OPINION OF ALITO, J. HEIN V. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC. 551 U. S. ____ (2007) SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES NO. 06-157 JAY F. HEIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF
FAITH-BASED AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, et al., PETITIONERS v. FREEDOM FROM RELI- GION FOUNDATION, INC.,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the seventh circuit

															[June 25, 2007]

															   Justice Alito announced the
judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion in which The Chief
Justice and Justice Kennedy join.

															   This is a lawsuit in which it was
claimed that conferences held as part of the President’s
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives program violated the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because, among other
things, President Bush and former Secretary of Education Paige gave
speeches that used “religious imagery” and praised the efficacy of
faith-based programs in delivering social services. The plaintiffs
contend that they meet the standing requirements of Article III of
the Constitution because they pay federal taxes.

															   It has long been established, however, that
the payment of taxes is generally not enough to establish standing
to challenge an action taken by the Federal Government. In light of
the size of the federal budget, it is a complete fiction to argue
that an unconstitutional federal expenditure causes an individual
federal taxpayer any measurable economic harm. And if every federal
taxpayer could sue to challenge any Government expenditure, the
federal courts would cease to function as courts of law and would
be cast in the role of general complaint bureaus.

															   In Flast v. Cohen , 392 U.
S. 83 (1968), we recognized a narrow exception to the general
rule against federal taxpayer standing. Under Flast , a
plaintiff asserting an Establishment Clause claim has standing to
challenge a law authorizing the use of federal funds in a way that
allegedly violates the Establishment Clause. In the present case,
Congress did not specifically authorize the use of federal funds to
pay for the conferences or speeches that the plaintiffs challenged.
Instead, the conferences and speeches were paid for out of general
Executive Branch appropriations.    The Court of
Appeals, however, held that the plaintiffs have standing as
taxpayers because the conferences were paid for with money
appropriated by Congress.

															   The question that is presented here is whether
this broad reading of Flast is correct. We hold that it is
not. We therefore reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals.

															I

															A

															   In 2001, the President issued an
executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives within the Executive Office of the President.
Exec. Order No. 13199, 3 CFR 752 (2001 Comp.). The purpose of this
new office was to ensure that “private and charitable community
groups, including religious ones … have the fullest opportunity
permitted by law to compete on a level playing field, so long as
they achieve valid public purposes” and adhere to “the bedrock
principles of pluralism, nondiscrimination, evenhandedness, and
neutrality.” Ibid . The office was specifically charged
with the task of eliminating unnecessary bureaucratic, legislative,
and regulatory barriers that could impede such organizations’
effectiveness and ability to compete equally for federal
assistance. Id ., at 752–753.

															   By separate executive orders, the
President also created Executive Department Centers for Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives within several federal agencies and
departments.[ Footnote 1 ] These
centers were given the job of ensuring that faith-based community
groups would be eligible to compete for federal financial support
without impairing their independence or autonomy, as long as they
did “not use direct Federal financial assistance to support any
inherently religious activities, such as worship, religious
instruction, or proselytization.” Exec. Order No. 13279, 3 CFR
§2(f), p. 260 (2002 Comp.). To this end, the President
directed that “[n]o organization should be discriminated against on
the basis of religion or religious belief in the administration or
distribution of Federal financial assistance under social service
programs,” id. , §2(c), at 260, and that “[a]ll
organizations that receive Federal financial assistance under
social services programs should be prohibited from discriminating
against beneficiaries or potential beneficiaries of the social
services programs on the basis of religion or religious belief,” id. , §2(d), at 260. Petitioners, who have been sued in
their official capacities, are the directors of the White House
Office and various Executive Department Centers.

															   No congressional legislation specifically
authorized the creation of the White House Office or the Executive
Department Centers. Rather, they were “created entirely within the
executive branch … by Presidential executive order.” Freedom
From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Chao , 433
F. 3d 989, 997 (CA7 2006). Nor has Congress enacted any law
specifically appropriating money for these entities’ activities.
Instead, their activities are funded through general Executive
Branch appropriations. For example, the Department of Education’s
Center is funded from money appropriated for the Office of the
Secretary of Education, while the Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s Center is funded through that Department’s salaries
and expenses account. See Government Accountability Office,
Faith-Based and Community Initiative: Improvements in Monitoring
Grantees and Measuring Performance Could Enhance Accountability,
GAO–06–616, p. 21 (June 2006), online at
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06616.pdf (as visited June 25, 2007,
and available in Clerk of Court’s case file); see also Amended
Complaint in No. 04–C–381–S (WD Wis.), ¶23, App. to Pet. for Cert.
71a–72a.

															B

															   The respondents are Freedom From
Religion Foundation, Inc., a nonstock corporation “opposed to
government endorsement of religion,” id. , ¶5, App. to Pet.
for Cert. 68a, and three of its members. Respondents brought suit
in the United States District Court for the Western District
of Wisconsin, alleging that petitioners violated the Establishment
Clause by organizing conferences at which faith-based organizations
allegedly “are singled out as being particularly worthy of federal
funding … , and the belief in God is extolled as distinguishing the
claimed effectiveness of faith-based social services.” Id. , ¶32, App. to Pet. for Cert. 73a. Respondents further
alleged that the content of these conferences sent a message to
religious believers “that they are insiders and favored members of
the political community” and that the conferences sent the message
to nonbelievers “that they are outsiders” and “not full members of
the political community.” Id. , ¶37, App. to Pet. for Cert.
76a. In short, respondents alleged that the conferences were
designed to promote, and had the effect of promoting, religious
community groups over secular ones.

															   The only asserted basis for
standing was that the individual respondents are federal taxpayers
who are “opposed to the use of Congressional taxpayer
appropriations to advance and promote religion.” Id. , ¶10,
App. to Pet. for Cert. 69a; see also id. , ¶¶7–9, App. to
Pet. for Cert. 68a–69a. In their capacity as federal taxpayers,
respondents sought to challenge Executive Branch expenditures for
these conferences, which, they contended, violated the
Establishment Clause.

															C

															   The District Court dismissed the
claims against petitioners for lack of standing. See Freedom
From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Towey , No.
04–C–381–S (WD Wis., Nov. 15, 2004), App. to Pet. for Cert.
27a–35a. It concluded that under Flast , 392 U.
S. 83 , federal taxpayer standing is limited to Establishment
Clause challenges to the constitutionality of “ ‘exercises of
congressional power under the taxing and spending clause of
Art. I, §8.’ ” App. to Pet. for Cert. 31a (quoting Flast , supra , at 102). Because petitioners in
this case acted “at the President’s request and on the President’s
behalf” and were not “charged with the administration of a
congressional program,” the District Court concluded that the
challenged activities were “not ‘exercises of congressional
power’ ” sufficient to provide a basis for taxpayer standing
under Flast . App. to Pet. for Cert. 33a–34a.

															   A divided panel of the United
States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed. 433
F. 3d 989. The majority read Flast as granting
federal taxpayers standing to challenge Executive Branch programs
on Establishment Clause grounds so long as the activities are
“financed by a congressional appropriation.” 433 F. 3d, at
997. This was the case, the majority concluded, even where “there
is no statutory program” enacted by Congress and the funds are
“from appropriations for the general administrative expenses, over
which the President and other executive branch officials have a
degree of discretionary power.” Id. , at 994. According to
the majority, a taxpayer has standing to challenge anything done by
a federal agency or officer so long as “the marginal or incremental
cost to the taxpaying public of the alleged violation of the
establishment clause” is greater than “zero.” Id. , at
995.

															   In dissent, Judge Ripple opined that the
majority’s decision reflected a “dramatic expansion of current
standing doctrine,” id. , at 997, that “cuts the concept of
taxpayer standing loose from its moorings,” id. , at 998.
Noting that “[t]he executive can do nothing without general budget
appropriations from Congress,” id. , at 1000, he criticized
the majority for overstepping Flast ’s requirement that a
“plaintiff must bring an attack against a disbursement of public
funds made in the exercise of Congress’ taxing and
spending power,” 433 F. 3d, at 1000 (emphasis in
original).

															   The Court of Appeals denied en banc review by
a vote of seven to four. 447 F. 3d 988 (CA7 2006). Concurring
in the denial of rehearing, Chief Judge Flaum expressed doubt about
the panel decision, but noted that “the obvious tension which has
evolved in this area of jurisprudence … can only be resolved by the
Supreme Court.” Ibid. We granted certiorari to resolve
this question, 549 U. S. ___ (2006), and we now reverse.

															II

															A

															   Article III of the Constitution
limits the judicial power of the United States to the resolution of
“Cases” and “Controversies,” and “ ‘Article III standing …
enforces the Constitution’s case-or-controversy
requirement.’ ” DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno , 547 U. S. ___, ___ (2006) (slip op., at 6) (quoting Elk Grove Unified School Dist. v. Newdow , 542 U. S. 1 , 11
(2004)). “ ‘No principle is more fundamental to the
judiciary’s proper role in our system of government than the
constitutional limitation of federal-court jurisdiction to actual
cases or controversies.’ ” Raines v. Byrd , 521 U. S. 811 ,
818 (1997) (quoting Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare
Rights Organization , 426 U. S. 26 , 37
(1976)).

															   “[O]ne of the controlling
elements in the definition of a case or controversy under Article
III” is standing. ASARCO Inc. v. Kadish , 490 U. S. 605 , 613 (1989) (opinion of
Kennedy, J.). The requisite elements of Article III standing are
well established: “A plaintiff must allege personal injury fairly
traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely
to be redressed by the requested relief.” Allen v. Wright , 468
U. S. 737 , 751 (1984).

															   The constitutionally mandated standing inquiry
is especially important in a case like this one, in which taxpayers
seek “to challenge laws of general application where their own
injury is not distinct from that suffered in general by other
taxpayers or citizens.” ASARCO , supra , at 613
(opinion of Kennedy, J.) . This is because “[t]he judicial
power of the United States defined by Art. III is not an
unconditioned authority to determine the constitutionality of
legislative or executive acts.” Valley Forge Christian
College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and
State, Inc. , 454 U. S. 464 , 471 (1982). The federal
courts are not empowered to seek out and strike down any
governmental act that they deem to be repugnant to the
Constitution. Rather, federal courts sit “solely, to decide on the
rights of individuals,” Marbury v. Madison , 1
Cranch 137, 170 (1803), and must “ ‘refrai[n] from passing
upon the constitutionality of an act … unless obliged to do so in
the proper performance of our judicial function, when the question
is raised by a party whose interests entitle him to raise
it.’ ” Valley Forge , supra , at 474 (quoting Blair v. United States , 250 U. S. 273 , 279
(1919)). As we held over 80 years ago, in another case involving
the question of taxpayer standing:

															“We have no power per se to review and
annul acts of Congress on the ground that they are
unconstitutional. The question may be considered only when the
justification for some direct injury suffered or threatened,
presenting a justiciable issue, is made to rest upon such an
act… . The party who invokes the power must be able to show
not only that the statute is invalid but that he has sustained or
is immediately in danger of sustaining some direct injury as the
result of its enforcement, and not merely that he suffers in some
indefinite way in common with people generally.” Frothingham v. Mellon , decided with Massachusetts v. Mellon , 262 U. S. 447 , 488 (1923).

