Supreme Court Discusses Taxpayer Standing

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court decision in DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno (May 15, 2006) denied plaintiffs' standing to challenge state tax benefits offered by Ohio to attract industry to the state. One of plaintiffs' arguments was that taxpayers should have standing to make a dormant commerce clause challenge, just as they have standing to challenge government expenditures under the Establishment Clause. Here is what the Court said about that claim:

Quite apart from whether the franchise tax credit is analogous to an exercise of congressional power under Art. I, § 8, plaintiffs' reliance on Flast is misguided: Whatever rights plaintiffs have under the Commerce Clause, they are fundamentally unlike the right not to "'contribute three pence . . . for the support of any one [religious] establishment.'" Indeed, plaintiffs compare the Establishment Clause to the Commerce Clause at such a high level of generality that almost any constitutional constraint on government power would "specifically limit" a State's taxing and spending power for Flast purposes.... [S]uch a broad application of Flast's exception to the general prohibition on taxpayer standing would be quite at odds with its narrow application in our precedent and Flast's own promise that it would not transform federal courts into forums for taxpayers'"generalized grievances."...

The Flast Court discerned in the history of the Establishment Clause "the specific evils feared by [its drafters] that the taxing and spending power would be used to favor one religion over another or to support religion in general." ... The Court therefore understood the "injury" alleged in Establishment Clause challenges to federal spending to be the very "extraction and spending" of "tax money" in aid of religion alleged by a plaintiff.... And an injunction against the spending would of course redress that injury, regardless of whether lawmakers would dispose of the savings in a way that would benefit the taxpayer-plaintiffs personally.