Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 18 (1998)

Page:   Index   Previous  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  Next

434

CLINTON v. CITY OF NEW YORK

Opinion of the Court

As with the New York case, the Government argues that the wrong parties are before the Court—that because the sellers of the processing facilities would have received the tax benefits, only they have standing to challenge the cancellation of § 968. This argument not only ignores the fact that the cooperatives were the intended beneficiaries of § 968, but also overlooks the self-evident proposition that more than one party may have standing to challenge a particular action or inaction.23 Once it is determined that a particular plain-can itself create an Article III injury, irrespective of the end result. See Northeastern Fla. Chapter, Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. Jacksonville, 508 U. S. 656, 666 (1993). In that case an association of contractors challenged a city ordinance that accorded preferential treatment to certain minority-owned businesses in the award of city contracts. The Court of Appeals had held that the association lacked standing "because it failed to allege that one or more of its members would have been awarded a contract but for the challenged ordinance." Id., at 664. We rejected the Court of Appeals' position, stating that it "cannot be reconciled with our precedents." Ibid. Even though the preference applied to only a small percentage of the city's business, and even though there was no showing that any party would have received a contract absent the ordinance, we held that the prospective bidders had standing; the "injury in fact" was the harm to the contractors in the negotiation process, "not the ultimate inability to obtain the benefit." Id., at 666.

Having found that both the New York and Snake River appellees are actually injured, traceability and redressability are easily satisfied—each injury is traceable to the President's cancellation of § 4722(c) or § 968, and would be redressed by a declaratory judgment that the cancellations are invalid.

23 Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737 (1984), and Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U. S. 26 (1976), are distinguishable, as each of those cases involved a speculative chain of causation quite different from the situation here. In Allen, parents of black public school children alleged that, even though it was the policy of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory schools, the IRS had "not adopted sufficient standards and procedures" to enforce this policy. 468 U. S., at 739. The parents alleged that the lax enforcement caused white students to attend discriminatory private schools and, therefore, interfered with their children's opportunity to attend desegre-

Page:   Index   Previous  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  Next

Last modified: October 4, 2007