Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.

(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 2006 1

Syllabus

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

HEIN, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF FAITH-
BASED AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVES, ET AL. v.
FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.,
ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT

No. 06–157. Argued February 28, 2007—Decided June 25, 2007
The President, by executive orders, created a White House office and
several centers within federal agencies to ensure that faith-based
community groups are eligible to compete for federal financial sup-
port. No congressional legislation specifically authorized these enti-
ties, which were created entirely within the Executive Branch, nor
has Congress enacted any law specifically appropriating money to
their activities, which are funded through general Executive Branch
appropriations. Respondents, an organization opposed to Govern-
ment endorsement of religion and three of its members, brought this
suit alleging that petitioners, the directors of the federal offices, vio-
lated the Establishment Clause by organizing conferences that were
designed to promote, and had the effect of promoting, religious com-
munity groups over secular ones. The only asserted basis for stand-
ing was that the individual respondents are federal taxpayers op-
posed to Executive Branch use of congressional appropriations for
these conferences. The District Court dismissed the claims for lack of
standing, concluding that under Flast v. Cohen, 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. Because petitioners acted on
the President’s behalf and were not charged with administering a
congressional program, the court held that the challenged activities
did not authorize taxpayer standing under Flast. The Seventh Cir-
cuit reversed, reading Flast as granting federal taxpayers standing to
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Syllabus

challenge Executive Branch programs on Establishment Clause
grounds so long as the activities are financed by a congressional ap-
propriation, even where there is no statutory program and the funds
are from appropriations for general administrative expenses. Accord-
ing to the court, a taxpayer has standing to challenge anything done
by a federal agency so long as the marginal or incremental cost to the
public of the alleged Establishment Clause violation is greater than
zero.
Held: The judgment is reversed.
433 F. 3d 989, reversed.
JUSTICE ALITO, joined by THE CHIEF JUSTICE and JUSTICE KENNEDY,
concluded that because the Seventh Circuit’s broad reading of Flast is
incorrect, respondents lack standing. Pp. 6–25.
1. Federal-court jurisdiction is limited to actual “Cases” and “Con-
troversies.” U. S. Const., Art. III. A controlling factor in the defini-
tion of such a case or controversy is standing, ASARCO Inc. v.
Kadish, 490 U. S. 605, 613, the requisite elements of which are well
established: “A plaintiff must allege personal injury fairly traceable
to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be re-
dressed by the requested relief.” Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737, 751.
Pp. 6–8.
2. Generally, a federal taxpayer’s interest in seeing that Treasury
funds are spent in accordance with the Constitution is too attenuated
to give rise to the kind of redressable “personal injury” required for
Article III standing. See, e.g., Frothingham v. Mellon, decided with
Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 447, 485–486. Pp. 8–10.
3. In Flast, the Court carved out a narrow exception to the general
constitutional prohibition against taxpayer standing. The taxpayer-
plaintiff there alleged that the distribution of federal funds to reli-
gious schools under a federal statute violated the Establishment
Clause. The Court set out a two-part test for determining standing:
“First, . . . a taxpayer will be a proper party to allege the unconstitu-
tionality only of exercises of congressional power under the taxing
and spending clause of Art. I, §8. . . . Secondly, 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 be-
yond the powers delegated to Congress by Art. I, §8.” 392 U. S., at
102–103. The Court then held that the particular taxpayer had satis-
fied both prongs of the test. Id., at 103–104. Pp. 11–12.
4. Respondents’ broad reading of the Flast exception to cover any
expenditure of Government funds in violation of the Establishment
Clause fails to observe “the rigor with which the Flast exception to
the Frothingham principle ought to be applied.” Valley Forge Chris-
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 3

