By Eric Segall
There is one constitutional law doctrine that rears its ugly head across the spectrum of controversial issues. It has played a role in civil rights cases, environmental cases, privacy cases, free speech controversies, separation of powers disputes, and in numerous other areas of constitutional law. It is also the one doctrine that virtually all commentators, left, right, and middle believe is singularly incoherent. That doctrine is standing, and it is a doctrine like no other.
The week before last, the Supreme Court used standing to reject yet another challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The Justices held that neither the states nor the individual plaintiffs in California v. Texas satisfied the all too familiar three part test that the Court has used for the last fifty years to determine standing: every plaintiff in federal court must suffer a personal injury caused by the defendant that can be redressed by a favorable court ruling. In a previous post, I documented the incoherence of the personal injury prong of the standing test (that prong was used by the Court on Friday of last week to deny standing to plaintiffs who were quite obviously injured under federal fair credit reporting laws). In this post, I address the causation prong, which was the one at issue in the ACA case.
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