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Page Number: 59

12 

BIDEN v. NEBRASKA 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

Remaining  is  the  majority’s  unsupported—and  insup-
portable—idea that the Secretary’s plan “necessarily” hurts
Missouri  because  it  “impair[s]”  MOHELA’s  “efforts  to  aid 
[the State’s] college students.”  Ante, at 9.  To begin with, it
seems unlikely that the reduction in MOHELA’s revenues
resulting from the discharge would make it harder for stu-
dents  to  “access  student  loans,”  as  the  majority  contends. 
Ante, at 8.  MOHELA is not a lender; it services loans others 
have made.  Which is probably why even Missouri has never 
tried to show that the Secretary’s plan will so detrimentally 
affect the State’s borrowers.  In any event—and more im-
portant—such a harm to citizens cannot provide an escape 
hatch out of MOHELA’s legal and financial independence.
That is because of another canonical limit on a State’s abil-
ity to ride on third parties: A State may never sue the Fed-
eral Government based on its citizens’ rights and interests.
See Alfred L. Snapp & Son, Inc. v. Puerto Rico ex rel. Barez, 
458 U. S. 592, 610, n. 16 (1982); Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 
U. S. ___, ___, and n. 11 (2023) (slip op., at 32, and n. 11). 
Or said more technically, a “State does not have standing 
as  parens  patriae  to  bring  an  action  against  the  Federal 
Government.”  Ibid.; see Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 
447, 485–486 (1923).  So Missouri cannot get standing by
asserting  that  a  harm  to  MOHELA  will  harm  the  State’s
citizens.  Missouri  needs  to  show  that  the  harm  to 
MOHELA produces harm to the State itself.  And because, 
as explained above, MOHELA was set up (as corporations
typically  are)  to  insulate  its  creator  from  such  derivative
harm, Missouri is incapable of making that showing.  See 
supra, at 6.  The separateness, both financial and legal, be-
tween MOHELA and Missouri makes MOHELA alone the 
proper party.

The author of today’s opinion once wrote that a 1970s-era 
standing decision “became emblematic” of “how utterly ma-
nipulable”  this  Court’s  standing  law  is  “if  not  taken  seri-
ously as a matter of judicial self-restraint.”  Massachusetts,