494
Opinion of the Court
has affected that interest by allowing federal credit unions to increase their customer base.7
Section 109 cannot be distinguished from the statutory provisions at issue in Clarke, ICI, Arnold Tours, and Data Processing. Although in Clarke the McFadden Act appeared to be designed to protect only the interest of state banks in parity of treatment with national banks, we nonetheless determined that the statute also limited "the extent to which [national] banks [could] engage in the discount brokerage business and hence limit[ed] the competitive impact on nonbank discount brokerage houses." Clarke, 479 U. S., at 403. Accordingly, although Congress did not intend specifically to protect securities dealers, one of the interests "arguably . . . to be protected" by the statute was an interest in restricting national bank market power. The plaintiff securities dealers, as competitors of national banks, had that interest, and that interest had been affected by the inter-7 Contrary to the dissent's contentions, see post, at 503, 509, our formulation does not "eviscerat[e]" or "abolis[h]" the zone of interests requirement. Nor can it be read to imply that, in order to have standing under the APA, a plaintiff must merely have an interest in enforcing the statute in question. The test we have articulated—discerning the interests "arguably . . . to be protected" by the statutory provision at issue and inquiring whether the plaintiff's interests affected by the agency action in question are among them—differs only as a matter of semantics from the formulation that the dissent has accused us of "eviscerating" or "abolishing," see post, at 504 (stating that the plaintiff must establish that "the injury he complains of . . . falls within the zone of interests sought to be protected by the statutory provision whose violation forms the legal basis for his complaint" (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)).
Our only disagreement with the dissent lies in the application of the "zone of interests" test. Because of the unmistakable link between § 109's express restriction on credit union membership and the limitation on the markets that federal credit unions can serve, there is objectively "some indication in the statute," post, at 517 (emphasis deleted), that respondents' interest is "arguably within the zone of interests to be protected" by § 109. Hence respondents are more than merely incidental beneficiaries of § 109's effects on competition.
Page: Index Previous 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007