Syllabus

tian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State,
Inc., 454 U. S. 464, 481. Given that the alleged Establishment
Clause violation in Flast was funded by a specific congressional ap-
propriation and was undertaken pursuant to an express congres-
sional 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.” 392 U. S., at 102.
“Their constitutional challenge [was] made to an exercise by Con-
gress of its power under Art. I, §8, to spend for the general welfare.”
Id., at 103. But Flast “limited taxpayer standing to challenges di-
rected ‘only [at] exercises of congressional power’ ” under the Taxing
and Spending Clause. Valley Forge, supra, at 479. Pp. 12–13.
5. The link between congressional action and constitutional viola-
tion that supported taxpayer standing in Flast is missing here. Re-
spondents neither challenge any specific congressional action or ap-
propriation nor ask the Court to invalidate any congressional
enactment or legislatively created program as unconstitutional. That
is because the expenditures at issue were not made pursuant to any
Act of Congress, but under general appropriations to the Executive
Branch to fund day-to-day activities. These appropriations did not
expressly authorize, direct, or even mention the expenditures in ques-
tion, which resulted from executive discretion, not congressional ac-
tion. The Court has never found taxpayer standing under such cir-
cumstances. Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589, 619–620,
distinguished. Pp. 13–18.
6. Respondents argue to no avail that distinguishing between
money spent pursuant to congressional mandate and expenditures
made in the course of executive discretion is arbitrary because the in-
jury to taxpayers in both situations is the same as that targeted by
the Establishment Clause and Flast—the expenditure for the support
of religion of funds exacted from taxpayers. But Flast focused on
congressional action, and the invitation to extend its holding to en-
compass discretionary Executive Branch expenditures must be de-
clined. The Court has repeatedly emphasized that the Flast excep-
tion has a “narrow application,” DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, 547
U. S. ___, ___, that only “slightly lowered” the bar on taxpayer stand-
ing, United States v. Richardson, 418 U. S. 166, 173, and that must
be applied with “rigor,” Valley Forge, supra, at 481. Pp. 18–19.
7. Also rejected is respondents’ argument that Executive Branch
expenditures in support of religion are no different from legislative
extractions. Flast itself rejected this equivalence. 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
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Syllabus

action—be it a conference, proclamation, or speech—to Establish-
ment Clause challenge by any taxpayer in federal court. Respon-
dents’ proposed rule would also raise serious separation-of-powers
concerns, enlisting the federal courts to superintend, at the behest of
any federal taxpayer, the speeches, statements, and myriad daily ac-
tivities of the President, his staff, and other Executive Branch offi-
cials. Pp. 19–21.
8. Both the Seventh Circuit and respondents implicitly recognize
that unqualified federal taxpayer standing to assert Establishment
Clause claims would go too far, but neither has identified a workable
limitation. Taking the Circuit’s zero-marginal-cost test literally—i.e.,
that any marginal cost greater than zero suffices—taxpayers might
well have standing to challenge some (and perhaps many) speeches
by Government officials. At a minimum, that approach would create
difficult and uncomfortable line-drawing problems. Respondents’
proposal to require an expenditure to be fairly traceable to the con-
duct alleged to violate the Establishment Clause, so that challenges
to the content of any particular speech would be screened out, is too
vague and ill-defined to be accepted. Pp. 21–23.
9. None of the parade of horribles respondents claim could occur if
Flast is not extended to discretionary Executive Branch expenditures
has happened. In the unlikely event any do take place, Congress can
quickly step in. And respondents make no effort to show that these
improbable abuses could not be challenged in federal court by plain-
tiffs possessed of standing based on grounds other than their tax-
payer status. Pp. 23–24.
10. This case does not require the Court to reconsider Flast. The
Seventh Circuit did not apply Flast; it extended it. Valley Forge
Christian Academy illustrates that a necessary concomitant of stare
decisis is that a precedent is not always expanded to the limit of its
logic. That is the approach taken here. Flast is neither extended nor
overruled. It is simply left as it was. Pp. 24–25.
JUSTICE SCALIA, joined by JUSTICE THOMAS, concurred in the
Court’s judgment, concluding that Flast v. Cohen, 392 U. S. 83,
should be overruled as wholly irreconcilable with the Article III re-
strictions on federal-court jurisdiction that are embodied in the
standing doctrine. Pp. 1–21.
1. The Court’s taxpayer-standing cases involving Establishment
Clause challenges to government expenditures are notoriously incon-
sistent because they have inconsistently described the relevant “in-
jury in fact” that Article III requires. Some cases have focused on the
financial effect on the taxpayer’s wallet, whereas Flast and the cases
that follow its teaching have emphasized the mental displeasure the
taxpayer suffers when his funds are extracted and spent in aid of re-
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 5