															B

															   As a general matter, the interest
of a federal taxpayer in seeing that Treasury funds are spent in
accordance with the Constitution does not give rise to the kind of
redressable “personal injury” required for Article III standing. Of
course, a taxpayer has standing to challenge the collection of a specific tax assessment as
unconstitutional; being forced to pay such a tax causes a real and
immediate economic injury to the individual taxpayer. See, e.g. , Follett v. Town of McCormick , 321 U. S. 573 (1944) (invalidating tax on preaching on First Amendment grounds).
But that is not the interest on which respondents assert standing
here. Rather, their claim is that, having paid lawfully collected
taxes into the Federal Treasury at some point, they have a
continuing, legally cognizable interest in ensuring that those
funds are not used by the Government in a way that
violates the Constitution.

															   We have consistently held that
this type of interest is too generalized and attenuated to support
Article III standing. In Frothingham , a federal taxpayer
sought to challenge federal appropriations for mothers’ and
children’s health, arguing that federal involvement in this area
intruded on the rights reserved to the States under the Tenth
Amendment and would “increase the burden of future taxation and
thereby take [the plaintiff’s] property without due process of
law.” 262 U. S., at 486. We concluded that the plaintiff lacked the
kind of particularized injury required for Article III
standing:

															“[I]nterest in the moneys of the Treasury … is
shared with millions of others; is comparatively minute and
indeterminable; and the effect upon future taxation, of any payment
out of the funds, so remote, fluctuating and uncertain, that no
basis is afforded for an appeal to the preventive powers of a court
of equity.

															   “The administration of any statute, likely to
produce additional taxation to be imposed upon a vast number of
taxpayers, the extent of whose several liability is indefinite and
constantly changing, is essentially a matter of public and not of
individual concern.” Id. , at 487.

															   Because the interests of the
taxpayer are, in essence, the interests of the public-at-large,
deciding a constitutional claim based solely on taxpayer standing
“would be[,] not to decide a judicial controversy, but to assume a
position of authority over the governmental acts of another and
co-equal department, an authority which plainly we do not possess.” Id. , at 489; see also Alabama Power Co. v. Ickes , 302
U. S. 464 , 478–479 (1938).

															   In Doremus v. Board of Ed. of
Hawthorne , 342
U. S. 429 , 433 (1952), we reaffirmed this principle, explaining
that “the interests of a taxpayer in the moneys of the federal
treasury are too indeterminable, remote, uncertain and indirect to
furnish a basis for an appeal to the preventive powers of the Court
over their manner of expenditure.” We therefore rejected a state
taxpayer’s claim of standing to challenge a state law authorizing
public school teachers to read from the Bible because “the
grievance which [the plaintiff] sought to litigate … is not a
direct dollars-and-cents injury but is a religious difference.” Id. , at 434. In so doing, we gave effect to the basic
constitutional principle that

															“a plaintiff raising only a generally available
grievance about government—claiming only harm to his and every
citizen’s interest in proper application of the Constitution and
laws, and seeking relief that no more directly and tangibly
benefits him than it does the public at large—does not state an
Article III case or controversy.” Lujan v. Defenders
of Wildlife , 504 U. S. 555 , 573–574
(1992).[ Footnote 2 ]

															C

															   In Flast , the Court
carved out a narrow exception to the general constitutional
prohibition against taxpayer standing. The taxpayer-plaintiff in
that case challenged the distribution of federal funds to religious
schools under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,
alleging that such aid violated the Establishment Clause. The Court
set out a two-part test for determining whether a federal taxpayer
has standing to challenge an allegedly unconstitutional
expenditure:

															“First, the taxpayer must establish a logical link
between that status and the type of legislative enactment attacked.
Thus, a taxpayer will be a proper party to allege the
unconstitutionality only of exercises of congressional power under
the taxing and spending clause of Art. I, §8, of the
Constitution. It will not be sufficient to allege an incidental
expenditure of tax funds in the administration of an essentially
regulatory statute… . Secondly, the taxpayer must establish a
nexus between that status and the precise nature of the
constitutional infringement alleged. Under this requirement, the
taxpayer must show that the challenged enactment exceeds specific
constitutional limitations imposed upon the exercise of the
congressional taxing and spending power and not simply that the
enactment is generally beyond the powers delegated to Congress by
Art. I, §8.” Flast , 392 U. S., at 102–103.

															   The Court held that the
taxpayer-plaintiff in Flast had satisfied both prongs of
this test: The plaintiff’s “constitutional challenge [was] made to
an exercise by Congress of its power under Art. I, §8, to
spend for the general welfare,” and she alleged a violation of the
Establishment Clause, which “operates as a specific constitutional
limitation upon the exercise by Congress of the taxing and spending
power conferred by Art. I, §8.” Id. , at 103–104.

															III

															A

															   Respondents argue that this case
falls within the Flast exception, which they read to cover
any “expenditure of government funds in violation of the
Establishment Clause.” Brief for Respondents 12. But this broad
reading fails to observe “the rigor with which the Flast exception to the Frothingham principle ought to be
applied.” Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at 481.

															   The expenditures at issue in Flast were made pursuant to an express congressional
mandate and a specific congressional appropriation. The plaintiff
in that case challenged disbursements made under the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 27. That Act expressly
appropriated the sum of $100 million for fiscal year 1966, §201(b), id. , at 36, and authorized the disbursement of those funds
to local educational agencies for the education of low-income
students, see Flast , supra , at 86. The Act
mandated that local educational agencies receiving such funds
“ma[k]e provision for including special educational services and
arrangements (such as dual enrollment, educational radio and
television, and mobile educational services and equipment)” in
which students enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools
could participate, §2, 79 Stat. 30–31. In addition, recipient
agencies were required to ensure that “library resources,
textbooks, and other instructional materials” funded through the
grants “be provided on an equitable basis for the use of children
and teachers in private elementary and secondary schools,”
§203(a)(3)(B), id. , at 37.

															   The expenditures challenged in Flast ,
then, were funded by a specific congressional appropriation and
were disbursed to private schools (including religiously affiliated
schools) pursuant to a direct and unambiguous congressional
mandate.[ Footnote 3 ] Indeed,
the Flast taxpayer-plaintiff’s constitutional claim was
premised on the contention that if the Government’s actions were
“ ‘within the authority and intent of the Act, the Act is to
that extent unconstitutional and void.’ ” Flast , 392
U. S., at 90. And the judgment reviewed by this Court in Flast solely concerned the question whether “if [the
challenged] expenditures are authorized by the Act the statute
constitutes a ‘law respecting an establishment of religion’ and law
‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ ” under the First
Amendment. Flast v. Gardner , 271 F. Supp. 1,
2 (SDNY 1967).

															   Given that the alleged Establishment Clause
violation in Flast was funded by a specific congressional
appropriation and was undertaken pursuant to an express
congressional mandate, the Court concluded that the
taxpayer-plaintiffs had established the requisite “logical link
between [their taxpayer] status and the type of legislative
enactment attacked.” In the Court’s words, “[t]heir constitutional
challenge [was] made to an exercise by Congress of its power under
Art. I, §8, to spend for the general welfare.” 392 U. S., at
90. But as this Court later noted, Flast “ limited
taxpayer standing to challenges directed ‘only [at] exercises of
congressional power’ ” under the Taxing and Spending Clause. Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at 479.

															B

															   The link between congressional
action and constitutional violation that supported taxpayer
standing in Flast is missing here. Respondents do not
challenge any specific congressional action or appropriation; nor
do they ask the Court to invalidate any congressional enactment or
legislatively created program as unconstitutional. That is because
the expenditures at issue here were not made pursuant to any Act of
Congress. Rather, Congress provided general appropriations to the
Executive Branch to fund its day-to-day activities.[ Footnote 4 ] These appropriations did not
expressly authorize, direct, or even mention the expenditures of
which respondents complain. Those expenditures resulted from
executive discretion, not congressional action.

															   We have never found taxpayer
standing under such circumstances. In Valley Forge , we
held that a taxpayer lacked standing to challenge “a decision by
[the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare] to
transfer a parcel of federal property” to a religious college
because this transfer was “not a congressional action.” 454 U. S.,
at 479. In fact, the connection to congressional action was closer
in Valley Forge than it is here, because in that case, the
“particular Executive Branch action” being challenged was at least
“arguably authorized” by the Federal Property and Administrative
Services Act of 1949, which permitted federal agencies to transfer
surplus property to private entities. Id. , at 479,
n. 15. Nevertheless, we found that the plaintiffs lacked
standing because Flast “limited taxpayer standing to
challenges directed ‘only [at] exercises of congressional
power’ ” under the Taxing and Spending Clause. 454 U. S., at
479 (quoting Flast , supra , at 102).[ Footnote 5 ]

															   Similarly, in Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War , 418 U. S. 208 (1974), the
taxpayer-plaintiffs contended that the Incompatibility Clause of
Article I prohibited Members of Congress from holding commissions
in the Armed Forces Reserve. We held that these plaintiffs lacked
standing under Flast because they “did not challenge an
enactment under Art. I, §8, but rather the action of the
Executive Branch in permitting Members of Congress to maintain
their Reserve status.” 418 U. S., at 228. This was the case even
though the plaintiffs sought to reclaim reservist pay received by
those Members—pay that presumably was funded through Congress’
general appropriations for the support of the Armed Forces: “Such
relief would follow from the invalidity of Executive action in
paying persons who could not lawfully have been reservists, not
from the invalidity of the statutes authorizing pay to those who
lawfully were Reservists.” Ibid. , n. 17. See also United States v. Richardson , 418 U. S. 166 , 175 (1974) (denying
taxpayers standing to compel publication of accounting for the
Central Intelligence Agency because “there is no ‘logical nexus’
between the asserted status of taxpayer and the claimed failure of
the Congress to require the Executive to supply a more detailed
report of the expenditures of that agency”). Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U. S. 589 (1988), on
which respondents rely heavily, is not to the contrary. In that
case, we held that the taxpayer-plaintiffs had standing to mount an
as-applied challenge to the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA),
which authorized federal grants to private community service groups
including religious organizations. The Court found “a sufficient
nexus between the taxpayer’s standing as a taxpayer and the
congressional exercise of taxing and spending power,”
notwithstanding the fact that the “the funding authorized by
Congress ha[d] flowed through and been administered” by an
Executive Branch official. Id. , at 620, 619.

															   But the key to that conclusion was the Court’s
recognition that AFLA was “at heart a program of disbursement of
funds pursuant to Congress’ taxing and spending powers,” and that
the plaintiffs’ claims “call[ed] into question how the funds
authorized by Congress [were] being disbursed pursuant to the
AFLA’s statutory mandate .” Id. , at 619–620 (emphasis
added). AFLA not only expressly authorized and appropriated
specific funds for grant-making, it also expressly contemplated
that some of those moneys might go to projects involving religious
groups. See id. , at 595–596; see also id. , at 623
(O’Connor, J., concurring) (noting the “partnership between
governmental and religious institutions contemplated by the
AFLA”).[ Footnote 6 ] Unlike this
case, Kendrick involved a “program of disbursement of
funds pursuant to Congress’ taxing and spending powers” that
“Congress had created,” “authorized,” and “mandate[d].” Id. , at 619–620.

