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6 

CALIFORNIA v. TEXAS 

Opinion of the Court 

have not shown that any kind of Government action or con-
duct  has  caused  or  will  cause  the  injury  they  attribute  to
§5000A(a).

The plaintiffs point to cases concerning the Act that they
believe support their standing.  But all of those cases con-
cerned the Act when the provision was indisputably enforce-
able, because the penalty provision was still in effect.  See 
Brief for Respondent-Cross Petitioner Hurley et al. 22 (cit-
ing Florida ex rel. Atty. Gen. v. United States Dept. of Health 
and  Human  Servs.,  648  F. 3d  1235,  1243  (CA11  2011); 
Thomas  More  Law  Center  v.  Obama,  651  F.  3d  529,  535 
(CA6 2011); Virginia ex rel. Cuccinelli v. Sebelius, 656 F. 3d 
253, 266–268 (CA4 2011)); cf. National Federation of Inde-
pendent  Business  v.  Sebelius,  567  U. S.  519  (2012)  (as-
sessing the constitutionality of the Act with the penalty pro-
vision).  These cases therefore tell us nothing about how the 
statute is enforced, or could be enforced, today.

It is consequently not surprising that the plaintiffs can-
not point to cases that support them.  To the contrary, our
cases have consistently spoken of the need to assert an in-
jury that is the result of a statute’s actual or threatened en-
forcement, whether today or in the future.  See, e.g., Babbitt 
v. Farm Workers, 442 U. S. 289, 298 (1979) (“A plaintiff who
challenges a statute must demonstrate a realistic danger of 
sustaining a direct injury as a result of the statute’s opera-
tion or enforcement” (emphasis added)); Virginia v. Ameri-
can  Booksellers  Assn.,  Inc.,  484  U. S.  383,  392  (1988)  (re-
quiring  “threatened  or  actual  injury  resulting  from  the 
putatively  illegal  action”  (internal  quotation  marks  omit-
ted)).  In the absence of contemporary enforcement, we have
said that a plaintiff claiming standing must show that the
likelihood of future enforcement is “substantial.”  Susan B. 
Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U. S. 149, 164 (2014); see also 
Massachusetts  v.  Mellon,  262  U. S.  447,  488  (1923)  (“The
party who invokes the power [of Article III courts] must be 
able to show, not only that the statute is invalid, but that