824
Opinion of the Court
It should be equally obvious that appellees' claim does not fall within our holding in Coleman, as thus understood. They have not alleged that they voted for a specific bill, that there were sufficient votes to pass the bill, and that the bill was nonetheless deemed defeated. In the vote on the Act, their votes were given full effect. They simply lost that vote.7 Nor can they allege that the Act will nullify their votes in the future in the same way that the votes of the Coleman legislators had been nullified. In the future, a majority of Senators and Congressmen can pass or reject appropriations bills; the Act has no effect on this process. In addition, a majority of Senators and Congressmen can vote to repeal the Act, or to exempt a given appropriations bill (or a given provision in an appropriations bill) from the Act; again, the Act has no effect on this process. Coleman thus provides little meaningful precedent for appellees' argument.8
7 Just as appellees cannot show that their vote was denied or nullified as in Coleman (in the sense that a bill they voted for would have become law if their vote had not been stripped of its validity), so are they unable to show that their vote was denied or nullified in a discriminatory manner (in the sense that their vote was denied its full validity in relation to the votes of their colleagues). Thus, the various hypotheticals offered by appellees in their briefs and discussed during oral argument have no applicability to this case. See Reply Brief for Appellees 6 (positing hypothetical law in which "first-term Members were not allowed to vote on appropriations bills," or in which "every Member was disqualified on grounds of partiality from voting on major federal projects in his or her own district"); Tr. of Oral Arg. 17 ("QUESTION: But [Congress] might have passed a statute that said the Senators from Iowa on hog-farming matters should have only a half-a-vote. Would they have standing to challenge that?").
8 Since we hold that Coleman may be distinguished from the instant case on this ground, we need not decide whether Coleman may also be distinguished in other ways. For instance, appellants have argued that Coleman has no applicability to a similar suit brought in federal court, since that decision depended on the fact that the Kansas Supreme Court "treated" the senators' interest in their votes "as a basis for entertaining and deciding the federal questions." 307 U. S., at 446. They have also
Page: Index Previous 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007