Page:United States v. Texas (2023).pdf/57

Rh Prior to today’s decision, it was established law that plaintiffs who suffer a traditional injury resulting from an agency “decision not to proceed” with an enforcement action have Article III standing. Federal Election Comm’n v. Akins, 524 U. S. 11, 19 (1998). The obvious parallel to the case before us is Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U. S. 497 (2007), which has been called “the most important environmental law case ever decided by the Court.” R. Lazarus, The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court 1 (2020). In that prior case, Massachusetts challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to use its civil enforcement powers to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly injured the Commonwealth. Massachusetts argued that it was harmed because the accumulation of greenhouse gases would lead to higher temperatures; higher temperatures would cause the oceans to rise; and rising sea levels would cause the Commonwealth to lose some of its dry land. The Court noted that Massachusetts had a “quasi-sovereign interes[t]” in avoiding the loss of territory and that our federalist system had stripped the Commonwealth of “certain sovereign prerogatives” that it could have otherwise employed to defend its interests. Massachusetts, 549 U. S., at 519–520. Proclaiming that Massachusetts’ standing claim was entitled to “special solicitude,” the Court held that the Commonwealth had standing. Id., at 520.

The reasoning in that case applies with at least equal force in the case at hand. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court suggested that allowing Massachusetts to protect its sovereign interests through litigation compensated for its inability to protect those interests by the means that would have been available had it not entered the Union. In the present case, Texas’s entry into the Union stripped it of the power that it undoubtedly enjoyed as a sovereign nation to