Syllabus

ligion. There are only two logical routes available with respect to
taxpayer standing. If the mental displeasure created by Establish-
ment Clause violations is concrete and particularized enough to con-
stitute an Article III “injury in fact,” then Flast should be applied to
(at a minimum) all challenges to government expenditures allegedly
violating constitutional provisions that specifically limit the taxing
and spending power; if not, Flast should be overturned. Pp. 2–12.
2. Today’s plurality avails itself of neither principled option, in-
stead accepting the Government’s submission that Flast should be
limited to challenges to expenditures that are expressly authorized or
mandated by specific congressional enactment. However, the plural-
ity gives no explanation as to why the factual differences between
this case and Flast are material. (Whether the challenged govern-
ment expenditure is expressly allocated by a specific congressional
enactment is not relevant to the Article III criteria of injury in fact,
traceability, and redressability.) Yet the plurality is also unwilling to
acknowledge that Flast erred by relying on purely mental injury.
Pp. 12–14.
3. Respondents’ legal position is no more coherent than the plural-
ity’s. They refuse to admit that their argument logically implies that
every expenditure of tax revenues that is alleged to violate the Estab-
lishment Clause is subject to suit under Flast. Of course, that posi-
tion finds no support in this Court’s precedents or this Nation’s his-
tory. Pp. 14–16.
4. A taxpayer’s purely psychological disapproval that his funds
are being spent in an allegedly unlawful manner is never sufficiently
concrete and particularized to support Article III standing. See
Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 573–574. Although
overruling precedents is a serious undertaking, stare decisis should
not prevent the Court from doing so here. Flast was inconsistent
with the cases that came before it and undervalued the separation-of-
powers function of standing. Its lack of a logical theoretical under-
pinning has rendered the Court’s taxpayer-standing doctrine so in-
comprehensible that appellate judges do not know what to make of it.
The case has engendered no reliance interests. Few cases less war-
rant stare decisis effect. It is past time to overturn Flast. Pp. 17–21.

ALITO, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an
opinion, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, J., joined. KENNEDY, J.,
filed a concurring opinion. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring in the
judgment, in which THOMAS, J., joined. SOUTER, J., filed a dissenting
opinion, in which STEVENS, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

Opinion of ALITO, J.

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to
notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash-
ington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order
that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.

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 confer-
ences held as part of the President’s Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives program violated the Establish-
ment Clause of the First Amendment because, among
other things, President Bush and former Secretary of
Education Paige gave speeches that used “religious im-
agery” 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 Con-
stitution 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 expendi-
ture causes an individual federal taxpayer any measurable
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 tax-
payer 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 pre-
sent 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 creat-
ing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Commu-
nity Initiatives within the Executive Office of the Presi-
dent. 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 com-
pete on a level playing field, so long as they achieve valid
public purposes” and adhere to “the bedrock principles of
pluralism, nondiscrimination, evenhandedness, and neu-
trality.” Ibid. The office was specifically charged with the
task of eliminating unnecessary bureaucratic, legislative,
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

and regulatory barriers that could impede such organiza-
tions’ 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 Com-
munity Initiatives within several federal agencies and
departments.1 These centers were given the job of ensur-
ing 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 assis-
tance 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 pro-
hibited from discriminating against beneficiaries or poten-
tial 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 De-
partment Centers. Rather, they were “created entirely
within the executive branch . . . by Presidential executive
order.” Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Chao,

——————
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).
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 Develop-
ment’s Center is funded through that Department’s salaries
and expenses account. See Government Accountability
Office, Faith-Based and Community Initiative: Improve-
ments 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 Founda-
tion, 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 Estab-
lishment 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 effective-
ness of faith-based social services.” Id., ¶32, App. to Pet.
for Cert. 73a. Respondents further alleged that the con-
tent of these conferences sent a message to religious be-
lievers “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
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 indi-
vidual 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 peti-
tioners 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 con-
cluded 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). Be-
cause 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 pro-
gram,” 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
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

