Page:Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n.pdf/75

4 to challenge the Line Item Veto Act, which they claimed “ ‘unconstitutionally expand[ed] the President’s power’ ” and “ ‘alter[ed] the constitutional balance of powers between the Legislative and Executive Branches.’ ” Id., at 816. In Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 447, 479–480 (1923), we refused to allow a State to pursue its claim that a conditional congressional appropriation “constitute[d] an effective means of inducing the States to yield a portion of their sovereign rights.” (And Mellon involved a contention that one government infringed upon another government’s power—far closer to the traditional party-versus-party lawsuit than is an intragovernmental dispute.) We put it plainly: “In the last analysis, the complaint of the plaintiff State is brought to the naked contention that Congress has usurped the reserved powers of the several States,” id., at 483—and because the State could not show a discrete harm except the alleged usurpation of its powers, we refused to allow the State’s appeal.

The sole precedent the Court relies upon is Coleman v. Miller, 307 U. S. 433 (1939). Coleman can be distinguished from the present case as readily as it was distinguished in Raines. In Raines, the accurate-in-fact (but inconsequential-in-principle) distinction was that the Senators in Coleman had their votes nullified, whereas the Members of Congress claimed that their votes could merely be rendered ineffective by a Presidential line-item veto. Raines, supra, at 823–824. In the present case we could make the accurate-in-fact distinction that in Coleman individual legislators were found to have standing, whereas here it is the governmental body, the Arizona Legislature, that seeks to bring suit. But the reality is that the supposed holding of Coleman stands out like a sore thumb from the rest of our jurisprudence, which denies standing for intragovernmental disputes.

Coleman was a peculiar case that may well stand for nothing. The opinion discussing and finding standing, and