															   Respondents attempt to paint their lawsuit as
a Kendrick -style as-applied challenge, but this effort is
unavailing for the simple reason that they can cite no statute
whose application they challenge. The best they can do is to point
to unspecified, lump-sum “Congressional budget appropriations” for
the general use of the Executive Branch—the allocation of which “is
a[n] administrative decision traditionally regarded as committed to
agency discretion.” Lincoln v. Vigil , 508 U. S. 182 , 192
(1993). Characterizing this case as an “as-applied challenge” to
these general appropriations statutes would stretch the meaning of
that term past its breaking point. It cannot be that every legal
challenge to a discretionary Executive Branch action implicates the
constitutionality of the underlying congressional appropriation.
When a criminal defendant charges that a federal agent carried out
an unreasonable search or seizure, we do not view that claim as an
as-applied challenge to the constitutionality of the statute
appropriating funds for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Respondents have not established why the discretionary Executive
Branch expenditures here, which are similarly funded by no-strings,
lump-sum appropriations, should be viewed any differently.[ Footnote 7 ]

															   In short, this case falls outside the “the
narrow exception” that Flast “created to the general rule
against taxpayer standing established in Frothingham .” Kendrick , supra , at 618. Because the expenditures
that respondents challenge were not expressly authorized or
mandated by any specific congressional enactment, respondents’
lawsuit is not directed at an exercise of congressional power, see Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at 479, and thus lacks the
requisite “logical nexus” between taxpayer status “and the type of
legislative enactment attacked.” Flast , 392 U. S., at
102.

															IV

															A

															1

															   Respondents argue that it is
“arbitrary” to distinguish between money spent pursuant to
congressional mandate and expenditures made in the course of
executive discretion, because “the injury to taxpayers in both
situations is the very injury targeted by the Establishment Clause
and Flast —the expenditure for the support of religion of
funds exacted from taxpayers.” Brief for Respondents 13. The panel
majority below agreed, based on its observation that “there is so
much that executive officials could do to promote religion in ways
forbidden by the establishment clause.” 433 F. 3d, at 995.

															   But Flast focused on
congressional action, and we must decline this invitation to extend
its holding to encompass discretionary Executive Branch
expenditures. Flast itself distinguished the “incidental
expenditure of tax funds in the administration of an essentially
regulatory statute,” Flast , supra , at 102, and we
have subsequently rejected the view that taxpayer standing “extends
to ‘the Government as a whole, regardless of which branch is at
work in a particular instance,’ ” Valley Forge , supra , at 484, n. 20. Moreover, we have repeatedly
emphasized that the Flast exception has a “narrow
application in our precedent,” Cuno , 547 U. S., at ___
(slip op., at 12), that only “slightly lowered” the bar on taxpayer
standing, Richardson , 418 U. S., at 173, and that must be
applied with “rigor,” Valley Forge , supra , at
481.

															   It is significant that, in the four decades
since its creation, the Flast exception has largely been
confined to its facts. We have declined to lower the taxpayer
standing bar in suits alleging violations of any constitutional
provision apart from the Establishment Clause. See Tilton v. Richardson , 403 U. S. 672 (1971) (no
taxpayer standing to sue under Free Exercise Clause of First
Amendment); Richardson , 418 U. S., at 175 (no taxpayer
standing to sue under Statement and Account Clause of Art. I); Schlesinger , 418 U. S., at 228 (no taxpayer standing to
sue under Incompatibility Clause of Art. I); Cuno , supra, at ___ (slip op., at 13) (no taxpayer standing to
sue under Commerce Clause). We have similarly refused to extend Flast to permit taxpayer standing for Establishment Clause
challenges that do not implicate Congress’ taxing and spending
power. See Valley Forge , supra , at 479–482 (no
taxpayer standing to challenge Executive Branch action taken
pursuant to Property Clause of Art. IV); see also District
of Columbia Common Cause v. District of Columbia , 858
F. 2d 1, 3–4 (CADC 1988); In re United States
Catholic Conference , 885 F. 2d 1020, 1028 (CA2 1989). In
effect, we have adopted the position set forth by Justice Powell in
his concurrence in Richardson and have “limit[ed] the
expansion of federal taxpayer and citizen standing in the absence
of specific statutory authorization to an outer boundary drawn by
the results in Flast … .” 418 U. S., at
196.

															2

															   While respondents argue that
Executive Branch expenditures in support of religion are no
different from legislative extractions, Flast itself
rejected this equivalence: “It will not be sufficient to allege an
incidental expenditure of tax funds in the administration of an
essentially regulatory statute.” 392 U. S., at 102.

															   Because almost all Executive
Branch activity is ultimately funded by some congressional
appropriation, extending the Flast exception to purely
executive expenditures would effectively subject every federal
action—be it a conference, proclamation or speech—to Establishment
Clause challenge by any taxpayer in federal court. To see the wide
swathe of activity that respondents’ proposed rule would cover, one
need look no further than the amended complaint in this action,
which focuses largely on speeches and presentations made by
Executive Branch officials. See, e.g. , Amended Complaint
¶32, App. to Pet. for Cert. 73a (challenging Executive Branch
officials’ “support of national and regional conferences”); id. , ¶33, App. to Pet. for Cert. 73a–75a (challenging
content of speech by Secretary of Education); id. , ¶¶35,
36, App. to Pet. for Cert. 76a (challenging content of Presidential
speeches); id. , ¶41, App. to Pet. for Cert. 77a
(challenging Executive Branch officials’ “public appearances” and
“speeches”). Such a broad reading would ignore the first prong of Flast ’s standing test, which requires “a logical link
between [taxpayer] status and the type of legislative enactment
attacked.” 392 U. S., at 102.

															   It would also raise serious
separation-of-powers concerns. As we have recognized, Flast itself gave too little weight to these concerns. By
framing the standing question solely in terms of whether the
dispute would be presented in an adversary context and in a form
traditionally viewed as capable of judicial resolution, Flast “failed to recognize that this doctrine has a
separation-of-powers component, which keeps courts within certain
traditional bounds vis-À-vis the other branches, concrete
adverseness or not.” Lewis v. Casey , 518 U. S. 343 , 353,
n. 3 (1996); see also Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at
471. Respondents’ position, if adopted, would repeat and compound
this mistake.

															   The constitutional requirements for
federal-court jurisdiction—including the standing requirements and
Article III—“are an essential ingredient of separation and
equilibration of powers.” Steel Co. v. Citizens for
Better Environment , 523 U. S. 83 , 101 (1998).
“Relaxation of standing requirements is directly related to the
expansion of judicial power,” and lowering the taxpayer standing
bar to permit challenges of purely executive actions “would
significantly alter the allocation of power at the national level,
with a shift away from a democratic form of government.” Richardson , 418 U. S., at 188 (Powell, J., concurring).
The rule respondents propose would enlist the federal courts to
superintend, at the behest of any federal taxpayer, the speeches,
statements, and myriad daily activities of the President, his
staff, and other Executive Branch officials. This would “be quite
at odds with … Flast ’s own promise that it would not
transform federal courts into forums for taxpayers’ ‘generalized
grievances’ ” about the conduct of government, Cuno ,
547 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 12) (quoting Flast , supra , at 106), and would “open the Judiciary to an
arguable charge of providing ‘government by injunction,’ ” Schlesinger , 418 U. S., at 222. It would deputize federal
courts as “ ‘virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and
soundness of Executive action,’ ” and that, most emphatically,
“is not the role of the judiciary.” Allen , 468 U. S., at
760 (quoting Laird v. Tatum , 408 U. S. 1 , 15
(1972)).

															3

															   Both the Court of Appeals and
respondents implicitly recognize that unqualified federal taxpayer
standing to assert Establishment Clause claims would go too far,
but neither the Court of Appeals nor respondents has identified a
workable limitation. The Court of Appeals, as noted, conceded only
that a taxpayer would lack standing where “the marginal or
incremental cost to the taxpaying public of the alleged violation
of the establishment clause” is “zero.” 433 F. 3d, at 995.
Applying this rule, the Court of Appeals opined that a taxpayer
would not have standing to challenge a President’s favorable
reference to religion in a State of the Union address because the
costs associated with the speech “would be no greater merely
because the President had mentioned Moses rather than John Stuart
Mill.” Ibid. There is reason to question
whether the Court of Appeals’ intended for its zero-marginal-cost
test to be taken literally, because the court, without any apparent
inquiry into the costs of Secretary Paige’s speech, went on to
agree that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge that speech. Id. , at 996. But if we take the Court of Appeals’ test
literally— i.e. , that any marginal cost greater than zero
suffices—taxpayers might well have standing to challenge some (and
perhaps many) speeches. As Judge Easterbrook observed: “The total
cost of presidential proclamations and speeches by Cabinet officers
that touch on religion (Thanksgiving and several other holidays)
surely exceeds $500,000 annually; it may cost that much to use Air
Force One and send a Secret Service detail to a single speaking
engagement.” 447 F. 3d, at 989–990 (concurring in denial of
rehearing en banc). At a minimum, the Court of Appeals’ approach
(asking whether the marginal cost exceeded zero) would surely
create difficult and uncomfortable line-drawing problems. Suppose
that it is alleged that a speech writer or other staff member spent
extra time doing research for the purpose of including “religious
imagery” in a speech. Suppose that a President or a Cabinet officer
attends or speaks at a prayer breakfast and that the time spent was
time that would have otherwise been spent on secular work.

															   Respondents take a somewhat different
approach, contending that their proposed expansion of Flast would be manageable because they would require that
a challenged expenditure be “fairly traceable to the conduct
alleged to violate the Establishment Clause.” Brief for Respondents
17. Applying this test, they argue, would “scree[n] out …
challenge[s to] the content of one particular speech, for example
the State of the Union address, as an Establishment Clause
violation.” Id. , at 21.

															   We find little comfort in this vague and
ill-defined test. As an initial matter, respondents fail to explain
why the (often substantial) costs that attend, for example, a
Presidential address are any less “traceable” than the expenses
related to the Executive Branch statements and conferences at issue
here. Indeed, respondents concede that even lawsuits involving de minimis amounts of taxpayer money can pass their
proposed “traceability” test. Id. , at 20, n. 6.

															   Moreover, the “traceability” inquiry,
depending on how it is framed, would appear to prove either too
little or too much. If the question is whether an allegedly
unconstitutional executive action can somehow be traced to taxpayer
funds in general , the answer will always be yes: Almost
all Executive Branch activities are ultimately funded by some congressional appropriation, whether general or
specific, which is in turn financed by tax receipts. If, on the
other hand, the question is whether the challenged action can be
traced to the contributions of a particular taxpayer-plaintiff, the answer will almost always be no: As we
recognized in Frothingham , the interest of any individual
taxpayer in a particular federal expenditure “is comparatively
minute and indeterminable … and constantly changing.” 262 U. S., at
487.

