Page:Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n.pdf/74

Rh directly by a governmental subunit’s complaint. We have always resolved those questions in the context of a private lawsuit in which the claim or defense depends on the constitutional validity of action by one of the governmental subunits that has caused a private party concrete harm. That is why, for example, it took this Court over 50 years to rule upon the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act, passed in 1867. If the law of standing had been otherwise, “presumably President Wilson, or Presidents Grant and Cleveland before him, would … have had standing, and could have challenged the law preventing the removal of a Presidential appointee without the consent of Congress.” Raines v. Byrd, 521 U. S. 811, 828 (1997).

We do not have to look far back in the United States Reports to find other separation-of-powers cases which, if the Arizona Legislature’s theory of standing is correct, took an awfully circuitous route to get here. In Zivotofsky v. Kerry, ante, p. ___, the President could have sued for an injunction against Congress’s attempted “direct usurpation” of his constitutionally-conferred authority to pronounce on foreign relations. Or in Wellness Int’l Network, Ltd. v. Sharif, 575 U. S. ___ (2015), a Federal District Judge could have sought a declaratory judgment that a bankruptcy court’s adjudicating a Stern claim improperly usurped his constitutionally conferred authority to decide cases and controversies. Or in NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U. S. ___ (2014), the Senate could have sued the President, claiming a direct usurpation of its prerogative to advise on and consent to Presidential appointments. Each of these cases involved the allocation of power to one or more branches of a government; and we surely would have dismissed suits arising in the hypothesized fashions.

We have affirmatively rejected arguments for jurisdiction in cases like this one. For example, in Raines, 521 U. S., at 829–830, we refused to allow Members of