statutory program” enacted by Congress and the funds are
“from appropriations for the general administrative ex-
penses, 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 taxpay-
ing 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 stand-
ing 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 obvi-
ous tension which has evolved in this area of jurispru-
dence . . . 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 “Contro-
versies,” and “ ‘Article III standing . . . enforces the Consti-
tution’s case-or-controversy requirement.’ ” DaimlerChrys-
ler Corp. v. Cuno, 547 U. S. ___, ___ (2006) (slip op., at 6)
(quoting Elk Grove Unified School Dist. v. Newdow, 542
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 jurisdic-
tion to actual cases or controversies.’ ” Raines v. Byrd, 521
U. S. 811, 818 (1997) (quoting Simon v. Eastern Ky. Wel-
fare 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 re-
quested 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 tax-
payers 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 constitu-
tionality 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 repug-
nant to the Constitution. Rather, federal courts sit “solely,
to decide on the rights of individuals,” Marbury v. Madi-
son, 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
8 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 unconstitu-
tional. The question may be considered only when the
justification for some direct injury suffered or threat-
ened, 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 re-
sult of its enforcement, and not merely that he suffers
in some indefinite way in common with people gener-
ally.” Frothingham v. Mellon, decided with Massa-
chusetts 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 redress-
able “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 eco-
nomic 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 en-
suring 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 chil-
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Opinion of ALITO, J.

dren’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 con-
cluded 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 pro-
duce additional taxation to be imposed upon a vast
number of taxpayers, the extent of whose several li-
ability is indefinite and constantly changing, is essen-
tially a matter of public and not of individual con-
cern.” Id., at 487.
Because the interests of the taxpayer are, in essence,
the interests of the public-at-large, deciding a constitu-
tional claim based solely on taxpayer standing “would be[,]
not to decide a judicial controversy, but to assume a posi-
tion 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
10 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 princi-
ple that
“a plaintiff raising only a generally available griev-
ance 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).2
——————
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 tax-
payer ‘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]eneral-
ized 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 constitu-
tional 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
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 11

Opinion of ALITO, J.

C
In Flast, the Court carved out a narrow exception to the
general constitutional prohibition against taxpayer stand-
ing. The taxpayer-plaintiff in that case challenged the
distribution of federal funds to religious schools under the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, alleg-
ing 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 be-
tween that status and the type of legislative enact-
ment attacked. Thus, a taxpayer will be a proper
party to allege the unconstitutionality only of exer-
cises 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 expendi-
ture of tax funds in the administration of an essen-
tially regulatory statute. . . . Secondly, the taxpayer
must establish a nexus between that status and the
precise nature of the constitutional infringement al-
leged. 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 “constitu-
tional challenge [was] made to an exercise by Congress of

——————
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”).
12 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

its power under Art. I, §8, to spend for the general wel-
fare,” and she alleged a violation of the Establishment
Clause, which “operates as a specific constitutional limita-
tion 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 con-
gressional appropriation. The plaintiff in that case chal-
lenged 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 dis-
bursement 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 spe-
cial 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, recipi-
ent agencies were required to ensure that “library re-
sources, textbooks, and other instructional materials”
funded through the grants “be provided on an equitable
basis for the use of children and teachers in private ele-
mentary and secondary schools,” §203(a)(3)(B), id., at 37.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 13

Opinion of ALITO, J.

The expenditures challenged in Flast, then, were funded
by a specific congressional appropriation and were dis-
bursed to private schools (including religiously affiliated
schools) pursuant to a direct and unambiguous congres-
sional mandate.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 unconstitu-
tional and void.’ ” Flast, 392 U. S., at 90. And the judg-
ment 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 re-
specting 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 appropria-
tion and was undertaken pursuant to an express congres-
sional mandate, the Court concluded that the taxpayer-
plaintiffs had established the requisite “logical link be-
tween [their taxpayer] status and the type of legislative
enactment attacked.” In the Court’s words, “[t]heir consti-
tutional 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

——————
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 exam-
ple, 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 Non-
public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1965–66, p. 7 (1968). Con-
gress surely understood that much of the aid mandated by the statute
would find its way to religious schools.
14 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