															B

															   Respondents set out a parade of
horribles that they claim could occur if Flast is not
extended to discretionary Executive Branch expenditures. For
example, they say, a federal agency could use its discretionary
funds to build a house of worship or to hire clergy of one
denomination and send them out to spread their faith. Or an agency
could use its funds to make bulk purchases of Stars of David,
crucifixes, or depictions of the star and crescent for use in its
offices or for distribution to the employees or the general public.
Of course, none of these things has happened, even though Flast has not previously been expanded in the way that
respondents urge. In the unlikely event that any of these executive
actions did take place, Congress could quickly step in. And
respondents make no effort to show that these improbable abuses
could not be challenged in federal court by plaintiffs who would
possess standing based on grounds other than taxpayer standing.

                                       C

															   Over the years, Flast has been
defended by some and criticized by others. But the present case
does not require us to reconsider that precedent. The Court of
Appeals did not apply Flast ; it extended Flast .
It is a necessary concomitant of the doctrine of stare
decisis that a precedent is not always expanded to the limit
of its logic. That was the approach that then-Justice Rehnquist
took in his opinion for the Court in Valley Forge , and it
is the approach we take here. We do not extend Flast , but
we also do not overrule it. We leave Flast as we found
it.

															   Justice Scalia says that we must
either overrule Flast or extend it to the limits of its
logic. His position is not “[in]sane,” inconsistent with the “rule
of law,” or “utterly meaningless.” Post , at 1 (opinion
concurring in judgment). But it is wrong. Justice Scalia does not
seriously dispute either (1) that Flast itself spoke in
terms of “legislative enactment[s]” and “exercises of congressional
power,” 392 U. S., at 102, or (2) that in the four decades since Flast was decided, we have never extended its narrow
exception to a purely discretionary Executive Branch expenditure.
We need go no further to decide this case. Relying on the provision
of the Constitution that limits our role to resolving the “Cases”
and “Controversies” before us, we decide only the case at hand.

															*  *  *

															   For these reasons, the judgment
of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is reversed.

															It is so ordered. Footnote 1 See, e.g. , Exec. Order No. 13198, 3
CFR 750 (2001 Comp.); Exec. Order No. 13280, 3 CFR 262 (2002
Comp.); Exec. Order No. 13342, 3 CFR 180 (2004 Comp.); Exec. Order
No. 13397, 71 Fed. Reg. 12275 (2006). Footnote 2 See also DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno , 547 U. S. ___, ___ (2006) (slip op., at 8)
(“Standing has been rejected” where “the alleged injury is not
‘concrete and particularized,’ … but instead a grievance the
taxpayer ‘suffers in some indefinite way in common with people
generally’ ” (quoting Defenders of Wildlife , 504 U.
S., at 560)); ASARCO Inc. v. Kadish , 490 U. S. 605 , 616 (1989) (opinion of
Kennedy, J.) (“[G]eneralized grievances brought by concerned
citizens … are not cognizable in the federal courts”); Valley
Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation
of Church and State, Inc. , 454 U. S. 464 , 483 (1982)
(“[A]ssertion of a right to a particular kind of Government
conduct, which the Government has violated by acting differently,
cannot alone satisfy the requirements of Art. III”); United States v. Richardson , 418 U. S. 166 , 174 (1974) (“[A]
taxpayer may not ‘employ a federal court as a forum in which to air
his generalized grievances about the conduct of government or the
allocation of power in the Federal System’ ” (quoting Flast v. Cohen , 392 U.
S. 83 , 114 (1968) (Stewart, J., concurring); some internal
quotation marks omitted); Schlesinger v. Reservists
Comm. to Stop the War , 418 U. S. 208 , 217 (1974)
(“Respondents seek to have the Judicial Branch compel the Executive
Branch to act in conformity with the Incompatibility Clause [of the
Constitution], an interest shared by all citizens… . And that
claimed nonobservance, standing alone, would adversely affect only
the generalized interest of all citizens in constitutional
governance, and that is an abstract injury”); Frothingham v. Mellon , decided with Massachusetts v. Mellon , 262 U. S. 447 , 488 (1923) (“The party
who invokes the power [of judicial review] must be able to show not
only that the statute is invalid but that he has sustained or is
immediately in danger of sustaining some direct injury as the
result of its enforcement, and not merely that he suffers in some
indefinite way in common with people generally”). Footnote 3 At around the time the Act was passed and Flast was decided, the great majority of nonpublic
elementary and secondary schools in the United States were
associated with a church. In 1965–1966, for example, 91.1 percent
of all nonpublic elementary schools and 78.2 percent of all
nonpublic secondary schools in the United States were religiously
affiliated. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Statistics of
Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Schools 1965–66, p. 7
(1968). Congress surely understood that much of the aid mandated by
the statute would find its way to religious schools. Footnote 4 See, e.g. , 119 Stat. 2472
(appropriating $53,830,000 “to be available for allocation within
the Executive Office of the President”). Footnote 5 Valley Forge also relied on a second
rationale: that the authorizing Act was an exercise of Congress’
power under the Property Clause of Art. IV, §3, cl. 2, and not
the Taxing and Spending Clause of Art. I, §8. 454 U. S., at 480.
But this conclusion merely provided an additional—“and perhaps
redundan[t],” ibid. —basis for denying a claim of standing
that was already foreclosed because it was not based on any
congressional action. Footnote 6 For example, the statute noted that the
problems of adolescent premarital sex and pregnancy “are best
approached through a variety of integrated and essential services
provided to adolescents and their families” by “religious and
charitable organizations,” among other groups. 42 U. S. C.
§300z(a)(8)(B) (1982 ed.). It went on to mandate that federally
provided services in that area should “emphasize the provision of
support by other family members, religious and charitable
organizations, voluntary associations, and other groups.”
§300z(a)(10)(c). And it directed that demonstration projects funded
by the government “shall … make use of support systems” such as
religious organizations, §300z–2(a), and required grant applicants
to describe how they would “involve religious and charitable
organizations” in their projects, §300z–5(a)(21)(B). Footnote 7 Nor is it relevant that Congress may have
informally “earmarked” portions of its general Executive Branch
appropriations to fund the offices and centers whose expenditures
are at issue here. See, e.g. , H. R. Rep. No. 107–342,
p. 108 (2001). “[A] fundamental principle of appropriations
law is that where ‘Congress merely appropriates lump-sum amounts
without statutorily restricting what can be done with those funds,
a clear inference arises that it does not intend to impose legally
binding restrictions, and indicia in committee reports and other
legislative history as to how the funds should or are expected to
be spent do not establish any legal requirements on’ the agency.” Lincoln , 508 U. S., at 192 (quoting In re LTV
Aerospace Corp. , 55 Comp. Gen. 307, 319 (1975)); see also TVA v. Hill , 437 U. S. 153 , 191
(1978) (“Expressions of committees dealing with requests for
appropriations cannot be equated with statutes enacted by
Congress”). KENNEDY, J., CONCURRING HEIN V. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC. 551 U. S. ____ (2007) SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES NO. 06-157 JAY F. HEIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF
FAITH-BASED AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, et al., PETITIONERS v. FREEDOM FROM RELI- GION FOUNDATION, INC.,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the seventh circuit

															[June 25, 2007]

															   Justice Kennedy, concurring.

															   The separation-of-powers design
in the Constitution is implemented, among other means, by Article
III’s case-or-controversy limitation and the resulting requirement
of standing. See, e.g., Lujan v. Defenders of
Wildlife , 504
U. S. 555 , 559–560 (1992). The Court’s decision in Flast v. Cohen , 392 U. S. 83 (1968), and
in later cases applying it, must be interpreted as respecting
separation-of-powers principles but acknowledging as well that
these principles, in some cases, must accommodate the First
Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The clause expresses the
Constitution’s special concern that freedom of conscience not be
compromised by government taxing and spending in support of
religion. In my view the result reached in Flast is
correct and should not be called into question. For the reasons set
forth by Justice Alito, however, Flast should not be
extended to permit taxpayer standing in the instant matter. And I
join his opinion in full.

															   Respondents’ amended complaint challenged the
religious nature of national and regional conferences that promoted
President Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. See App. to
Pet. for Cert. 73a–77a. To support the allegation respondents
pointed to speeches given by the President and other executive
officers, speeches with religious references. Id., at
73a–76a. The complaint relies on respondents’ taxpayer status as
the sole basis for standing to maintain the suit but points to no
specific use of Congress’ taxing and spending power other than
general appropriations to fund the administration of the Executive
Branch. Id., at 71a–73a. Flast established a “narrow
exception” to the rule against taxpayer standing. Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U. S. 589 , 618
(1988). To find standing in the circumstances of this case would
make the narrow exception boundless. The public events and public
speeches respondents seek to call in question are part of the open
discussion essential to democratic self-government. The Executive
Branch should be free, as a general matter, to discover new ideas,
to understand pressing public demands, and to find creative
responses to address governmental concerns. The exchange of ideas
between and among the State and Federal Governments and their
manifold, diverse constituencies sustains a free society.
Permitting any and all taxpayers to challenge the content of these
prototypical executive operations and dialogues would lead to
judicial intervention so far exceeding traditional boundaries on
the Judiciary that there would arise a real danger of judicial
oversight of executive duties. The burden of discovery to ascertain
if relief is justified in these potentially innumerable cases would
risk altering the free exchange of ideas and information. And were
this constant supervision to take place the courts would soon
assume the role of speech editors for communications issued by
executive officials and event planners for meetings they hold.

															   The courts must be reluctant to expand their
authority by requiring intrusive and unremitting judicial
management of the way the Executive Branch performs its duties. The
Court has refused to establish a constitutional rule that would
require or allow “permanent judicial intervention in the conduct of
governmental operations to a degree inconsistent with sound
principles of federalism and the separation of powers.” Garcetti v. Ceballos , 547 U. S. ___, ___ (2006)
(slip op., at 11); see also Cheney v. United States
Dist. Court for D. C. , 542 U. S. 367 , 382
(2004) (noting that “separation-of-powers considerations should
inform a court of appeals’ evaluation of a mandamus petition
involving the President or the Vice President” and that “mandamus
standards are broad enough … to prevent a lower court from
interfering with a coequal branch’s ability to discharge its
constitutional responsibilities”). In the Article III context the
Court explained that concerns based on separation of powers
“counsel[ed] against recognizing standing in a case brought … to
seek a restructuring of the apparatus established by the Executive
Branch to fulfill its legal duties.” Allen v. Wright , 468
U. S. 737 , 761 (1984).

															   The same principle applies here. The Court
should not authorize the constant intrusion upon the executive
realm that would result from granting taxpayer standing in the
instant case. As Justice Alito explains in detail, the Court’s
precedents do not require it to do so. The separation-of-powers
concerns implicated by intrusive judicial regulation of day-to-day
executive operations reinforce his interpretation of Flast ’s framework. Cf. Allen , supra, at
761, n. 26 (relying “on separation of powers principles to
interpret the ‘fairly traceable’ component of the standing
requirement”).

															   It must be remembered that, even where parties
have no standing to sue, members of the Legislative and Executive
Branches are not excused from making constitutional determinations
in the regular course of their duties. Government officials must
make a conscious decision to obey the Constitution whether or not
their acts can be challenged in a court of law and then must
conform their actions to these principled determinations. SCALIA, J., CONCURRING IN JUDGMENT HEIN V. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC. 551 U. S. ____ (2007) SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES NO. 06-157 JAY F. HEIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF
FAITH-BASED AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, et al., PETITIONERS v. FREEDOM FROM RELI- GION FOUNDATION, INC.,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the seventh circuit

															[June 25, 2007]

															   Justice Scalia, with whom Justice
Thomas joins, concurring in the judgment.

