Page:United States v. Texas (2023).pdf/8

Rh The States have not cited any precedent, history, or tradition of courts ordering the Executive Branch to change its arrest or prosecution policies so that the Executive Branch makes more arrests or initiates more prosecutions. On the contrary, this Court has previously ruled that a plaintiff lacks standing to bring such a suit.

The leading precedent is Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 410 U. S. 614 (1973). The plaintiff in that case contested a State’s policy of declining to prosecute certain child-support violations. This Court decided that the plaintiff lacked standing to challenge the State’s policy, reasoning that in “American jurisprudence at least,” a party “lacks a judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution … of another.” Id., at 619. The Court concluded that “a citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting authority when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.” Ibid.

The Court’s Article III holding in Linda R. S. applies to challenges to the Executive Branch’s exercise of enforcement discretion over whether to arrest or prosecute. See id., at 617, 619; Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U. S. 748, 760–761, 767, n. 13 (2005); cf. Sure-Tan, Inc. v. NLRB, 467 U. S. 883, 897 (1984) (citing Linda R. S. principle in immigration context and stating that the petitioners there had “no judicially cognizable interest in procuring enforcement of the immigration laws” by the Executive Branch). And importantly, that Article III standing principle remains the law today; the States have pointed to no case or historical practice holding otherwise. A “telling indication of the severe constitutional problem” with the States’ assertion of standing to bring this lawsuit “is the lack of historical precedent” supporting it. Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Bd., 561 U. S. 477, 505 (2010) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Raines, 521 U. S., at 826 (“Not only do appellees lack support from precedent, but historical practice appears