Taxing and Spending Clause. Valley Forge, 454 U. S., at
479.
B
The link between congressional action and constitu-
tional 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 legis-
latively created program as unconstitutional. That is
because the expenditures at issue here were not made
pursuant to any Act of Congress. Rather, Congress pro-
vided general appropriations to the Executive Branch to
fund its day-to-day activities.4 These appropriations did
not expressly authorize, direct, or even mention the ex-
penditures of which respondents complain. Those expen-
ditures resulted from executive discretion, not congres-
sional 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 Prop-
erty and Administrative Services Act of 1949, which per-
mitted 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] exer-

——————
4 See, e.g., 119 Stat. 2472 (appropriating $53,830,000 “to be available

for allocation within the Executive Office of the President”).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 15

Opinion of ALITO, J.

cises of congressional power’ ” under the Taxing and
Spending Clause. 454 U. S., at 479 (quoting Flast, supra,
at 102).5
Similarly, in Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the
War, 418 U. S. 208 (1974), the taxpayer-plaintiffs con-
tended that the Incompatibility Clause of Article I prohib-
ited Members of Congress from holding commissions in
the Armed Forces Reserve. We held that these plaintiffs
lacked standing under Flast because they “did not chal-
lenge an enactment under Art. I, §8, but rather the action
of the Executive Branch in permitting Members of Con-
gress 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 re-
servists, 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 re-
quire the Executive to supply a more detailed report of the
expenditures of that agency”).
Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589 (1988), on which re-
spondents rely heavily, is not to the contrary. In that
——————
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 congres-
sional action.
16 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 pri-
vate community service groups including religious organi-
zations. 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 Execu-
tive Branch official. Id., at 620, 619.
But the key to that conclusion was the Court’s recogni-
tion that AFLA was “at heart a program of disbursement
of funds pursuant to Congress’ taxing and spending pow-
ers,” and that the plaintiffs’ claims “call[ed] into question
how the funds authorized by Congress [were] being dis-
bursed 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 governmen-
tal and religious institutions contemplated by the
AFLA”).6 Unlike this case, Kendrick involved a “program
——————
6 For example, the statute noted that the problems of adolescent pre-

marital 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).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 17

Opinion of ALITO, J.

of disbursement of funds pursuant to Congress’ taxing and
spending powers” that “Congress had created,” “author-
ized,” and “mandate[d].” Id., at 619–620.
Respondents attempt to paint their lawsuit as a Ken-
drick-style as-applied challenge, but this effort is unavail-
ing 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 un-
derlying 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 appropria-
tions, should be viewed any differently.7
——————
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.
18 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

In short, this case falls outside the “the narrow excep-
tion” that Flast “created to the general rule against tax-
payer 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 discre-
tion, 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 pro-
mote 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 Govern-
ment as a whole, regardless of which branch is at work in
——————
307, 319 (1975)); see also TVA v. Hill, 437 U. S. 153, 191 (1978) (“Ex-
pressions of committees dealing with requests for appropriations
cannot be equated with statutes enacted by Congress”).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 19

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 crea-
tion, 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 provi-
sion 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.
20 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

2
While respondents argue that Executive Branch expen-
ditures in support of religion are no different from legisla-
tive 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 regula-
tory statute.” 392 U. S., at 102.
Because almost all Executive Branch activity is ulti-
mately funded by some congressional appropriation, ex-
tending the Flast exception to purely executive expendi-
tures 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 con-
cerns. As we have recognized, Flast itself gave too little
weight to these concerns. By framing the standing ques-
tion solely in terms of whether the dispute would be pre-
sented 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
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 21

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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’ posi-
tion, if adopted, would repeat and compound this mistake.
The constitutional requirements for federal-court juris-
diction—including the standing requirements and Article
III—“are an essential ingredient of separation and equili-
bration of powers.” Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Envi-
ronment, 523 U. S. 83, 101 (1998). “Relaxation of standing
requirements is directly related to the expansion of judi-
cial power,” and lowering the taxpayer standing bar to
permit challenges of purely executive actions “would sig-
nificantly alter the allocation of power at the national
level, with a shift away from a democratic form of govern-
ment.” Richardson, 418 U. S., at 188 (Powell, J., concur-
ring). 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 ac-
tion,’ ” 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
22 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

assert Establishment Clause claims would go too far, but
neither the Court of Appeals nor respondents has identi-
fied 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 stand-
ing to challenge a President’s favorable reference to relig-
ion 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 Ap-
peals’ 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 proc-
lamations 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 uncom-
fortable 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 Cabi-
net officer attends or speaks at a prayer breakfast and
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 23