															   Today’s opinion is, in one
significant respect, entirely consistent with our previous cases
addressing taxpayer standing to raise Establishment Clause
challenges to government expenditures. Unfortunately, the
consistency lies in the creation of utterly meaningless
distinctions which separate the case at hand from the precedents
that have come out differently, but which cannot possibly be (in
any sane world) the reason it comes out differently. If this Court
is to decide cases by rule of law rather than show of hands, we
must surrender to logic and choose sides: Either Flast v. Cohen , 392 U. S. 83 (1968), should be applied
to (at a minimum) all challenges to the governmental
expenditure of general tax revenues in a manner alleged to violate
a constitutional provision specifically limiting the taxing and
spending power, or Flast should be repudiated. For me, the
choice is easy. Flast is wholly irreconcilable with the
Article III restrictions on federal-court jurisdiction that this
Court has repeatedly confirmed are embodied in the doctrine of
standing.

															I

															A

															   There is a simple reason why our
taxpayer-standing cases involving Establishment Clause challenges
to government expenditures are notoriously inconsistent: We have
inconsistently described the first element of the “irreducible
constitutional minimum of standing,” which minimum consists of (1)
a “concrete and particularized” “ ‘injury in fact’ ” that
is (2) fairly traceable to the defendant’s alleged unlawful conduct
and (3) likely to be redressed by a favorable decision. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife , 504 U. S. 555 , 560–561
(1992). We have alternately relied on two entirely distinct
conceptions of injury in fact, which for convenience I will call
“Wallet Injury” and “Psychic Injury.”

															   Wallet Injury is the type of concrete and
particularized injury one would expect to be asserted in a taxpayer suit, namely, a claim that the plaintiff’s tax
liability is higher than it would be, but for the allegedly
unlawful government action. The stumbling block for suits
challenging government expenditures based on this conventional type
of injury is quite predictable. The plaintiff cannot satisfy the
traceability and redressability prongs of standing. It is uncertain
what the plaintiff’s tax bill would have been had the allegedly
forbidden expenditure not been made, and it is even more
speculative whether the government will, in response to an adverse
court decision, lower taxes rather than spend the funds in some
other manner.

															   Psychic Injury, on the other hand, has nothing
to do with the plaintiff’s tax liability. Instead, the injury
consists of the taxpayer’s mental displeasure that money
extracted from him is being spent in an unlawful manner. This shift
in focus eliminates traceability and redressability problems.
Psychic Injury is directly traceable to the improper use of taxpayer funds, and it is redressed when the improper use is
enjoined, regardless of whether that injunction affects the
taxpayer’s purse. Flast and the cases following its
teaching have invoked a peculiarly restricted version of Psychic
Injury, permitting taxpayer displeasure over unconstitutional
spending to support standing only if the constitutional
provision allegedly violated is a specific limitation on the taxing
and spending power. Restricted or not, this conceptualizing of
injury in fact in purely mental terms conflicts squarely with the
familiar proposition that a plaintiff lacks a concrete and
particularized injury when his only complaint is the generalized
grievance that the law is being violated. As we reaffirmed
unanimously just this Term: “ ‘We have consistently held that
a plaintiff raising only a generally available grievance about
government—claiming only harm to his and every citizen’s interest
in proper application of the Constitution and laws, and seeking
relief that no more directly and tangibly benefits him than it does
the public at large—does not state an Article III case or
controversy.’ ” Lance v. Coffman , 549 U. S.
___, ___ (2007) (per curiam) (slip op., at 3) (quoting Lujan , supra, at 573–574).

															   As the following review of our cases
demonstrates, we initially denied taxpayer standing based on Wallet
Injury, but then found standing in some later cases based on the
limited version of Psychic Injury described above. The basic
logical flaw in our cases is thus twofold: We have never explained
why Psychic Injury was insufficient in the cases in which standing
was denied, and we have never explained why Psychic Injury, however
limited, is cognizable under Article III.

															B

															1

															   Two pre- Flast cases are
of critical importance. In Frothingham v. Mellon ,
decided with Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 447 (1923),
the taxpayer challenged the constitutionality of the Maternity Act
of 1921, alleging in part that the federal funding provided by the
Act was not authorized by any provision of the Constitution. See id. , at 476–477 (argument for Frothingham), 479–480
(opinion of the Court). The Court held that the taxpayer lacked
standing. After emphasizing that “the effect upon future taxation …
of any payment out of [Treasury] funds” was “remote, fluctuating
and uncertain,” Frothingham , 262 U. S., at 487, the Court
concluded that “[t]he party who invokes the power [of judicial
review] must be able to show not only that the statute is invalid
but that he has sustained or is immediately in danger of sustaining
some direct injury as the result of its enforcement, and not merely
that he suffers in some indefinite way in common with people
generally,” id. , at 488. The Court was thus describing the
traceability and redressability problems with Wallet Injury, and
rejecting Psychic Injury as a generalized grievance rather than
concrete and particularized harm.

															   The second significant
pre- Flast case is Doremus v. Board of Ed. of
Hawthorne , 342
U. S. 429 (1952). There the taxpayers challenged under the
Establishment Clause a state law requiring public-school teachers
to read the Bible at the beginning of each school day. Id. , at 430, 433.[ Footnote
1 ] Relying extensively on Frothingham , the Court
denied standing. After first emphasizing that there was no
allegation that the Bible reading increased the plaintiffs’ taxes
or the cost of running the schools, 342 U. S., at 433, and then
reaffirming that taxpayers must allege more than an indefinite
injury suffered in common with people generally, id. , at
434, the Court concluded that the “grievance which [the plaintiffs]
sought to litigate here is not a direct dollars-and-cents injury
but is a religious difference,” ibid . In addition to
reiterating Frothingham ’s description of the unavoidable
obstacles to recovery under a taxpayer theory of Wallet Injury, Doremus rejected Psychic Injury in unmistakable terms. The
opinion’s deprecation of a mere “religious difference,” in contrast
to a real “dollars-and-cents injury,” can only be understood as a
flat denial of standing supported only by taxpayer disapproval of
the unconstitutional use of tax funds. If the Court had thought
that Psychic Injury was a permissible basis for standing, it should
have sufficed (as the dissenting Justices in Doremus suggested, see 342 U. S., at 435 (opinion of Douglas, J.)) that
public employees were being paid in part to violate the
Establishment Clause.

															2

															   Sixteen years after Doremus , the Court took a pivotal turn. In Flast v. Cohen , 392 U. S. 83 (1968), taxpayers
challenged the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,
alleging that funds expended pursuant to the Act were being used to
support parochial schools. Id. , at 85–87. They argued that
either the Act itself proscribed such expenditures or that the Act
violated the Establishment Clause. Id. , at 87, 90. The
Court held that the taxpayers had standing. Purportedly in order to
determine whether taxpayers have the “personal stake and interest”
necessary to satisfy Article III, a two-pronged nexus test was
invented. Id. , at 101–102.

															   The first prong required the
taxpayer to “establish a logical link between [taxpayer] status and
the type of legislative enactment.” Id. , at 102. The Court
described what that meant as follows:

															“[A] taxpayer will be a proper party to allege the
unconstitutionality only of exercises of congressional power under
the taxing and spending clause of Art. I, §8, of the
Constitution. It will not be sufficient to allege an incidental
expenditure of tax funds in the administration of an essentially
regulatory statute. This requirement is consistent with the
limitation imposed upon state-taxpayer standing in federal courts
in Doremus … .” Ibid .

															The second prong required the taxpayer to
“establish a nexus between [taxpayer] status and the precise nature
of the constitutional infringement alleged.” Ibid . The
Court elaborated that this required “the taxpayer [to] show that
the challenged enactment exceeds specific constitutional
limitations imposed upon the exercise of the congressional taxing
and spending power and not simply that the enactment is generally
beyond the powers delegated to Congress by Art. I, §8.” Id ., at 102–103. The Court held that the Establishment
Clause was the type of specific limitation on the taxing and
spending power that it had in mind because “one of the specific
evils feared by” the Framers of that Clause was that the taxing and
spending power would be used to favor one religion over another or
to support religion generally. Id. , at 103–104 (relying
exclusively upon Madison’s famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against
Religious Assessments).

															   Because both prongs of its newly minted
two-part test were satisfied, Flast held that the
taxpayers had standing. Wallet Injury could not possibly have been
the basis for this conclusion, since the taxpayers in Flast were no more able to prove that success on the
merits would reduce their tax burden than was the taxpayer in Frothingham . Thus, Flast relied on Psychic Injury
to support standing, describing the “injury” as the taxpayer’s
allegation that “his tax money is being extracted and spent in
violation of specific constitutional protections against such
abuses of legislative power.” 392 U. S., at 106.

															   But that created a problem: If the taxpayers
in Flast had standing based on Psychic Injury, and without
regard to the effect of the litigation on their ultimate tax
liability, why did not the taxpayers in Doremus and Frothingham have standing on a similar
basis?    Enter the magical two-pronged nexus test.
It has often been pointed out, and never refuted, that the criteria
in Flast ’s two-part test are entirely unrelated to the purported goal of ensuring that the plaintiff has a
sufficient “stake in the outcome of the controversy.” See Flast , 392 U. S., at 121–124 (Harlan, J., dissenting); see
also id. , at 107 (Douglas, J., concurring); United
States v. Richardson , 418 U. S. 166 , 183 (1974) (Powell, J.,
concurring). In truth, the test was designed for a quite different
goal. Each prong was meant to disqualify from standing one of the
two prior cases that would otherwise contradict the holding of Flast. The first prong distinguished Doremus as
involving a challenge to an “incidental expenditure of tax funds in
the administration of an essentially regulatory statute,” rather
than a challenge to a taxing and spending statute. See 392 U. S.,
at 102. Did the Court proffer any reason why a taxpayer’s Psychic
Injury is less concrete and particularized, traceable, or
redressable when the challenged expenditures are incidental to an
essentially regulatory statute (whatever that means)? Not at all. Doremus had to be evaded, and so it was. In reality, of
course, there is simply no material difference between Flast and Doremus as far as Psychic Injury is
concerned: If taxpayers upset with the government’s giving money to
parochial schools had standing to sue, so should the taxpayers who
disapproved of the government’s paying public-school teachers to
read the Bible.[ Footnote 2 ] Flast ’s dispatching of Frothingham via the second prong of the nexus test was
only marginally less disingenuous. Not only does the relationship
of the allegedly violated provision to the taxing and spending
power have no bearing upon the concreteness or particularity of the
Psychic Injury, see Part III, infra , but the existence of
that relationship does not even genuinely distinguish Flast from Frothingham. It is impossible to
maintain that the Establishment Clause is a more direct limitation
on the taxing and spending power than the constitutional limitation
invoked in Frothingham , which is contained within the
very provision creating the power to tax and spend . Article I,
§8, cl. 1, provides: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and
collect Taxes … , to pay the Debts and provide for the common
Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
(Emphasis added.) Though unmentioned in Flast , it was
precisely this limitation upon the permissible purposes of taxing
and spending upon which Mrs. Frothingham relied. See, e.g., Brief for Appellant in Frothingham, O. T. 1922, No. 962, p. 68 (“[T]he words ‘provide for the
common defence and general welfare of the United States’ are used as limitations on the taxing power ”); id. , at
26–81 (discussing the general welfare limitation at length).

