provision requir-
ing the demonstration of the “nexus” the Court believed
must be shown in Richardson and Flast. Rather, there is a
statute which, as we previously pointed out, supra, at 19–20,
does seek to protect individuals such as respondents from
the kind of harm they say they have suffered, i. e., failing to
receive particular information about campaign-related activi-
ties. Cf. Richardson, 418 U. S., at 178, n. 11.

The fact that the Court in Richardson focused upon tax-
payer standing, id., at 171–178, not voter standing, places
that case at still a greater distance from the case before us.
We are not suggesting, as the dissent implies, post, at 32–34,
that Richardson would have come out differently if only the
plaintiff had asserted his standing to sue as a voter, rather
than as a taxpayer. Faced with such an assertion, the Rich-
ardson Court would simply have had to consider whether
“the Framers . . . ever imagined that general directives [of
the Constitution] . . . would be subject to enforcement by an
418 U. S., at 178, n. 11 (emphasis added).
individual citizen.”
But since that answer (like the answer to whether there was
taxpayer standing in Richardson) would have rested in sig-
niﬁcant part upon the Court’s view of the Accounts Clause,
it still would not control our answer in this case. All this is