Opinion of ALITO, J.

that the time spent was time that would have otherwise
been spent on secular work.
Respondents take a somewhat different approach, con-
tending 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 Establish-
ment 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 Presi-
dential address are any less “traceable” than the expenses
related to the Executive Branch statements and confer-
ences 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 unconstitu-
tional 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 compara-
tively minute and indeterminable . . . and constantly
changing.” 262 U. S., at 487.
24 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

Opinion of ALITO, J.

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 gen-
eral 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 con-
comitant 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 dis-
pute either (1) that Flast itself spoke in terms of “legisla-
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 25

Opinion of ALITO, J.

tive 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 resolv-
ing 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.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

KENNEDY, J., concurring

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 Constitu-
tion’s special concern that freedom of conscience not be
compromised by government taxing and spending in sup-
port 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 reli-
gious 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
2 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

KENNEDY, J., concurring

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 gen-
eral 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 crea-
tive responses to address governmental concerns. The
exchange of ideas between and among the State and Fed-
eral Governments and their manifold, diverse constituen-
cies sustains a free society. Permitting any and all tax-
payers 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 innumer-
able 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 manage-
ment 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 interven-
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 3

KENNEDY, J., concurring

tion 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 in-
volving 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 abil-
ity 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 separa-
tion-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 Execu-
tive 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.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 expen-
diture 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 jurisdic-
tion that this Court has repeatedly confirmed are embod-
ied in the doctrine of standing.
2 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

I
A
There is a simple reason why our taxpayer-standing
cases involving Establishment Clause challenges to gov-
ernment 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 defen-
dant’s alleged unlawful conduct and (3) likely to be re-
dressed by a favorable decision. See Lujan v. Defenders of
Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560–561 (1992). We have alter-
nately 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 govern-
ment 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 con-
sists 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 redressabil-
ity 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
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 3

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 gen-
eralized grievance that the law is being violated. As we
reaffirmed unanimously just this Term: “ ‘We have consis-
tently held that a plaintiff raising only a generally avail-
able 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 contro-
versy.’ ” 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 cogni-
zable under Article III.
B
1
Two pre-Flast cases are of critical importance. In Froth-
ingham v. Mellon, decided with Massachusetts v. Mellon,
262 U. S. 447 (1923), the taxpayer challenged the constitu-
tionality of the Maternity Act of 1921, alleging in part that
4 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

the federal funding provided by the Act was not author-
ized 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 suf-
fers in some indefinite way in common with people gener-
ally,” id., at 488. The Court was thus describing the
traceability and redressability problems with Wallet In-
jury, and rejecting Psychic Injury as a generalized griev-
ance 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,
433.1 Relying extensively on Frothingham, the Court
denied standing. After first emphasizing that there was
no allegation that the Bible reading increased the plain-
tiffs’ 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 “griev-
——————
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).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 5

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

ance which [the plaintiffs] sought to litigate here is not a
direct dollars-and-cents injury but is a religious differ-
ence,” 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 dissent-
ing 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” neces-
sary 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 un-
constitutionality only of exercises of congressional
power under the taxing and spending clause of Art. I,
6 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

§8, of the Constitution. It will not be sufficient to al-
lege an incidental expenditure of tax funds in the ad-
ministration 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 en-
actment is generally beyond the powers delegated to Con-
gress by Art. I, §8.” Id., at 102–103. The Court held that
the Establishment Clause was the type of specific limita-
tion 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 exclu-
sively upon Madison’s famous Memorial and Remon-
strance 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, describ-
ing 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 legisla-
tive power.” 392 U. S., at 106.
But that created a problem: If the taxpayers in Flast
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 7