															3

															   Coherence and candor have fared
no better in our later taxpayer-standing cases. The three of them
containing lengthy discussion of the Establishment Clause warrant
analysis. Flast was dismissively
and unpersuasively distinguished just 13 years later in Valley
Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation
of Church and State, Inc. , 454 U. S. 464 (1982).
The taxpayers there challenged the decision of the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare to give a 77-acre tract of
Government property, worth over half a million dollars, to a
religious organization. Id. , at 468. The Court, adhering
to the strict letter of Flast ’s two-pronged nexus test,
held that the taxpayers lacked standing. Flast ’s first
prong was not satisfied: Rather than challenging a congressional
taxing and spending statute, the plaintiffs were attacking an
agency decision to transfer federal property pursuant to Congress’s
power under the Property Clause, Art. IV, §3, cl. 2. 454 U.
S., at 479–480.

															   In distinguishing between the Spending Clause
and the Property Clause, Valley Forge achieved the
seemingly impossible: It surpassed the high bar for irrationality
set by Flast ’s distinguishing of Doremus and Frothingham . Like the dissenters in Valley Forge ,
see 454 U. S., at 511–512 (opinion of Brennan, J.); id. ,
at 513–514 (opinion of Stevens, J.), I cannot fathom why Article
III standing should turn on whether the government enables a
religious organization to obtain real estate by giving it a check
drawn from general tax revenues or instead by buying the property
itself and then transferring title.

															   While Valley Forge ’s application of
the first prong to distinguish Flast was unpersuasive, the
Court was at least not trying to hide the ball. Its holding was
forthrightly based on a resounding rejection of the very concept of
Psychic Injury:

															“[Plaintiffs] fail to identify any personal injury
suffered by them as a consequence of the alleged constitutional
error, other than the psychological consequence presumably produced
by observation of conduct with which one disagrees. That is not an
injury sufficient to confer standing under Art. III, even
though the disagreement is phrased in constitutional terms. It is
evident that respondents are firmly committed to the constitutional
principle of separation of church and State, but standing is not
measured by the intensity of the litigant’s interest or the fervor
of his advocacy.” 454 U. S., at 485–486 (emphasis omitted).

															Of course, in keeping with what was to become the
shameful tradition of our taxpayer-standing cases, the Court’s
candor about the inadequacy of Psychic Injury was combined with a
notable silence as to why Flast itself was not doomed.

															   A mere six years later, Flast was
resuscitated in Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U. S. 589 (1988).
The taxpayers there brought facial and as-applied Establishment
Clause challenges to the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which
was a congressional scheme that provided grants to public or
nonprofit private organizations to combat premarital adolescent
pregnancy and sex. Id. , at 593. The as-applied challenge
focused on whether particular grantees selected by the Secretary of
Health and Human Services were constitutionally permissible
recipients. Id. , at 620–622. The Solicitor General argued
that, under Valley Forge ’s application of Flast ’s
first prong, the taxpayers lacked standing for their as-applied
claim because that claim was really a challenge to executive
decisionmaking, not to Congress’s exercise of its taxing and
spending power. 487 U. S., at 618–619. The Court rejected this
contention, holding that the taxpayers’ as-applied claim was still
a challenge to Congress’s taxing and spending power even though
disbursement of the funds authorized by Congress had been
administered by the Secretary. Id. , at 619. Kendrick , like Flast before
it, was obviously based on Psychic Injury: The taxpayers could not
possibly make, and did not attempt to make, the showing required
for Wallet Injury. But by relying on Psychic Injury, Kendrick perfectly revealed the incompatibility of that
concept with the outcome in Doremus . Just as Kendrick did not care whether the appropriated funds would
have been spent anyway—given to a different, permissible
recipient—so also Doremus should not have cared that the
teachers would likely receive the same salary once their classroom
activities were limited to secular conduct. Flast and Kendrick ’s acceptance of Psychic Injury is fundamentally
at odds with Frothingham , Doremus , and Valley
Forge .

															   Which brings me to the final case worthy of
mention. Last Term, in DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno , 547 U. S. ___ (2006), we concisely confirmed that Flast was based on Psychic Injury. The taxpayers in that
case sought to rely on Flast to raise a Commerce Clause
challenge to a state franchise tax credit. 547 U. S., at ___ (slip
op., at 11). In rejecting the analogy and denying standing, we
described Flast as follows:

															“The Court … understood the ‘injury’ alleged in
Establishment Clause challenges to federal spending to be the very
‘extract[ion] and spen[ding]’ 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.” 547 U. S., at ___ (slip op.,
at 13) (citation omitted; some alterations in original).

															What Cuno ’s conceptualization of Flast reveals is that there are only two logical routes
available to this Court. We must initially decide whether Psychic
Injury is consistent with Article III. If it is, we should apply Flast to all challenges to government
expenditures in violation of constitutional provisions that
specifically limit the taxing and spending power; if it is not, we
should overturn Flast .

															II

															A

															   The plurality today avails itself
of neither principled option. Instead, essentially accepting the
Solicitor General’s primary submission, it limits Flast to
challenges to expenditures that are “expressly authorized or
mandated by . . . specific congressional enactment.” Ante ,
at 18. It offers no intellectual justification for this limitation,
except that “[i]t is a necessary concomitant of the doctrine of stare decisis that a precedent is not always expanded to
the limit of its logic.” Ante, at 24. That is true enough,
but since courts purport to be engaged in reasoned decisionmaking, it is only true when (1) the precedent’s
logic is seen to require narrowing or readjustment in light of
relevant distinctions that the new fact situation brings to the
fore; or (2) its logic is fundamentally flawed, and so deserves to
be limited to the facts that begot it. Today’s plurality claims
neither of these justifications. As to the first, the plurality
offers no explanation of why the factual differences between this
case and Flast are material . It virtually admits
that express congressional allocation vel non has nothing
to do with whether the plaintiffs have alleged an injury in fact
that is fairly traceable and likely to be redressed. See ante , at 18–19. As the dissent correctly contends and I
shall not belabor, see post , at 3–4 (opinion of Souter,
J.), Flast is indistinguishable from this case
for purposes of Article III. Whether the challenged government
expenditure is expressly allocated by a specific congressional
enactment has absolutely no relevance to the Article III
criteria of injury in fact, traceability, and redressability.

															   Yet the plurality is also
unwilling to acknowledge that the logic of Flast (its
Psychic Injury rationale) is simply wrong, and for that
reason should not be extended to other cases. Despite the lack
of acknowledgment, however, that is the only plausible explanation
for the plurality’s indifference to whether the “distinguishing”
fact is legally material, and for its determination to limit Flast to its “ ‘ resul[t] ,’ ” ante , at 19.[ Footnote
3 ] Why, then, pick a distinguishing fact that may breathe life
into Flast in future cases, preserving the disreputable
disarray of our Establishment Clause standing jurisprudence? Why
not hold that only taxpayers raising Establishment Clause
challenges to expenditures pursuant to the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 have standing? That, I suppose, would be too
obvious a repudiation of Flast , and thus an impediment to
the plurality’s pose of minimalism.

															   Because the express-allocation line has no
mooring to our tripartite test for Article III standing, it invites
demonstrably absurd results. For example, the plurality would deny
standing to a taxpayer challenging the President’s disbursement to
a religious organization of a discrete appropriation that Congress
had not explicitly allocated to that purpose, even if everyone knew
that Congress and the President had informally negotiated that the
entire sum would be spent in that precise manner. See ante , at 17, n. 7 (holding that nonstatutory earmarks
are insufficient to satisfy the express-allocation requirement).
And taxpayers should lack standing to bring Establishment Clause
challenges to the Executive Branch’s use of appropriated funds when
those expenditures have the added vice of violating
congressional restrictions. If, for example, Congress instructs the
President to disburse grants to hospitals that he deems worthy, and
the President instead gives all of the money to the Catholic
Church, “[t]he link between congressional action and constitutional
violation that supported taxpayer standing in Flast [would
be] missing.” Ante , at 13. Indeed, taking the plurality at
its word, Congress could insulate the President from all Flast -based suits by codifying the truism that no
appropriation can be spent by the Executive Branch in a manner that
violates the Establishment Clause.

															   Any last pretense of minimalism—of adhering to
prior law but merely declining to “extend” it—is swept away by the
fact that the Court’s holding flatly contradicts Kendrick .
The whole point of the as-applied challenge in Kendrick was that the Secretary, not Congress, had chosen inappropriate grant recipients. 487 U. S., at 620–622. Both Kendrick and this case equally involve, in the relevant
sense, attacks on executive discretion rather than congressional
decision: Congress generally authorized the spending of tax funds
for certain purposes but did not explicitly mandate that they be
spent in the unconstitutional manner challenged by the
taxpayers. I thus share the dissent’s bewilderment, see post , at 4–5 (opinion of Souter, J.), as to why the
plurality fixates on the amount of additional discretion
the Executive Branch enjoys under the law beyond the only
discretion relevant to the Establishment Clause issue: whether to
spend taxpayer funds for a purpose that is unconstitutional. See ante , at 25 (focusing on whether the case involves “a purely discretionary Executive Branch expenditure”
(emphasis added)).

															B

															   While I have been critical of the
Members of the plurality, I by no means wish to give the impression
that respondents’ legal position is any more coherent. Respondents
argue that Flast did not turn on whether Congress has
expressly allocated the funds to the allegedly unconstitutional
use, and their case plainly rests on Psychic Injury. They
repeatedly emphasize that the injury in Flast was merely
the governmental extraction and spending of tax money in aid of
religion. See, e.g., Brief for Respondents 28. Respondents
refuse to admit that their argument logically implies, for the
reasons already discussed, that every expenditure of tax
revenues that is alleged to violate the Establishment Clause is
subject to suit under Flast .

															   Of course, such a concession
would run headlong into the denial of standing in Doremus .
Respondents’ only answer to Doremus is the cryptic
assertion that the injury there was not fairly traceable to the
unconstitutional conduct. Brief for Respondents 21, and n. 7.
This makes no sense. On Flast ’s theory of Psychic Injury,
the injury in Doremus was perfectly traceable and not in
any way attenuated. It consisted of the psychic frustration that
tax funds were being used in violation of the Establishment Clause,
which was directly caused by the paying of teachers to read the
Bible, and which would have been remedied by prohibition of that
expenditure.[ Footnote 4 ] The
hollowness of respondents’ traceability argument is perhaps best
demonstrated by their counsel’s game submission at oral argument
that there would be standing to challenge the hiring of a single
Secret Service agent who guarded the President during religious
trips, but no standing if those responsibilities (and the
corresponding taxpayer-funded compensation) were spread out over
the entire Secret Service protective detail. Tr. of Oral Arg.
38–39.

