Opinion ID: 3046880
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: C itizens Plaintiffs’ standing

Text: On appeal, the citizen Plaintiffs (and the associations whose members are Pennsylvania citizens) 42 allege that their elected state representatives were, like R epresentative Vitali, precluded from drafting, debating and amending Act 44. The New Jersey district court has suggested that a state legislator’s constituents might be able to assert such a claim: The action by the Caucus in denying Senator A mmond the opportunity to attend its deliberations deprived her constituents of the Equal Protection of the law. In effect, the action by the Caucus created two classes of voters. One class consists of those citizens whose Senators could effectively participate fully in the legislative process and another class whose Senator could participate only to a limited degree. Ammond, 390 F. Supp. at 660. Even if we were to adopt the District of New Jersey’s reasoning, however, the citizen Plaintiffs in this case are able to assert only a generalized, abstract grievance shared by most Pennsylvanians— that Defendant legislators denied Plaintiffs’ representatives the equal opportunity to draft, debate and amend Act 44 before voting on that bill. See App. at 277 (Plaintiffs arguing to the district court that Defendants, through “their mechanism by avoiding the legislative process mandated by the Pennsylvania C onstitution, . . . cut out the vast majority of the representatives and the people of Pennsylvania from the deliberative processes of the General A ssem bly. These are representational rights that 43 are personal to every citizen in this state.”) Such injury is insufficient to confer constitutional standing. And even if they had established constitutional standing (which we conclude they did not), the citizen Plaintiffs cannot satisfy prudential standing concerns. See Valley Forge Christian Coll., 454 U.S. at 474-75.