On June 13, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Food & Drug Administration v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 23-235. Here is the opinion. It says that plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge an FDA decision to expand access to certain medications involving abortion.
Although this is not an election law case, it will affect election law, as Professor Derek Muller noted at electionlawblog. The decision says that just because a group must spend money if some administrative decision is not reversed, that doesn’t mean the challenger to the administration decision has standing. In Nevada, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is suing in federal court over the state’s determination that vice-presidential candidates must be listed on the independent presidential petition. A Democratic Party-allied interest group is trying to intervene in the case against Kennedy, on the grounds that if Kennedy gets on the ballot, the interest group will need to spend more money campaigning for President Joe Biden.
But the U.S. Supreme Court said in FDA v AHM, “The medical associations respond that under Hevens Realty Corp. v Coleman, standing exists when an organization diverts its resources in response to a defendant’s actions. That is incorrect. Indeed, that theory would mean that all the organizations in America would have standing to challenge almost every federal policy that they dislike, provided they spend a single dollar opposing those policies. Havens does not support such an expansive theory of standing.
Democratic Party groups this year alone have taken legal action to injure the ballot access of various minor party and independent candidates in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, and perhaps some other states.