															   The logical consequence of respondents’
position finds no support in this Court’s precedents or our
Nation’s history. Any taxpayer would be able to sue whenever tax
funds were used in alleged violation of the Establishment Clause.
So, for example, any taxpayer could challenge the fact that the
Marshal of our Court is paid, in part, to call the courtroom to
order by proclaiming “God Save the United States and this Honorable
Court.” As much as respondents wish to deny that this is what Flast logically entails, it blinks reality to conclude
otherwise. If respondents are to prevail, they must endorse a
future in which ideologically motivated taxpayers could “roam the
country in search of governmental wrongdoing and … reveal their
discoveries in federal court,” transforming those courts into
“ombudsmen of the general welfare” with respect to Establishment
Clause issues. Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at 487.

															C

															   Ultimately, the arguments by the
parties in this case and the opinions of my colleagues serve only
to confirm that Flast ’s adoption of Psychic Injury has to
be addressed head-on. Minimalism is an admirable judicial trait,
but not when it comes at the cost of meaningless and disingenuous
distinctions that hold the sure promise of engendering further
meaningless and disingenuous distinctions in the future. The rule
of law is ill served by forcing lawyers and judges to make
arguments that deaden the soul of the law, which is logic and
reason. Either Flast was correct, and must be accorded the
wide application that it logically dictates, or it was not, and
must be abandoned in its entirety. I turn, finally, to that
question.

															III

															   Is a taxpayer’s purely
psychological displeasure that his funds are being spent in an
allegedly unlawful manner ever sufficiently concrete and
particularized to support Article III standing? The answer is
plainly no.

															   As I noted at the outset, Lujan explained that the “consisten[t]” view of this Court
has been that “a plaintiff raising only a generally available
grievance about government—claiming only harm to his and every
citizen’s interest in proper application of the Constitution and
laws, and seeking relief that no more directly and tangibly
benefits him than it does the public at large—does not state an
Article III case or controversy.” 504 U. S., at 573–574. As
evidence of the consistency with which we have affirmed that
understanding, Lujan relied on the reasoning in Frothingham , and in several other cases, including Ex
parte Lévitt , 302 U. S. 633 (1937)
(dismissing suit challenging Justice Black’s appointment to this
Court in alleged violation of the Ineligibility Clause, Art. I, §6,
cl. 2), United States v. Richardson , 418 U. S. 166 (1974) (denying standing
to challenge the Government’s failure to disclose the CIA’s
expenditures in alleged violation of the Accounts Clause, Art. I,
§9, cl. 7), and Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm.
to Stop the War , 418 U. S. 208 (1974)
(rejecting challenge to Members of Congress holding commissions in
the military Reserves in alleged violation of the Incompatibility
Clause, Art. I, §6, cl. 2). See 504 U. S., at 573–577. Just
this Term, relying on precisely the same cases and the same
reasoning, we held unanimously that suits raising only generalized
grievances do not satisfy Article III’s requirement that the injury
in fact be concrete and particularized. See Lance , 549 U.
S., at ____ (slip op., at 2–4).[ Footnote 5 ]

															   Nor does Flast ’s limitation on
Psychic Injury—the limitation that it suffices only when the
two-pronged “nexus” test is met—cure the Article III deficiency.
The fact that it is the alleged violation of a specific
constitutional limit on the taxing and spending power that produces
the taxpayer’s mental angst does not change the fundamental flaw.
It remains the case that the taxpayer seeks “relief that no more
directly and tangibly benefits him than it does the public at
large.” Lujan , supra, at 573–574. And it is of no
conceivable relevance to this issue whether the Establishment
Clause was originally conceived of as a specific limitation on the
taxing and spending power. Madison’s Remonstrance has nothing
whatever to say on the question whether suits alleging violations
of that limitation are anything other than the generalized
grievances that federal courts had always been barred from
considering before Flast . Flast was forced to
rely on the slim reed of the Remonstrance since there was no better
support for its novel conclusion, in 1968, that violation of the
Establishment Clause, unique among the provisions of our law, had
always inflicted a personalized Psychic Injury upon all taxpayers
that federal courts had the power to remedy.

															   Moreover, Flast is damaged goods, not
only because its fanciful two-pronged “nexus” test has been
demonstrated to be irrelevant to the test’s supposed objective, but
also because its cavalier treatment of the standing requirement
rested upon a fundamental underestimation of that requirement’s
importance. Flast was explicitly and erroneously premised
on the idea that Article III standing does not perform a crucial
separation-of-powers function:

															“The question whether a particular person is a
proper party to maintain the action does not, by its own force,
raise separation of powers problems related to improper judicial
interference in areas committed to other branches of the Federal
Government. Such problems arise, if at all, only from the
substantive issues the individual seeks to have adjudicated. Thus,
in terms of Article III limitations on federal court jurisdiction,
the question of standing is related only to whether the dispute
sought to be adjudicated will be presented in an adversary context
and in a form historically viewed as capable of judicial
resolution.” 392 U. S., at 100–101.

															A perceptive Frenchman, visiting the United States
some 135 years before Chief Justice Warren wrote these words,
perceived that they were false.

															“It is true that … judicial censure, exercised by
the courts on legislation, cannot extend without distinction to all
laws, for there are some of them that can never give rise to
the sort of clearly formulated dispute that one calls a case .”
A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 97 (H. Mansfield & D.
Winthrop transls. and eds. 2000) (emphasis added). Flast ’s crabbed (and judge-empowering)
understanding of the role Article III standing plays in preserving
our system of separated powers has been repudiated:

															   “To permit a complainant who has
no concrete injury to require a court to rule on important
constitutional issues in the abstract would create the potential
for abuse of the judicial process, distort the role of the
Judiciary in its relationship to the Executive and the Legislature
and open the Judiciary to an arguable charge of providing
‘government by injunction.’ ” Schlesinger , supra, at 222.

															See also Richardson , 418 U. S. , at 179–180; Valley Forge , 454 U. S., at 474; Lujan , 504 U. S. , at 576–577. We twice have noted
explicitly that Flast failed to recognize the vital
separation-of-powers aspect of Article III standing. See Spencer v. Kemna , 523 U. S. 1 , 11–12 (1998); Lewis v. Casey , 518 U. S. 343 , 353,
n. 3 (1996). And once a proper understanding of the
relationship of standing to the separation of powers is brought to
bear, Psychic Injury, even as limited in Flast , is
revealed for what it is: a contradiction of the basic propositions
that the function of the judicial power “is, solely, to decide on
the rights of individuals,” Marbury v. Madison , 1
Cranch 137, 170 (1803), and that generalized grievances affecting
the public at large have their remedy in the political process.

															   Overruling prior precedents, even precedents
as disreputable as Flast , is nevertheless a serious
undertaking, and I understand the impulse to take a minimalist
approach. But laying just claim to be honoring stare
decisis requires more than beating Flast to a pulp
and then sending it out to the lower courts weakened, denigrated,
more incomprehensible than ever, and yet somehow technically alive.
Even before the addition of the new meaningless distinction devised
by today’s plurality, taxpayer standing in Establishment Clause
cases has been a game of chance. In the proceedings below,
well-respected federal judges declined to hear this case en banc,
not because they thought the issue unimportant or the panel
decision correct, but simply because they found our cases so
lawless that there was no point in, quite literally,
second-guessing the panel. See Freedom From Religion
Foundation, Inc. v. Chao , 447 F. 3d 988 (CA7
2006) (Flaum, C. J., concurring in denial of rehearing en
banc); id. , at 989–990 (Easterbrook, J., concurring in
denial of rehearing en banc) (describing our cases as “arbitrary,”
“illogical,” and lacking in “comprehensiveness and rationality”).
We had an opportunity today to erase this blot on our
jurisprudence, but instead have simply smudged it.

															   My call for the imposition of logic and order
upon this chaotic set of precedents will perhaps be met with the
snappy epigram that “[t]he life of the law has not been logic: it
has been experience.” O. Holmes, The Common Law 1 (1881). But what
experience has shown is that Flast ’s lack of a logical
theoretical underpinning has rendered our taxpayer-standing
doctrine such a jurisprudential disaster that our appellate judges
do not know what to make of it. And of course the case has
engendered no reliance interests, not only because one does not
arrange his affairs with an eye to standing, but also because there
is no relying on the random and irrational. I can think of few
cases less warranting of stare decisis respect. It is
time—it is past time—to call an end. Flast should be
overruled. Footnote 1 The text of the statute did not just
authorize public-school teachers to read from the Bible, but mandated that they do so: “At least five verses taken from
that portion of the Holy Bible known as the Old Testament shall
be read , or caused to be read, without comment, in each public
school classroom, in the presence of the pupils therein assembled, by the teacher in charge , at the opening of school upon
every school day … .” N. J. Rev. Stat. §18:14–77 (1937)
(emphasis added). Footnote 2 There is a natural impulse to respond that
the portion of the teachers’ salary that corresponded to the time
that they were required to read from the Bible was de
minimis . But even Flast had the decency not to seize
on a de minimis exception to distinguish Doremus: Having relied exclusively on Madison’s Remonstrance to justify the
conclusion that the Establishment Clause was a specific limitation
on the taxing and spending power, see Flast , 392 U. S., at
103–104, the Court could not simultaneously ignore Madison’s
admonition that “ ‘the same authority which can force a
citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for
the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to
any other establishment in all cases whatsoever,’ ” id. , at 103 (quoting Madison’s Remonstrance; emphasis
added). Footnote 3 This explanation does not suffice with regard
to Justice Kennedy, who, unlike the other Members of the plurality,
openly and avowedly contends both that Flast was correctly
decided and that respondents should nevertheless lose this case. Ante , at 1 (concurring opinion). He thus has the
distinction of being the only Justice who affirms both
propositions. I cannot begin to comprehend how the amorphous
separation-of-powers concerns that motivate him, ante , at
1–3, bear upon whether the express-allocation requirement is
grounded in the Article III criteria of injury in fact,
traceability, or redressability. Footnote 4 Nor is the dissent’s oblique suggestion that Doremus did not involve an “identifiable amoun[t]” of
taxpayer funds, post , at 3 (opinion of Souter, J.), any
more persuasive. One need not consult a CPA to realize that the
portion of the school day during which the teachers’ educational
responsibilities were to read the Bible corresponded to a fraction
of the teachers’ taxpayer-funded salaries. And while the amount of
money might well have been inconsequential, it was probably greater
than three pence. See n. 2, supra . Footnote 5 It is true that this Court has occasionally
in dicta described the prohibition on generalized grievances as
merely a prudential bar. But the fountainhead of this dicta, Warth v. Seldin , 422 U. S. 490 (1975),
supported its statement only by naked citation of Schlesinger , Richardson , and Lévitt . 422
U. S., at 499. But those cases squarely rested on Article III
considerations, as the analysis in Lujan and Lance confirms. SOUTER, J., DISSENTING HEIN V. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC. 551 U. S. ____ (2007) SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES NO. 06-157 JAY F. HEIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF
FAITH-BASED AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, et al., PETITIONERS v. FREEDOM FROM RELI- GION FOUNDATION, INC.,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states court of
appeals for the seventh circuit

															[June 25, 2007]

															   Justice Souter, with whom Justice
Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join, dissenting. Flast v. Cohen , 392 U. S. 83 , 102
(1968), held that plaintiffs with an Establishment Clause claim
could “demonstrate the necessary stake as taxpayers in the outcome
of the litigation to satisfy Article III requirements.” Here, the
controlling, plurality opinion declares that Flast does
not apply, but a search of that opinion for a suggestion that these
taxpayers have any less stake in the outcome than the taxpayers in Flast will come up empty: the plurality makes no such
finding, nor could it. Instead, the controlling opinion closes the
door on these taxpayers because the Executive Branch, and not the
Legislative Branch, caused their injury. I see no basis for this
distinction in either logic or precedent, and respectfully
dissent.

