In Lindsey v. Whitmer, No. 24-1413 (6th Cir. Dec. 20, 2024), the Sixth Circuit struggled to reconcile two lines of Supreme Court authority about the standing of state legislators to bring federal-court lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a state law.
“The Michigan Constitution . . . . empowers citizens to amend the state constitution directly without support from their elected representatives in the state legislature or without the need for a convention. See Mich. Const. art. XII, § 2.” Using that initiative power, in 2022 the voters approved changes to Michigan election law. Proposal 3 “created automatic voter registration, a secret ballot, an absentee ballot, straight-ticket voting, and an audit of statewide election results.” Proposal 2 “created new voter identification options, state-funded prepaid postage for absentee ballots, secure ballot drop boxes, and early voting. The provisions in Proposals 2 and 3 apply to state and federal elections.”
Eleven Michigan state senators and representatives filed a federal action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 challenging application of Proposals 2 and 3 to federal elections. “They claimed that the election amendments violated the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says that the ‘Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.’ As the claimants see it, the Clause allows only state legislatures, not the citizens themselves, to set the time, place, and manner of federal elections.”
The Sixth Circuit affirms dismissal of the action for lack of Article III standing, holding that the legislator plaintiffs failed to establish an injury-in-fact. In the context of challenges to legislative power, the courts distinguish individual injuries of legislators from institutional injuries of a legislature. While an individual “legislator lacks a personal right to prevent the ‘abstract dilution of institutional legislative power’ that runs ‘with the Member’s seat,’” an entire legislature (or in some instances, a substantial bloc of legislators) may have standing “when it suffers an ‘institutional’ injury, namely when an entity or individual strips the legislature of authority as a body.”
Thus, in Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997)—representing the “general rule”—the Supreme Court found no standing for U.S. Representatives and Senators challenging a live-item veto statute that allowed the President to veto a single appropriation out of entire budget. Raines “rebuffed the legislators’ theory that a selective veto would make future appropriations votes less ‘effective,’ reasoning that the alleged injury was ‘wholly abstract’ and ‘widely dispersed’ among each lawmaker.’”
As a practical matter, federal courts are also wary of single-legislator lawsuits because they “already have ‘ample legislative power’ to remedy injuries” as legislators and overr the concern about sore-loser litigants “sidestep[ing] their colleagues and run[ning] ‘to a sympathetic court for a do-over.’”
Yet when an entire legislature or a controlling bloc brings an action, then legislators may “suffer a concrete injury when they command enough votes ‘to defeat (or enact) a specific legislative [a]ct’ and their votes would be ‘nullified’ if the challenged conduct were allowed” (citing Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 (1939)).
“In today’s dispute, the Michigan legislators fall within the general rule, not within these narrow exceptions. They filed this lawsuit as individuals, not as approved representatives of their legislature. They do not allege that they passed election laws foreclosed by the 2018 or 2022 state constitutional amendments. And they do not allege that they command votes sufficient to pass contrary election laws in the future.”
The panel finally observes that “as an original matter, it’s fair to question the line between Raines and Coleman . . . . But our station gives us no right to change Supreme Court precedents or redraw the lines created by them. What our station does permit us to do is to reconcile any tension in such precedents to make them as consistent as possible with the Constitution’s text and the original understanding of it.”
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