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 dis-
qualify 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 administra-
tion 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, trace-
able, 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 govern-
ment’s giving money to parochial schools had standing to
sue, so should the taxpayers who disapproved of the gov-
ernment’s paying public-school teachers to read the Bible.2
——————
2 There is a natural impulse to respond that the portion of the teach-

ers’ 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
8 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 bear-
ing upon the concreteness or particularity of the Psychic
Injury, see Part III, infra, but the existence of that rela-
tionship does not even genuinely distinguish Flast from
Frothingham. It is impossible to maintain that the Estab-
lishment 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. Froth-
ingham relied. See, e.g., Brief for Appellant in Frothing-
ham, 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.
——————
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).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 9

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

Flast was dismissively and unpersuasively distin-
guished 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 Govern-
ment 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 reli-
gious 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 suf-
fered by them as a consequence of the alleged consti-
tutional error, other than the psychological conse-
quence presumably produced by observation of
10 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

conduct with which one disagrees. That is not an in-
jury sufficient to confer standing under Art. III, even
though the disagreement is phrased in constitutional
terms. It is evident that respondents are firmly com-
mitted 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 shame-
ful tradition of our taxpayer-standing cases, the Court’s
candor about the inadequacy of Psychic Injury was com-
bined 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 chal-
lenges 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,
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 11

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 Ken-
drick’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 Es-
tablishment 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 injunc-
tion against the spending would of course redress that
injury, regardless of whether lawmakers would dis-
pose 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 consis-
tent 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
12 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 Gen-
eral’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, ex-
cept 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 deci-
sionmaking, 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 cor-
rectly 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 chal-
lenged government expenditure is expressly allocated by a
specific congressional enactment has absolutely no rele-
vance to the Article III criteria of injury in fact, traceabil-
ity, 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
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 13

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

cases. Despite the lack of acknowledgment, however, that
is the only plausible explanation for the plurality’s indif-
ference to whether the “distinguishing” fact is legally
material, and for its determination to limit Flast to its
“ ‘resul[t],’ ” ante, at 19.3 Why, then, pick a distinguishing
fact that may breathe life into Flast in future cases, pre-
serving 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 de-
monstrably absurd results. For example, the plurality
would deny standing to a taxpayer challenging the Presi-
dent’s disbursement to a religious organization of a dis-
crete appropriation that Congress had not explicitly allo-
cated 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 man-
ner. See ante, at 17, n. 7 (holding that nonstatutory ear-
marks 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 expendi-

——————
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 sepa-
ration-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.
14 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

tures have the added vice of violating congressional re-
strictions. If, for example, Congress instructs the Presi-
dent 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 14. In-
deed, taking the plurality at its word, Congress could
insulate the President from all Flast-based suits by codify-
ing the truism that no appropriation can be spent by the
Executive Branch in a manner that violates the Estab-
lishment 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 Ken-
drick. 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 rele-
vant 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 unconstitu-
tional 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 discre-
tionary Executive Branch expenditure” (emphasis added)).
B
While I have been critical of the Members of the plural-
ity, I by no means wish to give the impression that re-
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 15

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

spondents’ legal position is any more coherent. Respon-
dents argue that Flast did not turn on whether Congress
has expressly allocated the funds to the allegedly uncon-
stitutional use, and their case plainly rests on Psychic
Injury. They repeatedly emphasize that the injury in
Flast was merely the governmental extraction and spend-
ing 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 dis-
cussed, 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 at-
tenuated. 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 teach-
ers to read the Bible, and which would have been reme-
died by prohibition of that expenditure.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
——————
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 proba-
bly greater than three pence. See n. 2, supra.
16 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 respon-
dents 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 disin-
genuous distinctions that hold the sure promise of engen-
dering further meaningless and disingenuous distinctions
in the future. The rule of law is ill served by forcing law-
yers 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.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 17

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 “con-
sisten[t]” view of this Court has been that “a plaintiff
raising only a generally available grievance about gov-
ernment—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 reason-
ing 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. Re-
servists Comm. to Stop the War, 418 U. S. 208 (1974)
(rejecting challenge to Members of Congress holding com-
missions 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).5
——————
5 It is true that this Court has occasionally in dicta described the

prohibition on generalized grievances as merely a prudential bar. But
18 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

Nor does Flast’s limitation on Psychic Injury—the limi-
tation 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 tax-
payer’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 griev-
ances 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 re-
quirement’s importance. Flast was explicitly and errone-
ously premised on the idea that Article III standing does
not perform a crucial separation-of-powers function:

——————
the fountainhead of this dicta, Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490 (1975),
supported its statement only by naked citation of Schlesinger, Richard-
son, and Lévitt. 422 U. S., at 499. And those cases squarely rested on
Article III considerations, as the analysis in Lujan and Lance confirms.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 19

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

“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 im-
proper judicial interference in areas committed to
other branches of the Federal Government. Such
problems arise, if at all, only from the substantive is-
sues the individual seeks to have adjudicated. Thus,
in terms of Article III limitations on federal court ju-
risdiction, 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 his-
torically 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 distinc-
tion 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 sys-
tem of separated powers has been repudiated:
“To permit a complainant who has no concrete in-
jury to require a court to rule on important constitu-
tional 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.
20 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 sepa-
ration 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 dis-
reputable as Flast, is nevertheless a serious undertaking,
and I understand the impulse to take a minimalist ap-
proach. But laying just claim to be honoring stare decisis
requires more than beating Flast to a pulp and then send-
ing 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 cor-
rect, 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 (Easter-
brook, J., concurring in denial of rehearing en banc) (de-
scribing our cases as “arbitrary,” “illogical,” and lacking in
“comprehensiveness and rationality”). We had an oppor-
tunity today to erase this blot on our jurisprudence, but
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 21

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment

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 ren-
dered our taxpayer-standing doctrine such a jurispruden-
tial 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.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

SOUTER, J., dissenting

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 plain-
tiffs with an Establishment Clause claim could “demon-
strate 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 plu-
rality 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 distinc-
tion 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
2 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SOUTER, J., dissenting

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 estab-
lishment” 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 practi-
cal 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 Establish-
ment Clause”); Locke v. Davey, 540 U. S. 712, 722 (2004)
(“Since the founding of our country, there have been popu-
lar 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 identi-
fiable 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 execu-
tive expenditure raises hackles of disagreement with the
policy supported, see ante, at 8 (SCALIA, J., concurring in
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 3

SOUTER, J., dissenting

judgment). Justice Stewart recognized this in his concur-
ring 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 distin-
guished 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 identi-
fiable 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 “trace-
able” 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 ex-
plain 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 appro-
priation to build a chapel for weekly church services (no
4 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SOUTER, J., dissenting

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 legis-
lation, Establishment Clause protection would melt away.1
So in Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U. S. 589 (1988), we rec-
ognized the equivalence between a challenge to a congres-
sional 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 ques-
tioned the standing of taxpayer plaintiffs to raise Estab-
lishment 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 “ex-
pressly 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
——————
1 The plurality warns that a parade of horribles would result if there

were standing to challenge executive action, because all federal activi-
ties 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 some-
times 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.
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 5

SOUTER, J., dissenting

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 implementa-
tion, violates the Establishment Clause. Thus, after Bo-
wen, 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 com-
plaints must be about the exercise of “executive discre-
tion,” so there is no line to be drawn between Bowen and
the case before us today.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
——————
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).
6 HEIN v. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC.

SOUTER, J., dissenting

exercise.” Allen, 468 U. S., at 751. The question, ulti-
mately, has to be whether the injury alleged is “too ab-
stract, or otherwise not appropriate, to be considered
judicially cognizable.” Id., at 752.3
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 stand-
ing? 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 gerryman-
dered electoral district? These injuries are no more con-
crete 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 evalu-
ated case by case.4
Thus, Flast speaks for this Court’s recognition (shared
——————
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 plain-
tiff 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’ ”).
4 Outside the Establishment Clause context, as the plurality points

out, we have not found the injury to a taxpayer when funds are improp-
erly expended to suffice for standing. See ante, at 19 (citing examples).
 Cite as: 551 U. S. ____ (2007) 7

SOUTER, J., dissenting

by a majority of the Court today) that when the Govern-
ment 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 suffi-
cient 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 continu-
ing to the modern day that favoritism for religion “ ‘sends
the . . . message to . . . nonadherents “that they are outsid-
ers, 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).5
Because the taxpayers in this case have alleged the type
of injury this Court has seen as sufficient for standing, I
would affirm.

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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.