															I

															   We held in Flast , and
repeated just last Term, that the “ ‘injury’ alleged in
Establishment Clause challenges to federal spending” is “the very
‘extract[ion] and spen[ding]’ of ‘tax money’ in aid of religion.” DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno , 547 U. S. ___, ___
(2006) (slip op., at 13) (quoting Flast , supra ,
at 106; alterations in original). As the Court said in Flast , the importance of that type of injury has deep
historical roots going back to the ideal of religious liberty in
James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious
Assessments, that the government in a free society may not “force a
citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the
support of any one establishment” of religion. 2 Writings of James
Madison 183, 186 (G. Hunt ed. 1901) (hereinafter Madison), quoted
in Flast , supra , at 103. Madison thus translated
into practical terms the right of conscience described when he
wrote that “[t]he Religion … of every man must be left to the
conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of
every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” Madison 184; see
also Zelman v. Simmons-Harris , 536 U. S. 639 , 711, n.
22 (2002) (Souter, J., dissenting) (“As a historical matter, the
protection of liberty of conscience may well have been the central
objective served by the Establishment Clause”); Locke v. Davey , 540
U. S. 712 , 722 (2004) (“Since the founding of our country,
there have been popular uprisings against procuring taxpayer funds
to support church leaders, which was one of the hallmarks of an
‘established’ religion”); N. Feldman, Divided By God: America’s
Church-State Problem—And What We Should Do About It 48 (2005) (“The
advocates of a constitutional ban on establishment were concerned
about paying taxes to support religious purposes that their
consciences told them not to support”).

															   The right of conscience and the
expenditure of an identifiable three pence raised by taxes for the
support of a religious cause are therefore not to be split off from
one another. The three pence implicates the conscience, and the
injury from Government expenditures on religion is not accurately
classified with the “Psychic Injury” that results whenever a
congressional appropriation or executive expenditure raises hackles
of disagreement with the policy supported, see ante , at 8
(Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). Justice Stewart recognized
this in his concurring opinion in Flast , when he said that
“every taxpayer can claim a personal constitutional right not to be
taxed for the support of a religious institution,” and thus
distinguished the case from one in which a taxpayer sought only to
air a generalized grievance in federal court. 392 U. S., at
114.

															   Here, there is no dispute that taxpayer money
in identifiable amounts is funding conferences, and these are
alleged to have the purpose of promoting religion. Cf. Doremus v. Board of Ed. of Hawthorne , 342 U. S. 429 , 434
(1952). The taxpayers therefore seek not to “extend” Flast , ante , at 24 (plurality opinion), but
merely to apply it. When executive agencies spend identifiable sums
of tax money for religious purposes, no less than when Congress
authorizes the same thing, taxpayers suffer injury. And once we
recognize the injury as sufficient for Article III, there can be no
serious question about the other elements of the standing enquiry:
the injury is indisputably “traceable” to the spending, and “likely
to be redressed by” an injunction prohibiting it. Allen v. Wright , 468
U. S. 737 , 751 (1984); see also Cuno , supra ,
at ___ (slip op., at 13) (“[A]n injunction against the spending
would of course redress that injury”).

															   The plurality points to the separation of
powers to explain its distinction between legislative and executive
spending decisions, see ante , at 20–21, but there is no
difference on that point of view between a Judicial Branch review
of an executive decision and a judicial evaluation of a
congressional one. We owe respect to each of the other branches, no
more to the former than to the latter, and no one has suggested
that the Establishment Clause lacks applicability to executive uses
of money. It would surely violate the Establishment Clause for the
Department of Health and Human Services to draw on a general
appropriation to build a chapel for weekly church services (no less
than if a statute required it), and for good reason: if the
Executive could accomplish through the exercise of discretion
exactly what Congress cannot do through legislation, Establishment
Clause protection would melt away.[ Footnote 1 ]

															   So in Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U. S. 589 (1988), we recognized
the equivalence between a challenge to a congressional spending
bill and a claim that the Executive Branch was spending an
appropriation, each in violation of the Establishment Clause. We
held that the “claim that … funds [were] being used improperly by
individual grantees [was no] less a challenge to congressional
taxing and spending power simply because the funding authorized by
Congress has flowed through and been administered by the
Secretary,” and we added that “we have not questioned the standing
of taxpayer plaintiffs to raise Establishment Clause challenges,
even when their claims raised questions about the administratively
made grants.” Id., at 619.

															   The plurality points out that the statute in Bowen “expressly authorized and appropriated specific
funds for grantmaking” and “expressly contemplated that some of
those moneys might go to projects involving religious groups.” Ante , at 16. That is all true, but there is no reason to
think it should matter, and every indication in Bowen that
it did not. In Bowen we already had found the statute
valid on its face before we turned to the taxpayers’ as-applied
challenge, see 487 U. S., at 618, so the case cannot be read to
hold that taxpayers have standing only to claim that congressional
action, but not its implementation, violates the Establishment
Clause. Thus, after Bowen , the plurality’s distinction
between a “congressional mandate” on the one hand and “executive
discretion” on the other, ante , at 18, is at once
arbitrary and hard to manage: if the statute itself is
constitutional, all complaints must be about the exercise of
“executive discretion,” so there is no line to be drawn between Bowen and the case before us today.[ Footnote 2 ]

															II

															   While Flast standing to
assert the right of conscience is in a class by itself, it would be
a mistake to think that case is unique in recognizing standing in a
plaintiff without injury to flesh or purse. Cognizable harm takes
account of the nature of the interest protected, which is the
reason that “the constitutional component of standing doctrine
incorporates concepts concededly not susceptible of precise
definition,” leaving it impossible “to make application of the
constitutional standing requirement a mechanical exercise.” Allen , 468 U. S., at 751. The question, ultimately, has to
be whether the injury alleged is “too abstract, or otherwise not
appropriate, to be considered judicially cognizable.” Id., at 752.[ Footnote 3 ]

															   In the case of economic or
physical harms, of course, the “injury in fact” question is
straightforward. But once one strays from these obvious cases, the
enquiry can turn subtle. Are esthetic harms sufficient for Article
III standing? What about being forced to compete on an uneven
playing field based on race (without showing that an economic loss
resulted), or living in a racially gerrymandered electoral
district? These injuries are no more concrete than seeing one’s tax
dollars spent on religion, but we have recognized each one as
enough for standing. See Friends of Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc. , 528 U. S. 167 , 183
(2000) (esthetic injury); Northeastern Fla. Chapter, Associated
Gen. Contractors of America v. Jacksonville , 508 U. S. 656 , 666
(1993) (“[T]he ‘injury in fact’ is the inability to compete on an
equal footing in the bidding process, not the loss of a contract”); United States v. Hays , 515 U. S. 737 , 744–745
(1995) (living in a racially gerrymandered electoral district).
This is not to say that any sort of alleged injury will satisfy
Article III, but only that intangible harms must be evaluated case
by case.[ Footnote 4 ]

															    Thus, Flast speaks for this Court’s
recognition (shared by a majority of the Court today) that when the
Government spends money for religious purposes a taxpayer’s injury
is serious and concrete enough to be “judicially cognizable,” Allen , supra , at 752. The judgment of sufficient
injury takes account of the Madisonian relationship of tax money
and conscience, but it equally reflects the Founders’ pragmatic
“conviction that individual religious liberty could be achieved
best under a government which was stripped of all power to tax, to
support, or otherwise to assist any or all religions,” Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing , 330 U. S. 1 , 11 (1947),
and the realization continuing to the modern day that favoritism
for religion “ ‘sends the … message to … nonadherents “that
they are outsiders, not full members of the political
community,” ’ ” McCreary County v. American
Civil Liberties Union of Ky. , 545 U. S. 844 , 860
(2005) (quoting Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe , 530 U.
S. 290 , 309–310 (2000), in turn quoting Lynch v. Donnelly , 465 U. S. 668 , 688
(1984) (O’Connor, J., concurring); omissions in original).[ Footnote 5 ]

															   Because the taxpayers in this case have
alleged the type of injury this Court has seen as sufficient for
standing, I would affirm. Footnote 1 The plurality warns that a parade of
horribles would result if there were standing to challenge
executive action, because all federal activities are “ultimately
funded by some congressional appropriation.” Ante , at 20.
But even if there is Article III standing in all of the cases
posited by the plurality (and the Court of Appeals thought that at
least sometimes there is not, 433 F. 3d 989, 996 (CA7 2006)),
that does not mean taxpayers will prevail in such suits. If these
claims are frivolous on the merits, I fail to see the harm in
dismissing them for failure to state a claim instead of for lack of
jurisdiction. To the degree the claims are meritorious, fear that
there will be many of them does not provide a compelling reason,
much less a reason grounded in Article III, to keep them from being
heard. Footnote 2 Bowen also indicated that the
barrier to standing in Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc. , 454 U. S. 464 (1982) , was that the taxpayers challenged “an exercise of
executive authority pursuant to the Property Clause of Article IV,
§3.” Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U. S. 589 , 619 (1988). In Valley Forge , we had first discussed the executive rather
than legislative nature of the action at issue there and then,
“perhaps redundantly,” 454 U. S., at 480, pointed to the
distinction between the Property Clause and the Taxing and Spending
Clause. Although at the time Valley Forge might have been
taken to support the distinction the plurality draws today, Bowen said that Valley Forge rested on the
distinction between the Property Clause on the one hand and the
Taxing and Spending Clause on the other. See also Valley
Forge , supra , at 480, n. 17 (noting that the
transfer of property to a religious college involved no expenditure
of funds). Footnote 3 Although the plurality makes much of the fact
that the injury in this case is “generalized,” ante , at 8,
and shared with the “public-at-large,” ante , at 9, those
properties on their own do not strip a would-be plaintiff of
standing. See Federal Election Comm’n v. Akins , 524 U. S. 11 , 24
(1998) (“Often the fact that an interest is abstract and the fact
that it is widely shared go hand in hand. But their association is
not invariable, and where a harm is concrete, though widely shared,
the Court has found ‘injury in fact’ ”). Footnote 4 Outside the Establishment Clause context, as
the plurality points out, we have not found the injury to a
taxpayer when funds are improperly expended to suffice for
standing. See ante , at 19 (citing examples). Footnote 5 There will not always be competitors for the
funds who would make better plaintiffs (and indeed there appears to
be no such competitor here), so after accepting the importance of
the injury there is no reason to refuse standing as a prudential
matter.

Summary: In *Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.,* the Supreme Court ruled that federal taxpayers do not have standing to challenge an Executive Branch program that used federal funds in a way that allegedly violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court held that taxpayers must demonstrate a direct and personal injury, which was not established in this case, to have standing to sue.