Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1982

Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc.

454 U.S. 464 | 102 S. Ct. 752 | 70 L. Ed. 2d 700 | 1982 U.S. LEXIS 22 | 50 U.S.L.W. 4103

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Takeaway

In short, this case sharply limited standing: neither taxpayer status nor a sincere citizen’s objection to an alleged Establishment Clause violation permits suit without a concrete, personal injury.

Background

Under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, the federal government may transfer surplus property to nonprofit educational institutions at a discount reflecting the expected public benefit. The Act rests on Congress’s Article IV Property Clause authority. In 1976, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare transferred a 77-acre portion of the former Valley Forge General Hospital to Valley Forge Christian College, a religious college affiliated with the Assemblies of God. The property had an appraised value of $577,500, but the college received it without payment because HEW applied a 100% public-benefit allowance.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State and four of its employees sued, asserting that the free transfer of federal property to a religious college violated the Establishment Clause. They alleged injury as federal taxpayers and sought to invalidate the transfer. The District Court granted summary judgment for the college, holding that the plaintiffs alleged no concrete injury beyond a generalized taxpayer grievance.

The Third Circuit agreed that the plaintiffs lacked taxpayer standing under Flast v. Cohen because the transfer was authorized under the Property Clause rather than Congress’s taxing-and-spending power. But it nevertheless held that they had standing as citizens asserting a personal right to a government that does not establish religion. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and reversed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the plaintiffs had standing as federal taxpayers to challenge HEW’s transfer of surplus federal property to a religious college under the Establishment Clause.

Holding

No. The plaintiffs did not satisfy the narrow taxpayer-standing exception recognized in Flast v. Cohen.

Reasoning

Article III requires an actual or threatened personal injury that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct and likely to be redressed by judicial relief. Ordinarily, a federal taxpayer’s interest in the Treasury is too remote and generalized to qualify as such an injury. Frothingham v. Mellon therefore bars suits resting only on the claim that the government has spent public resources unlawfully.

Flast created a limited exception for taxpayers challenging a congressional exercise of the Article I taxing-and-spending power that allegedly violates a specific constitutional limitation on that power, such as the Establishment Clause. The exception does not authorize a taxpayer to challenge every federal action that may involve public resources.

The challenged transfer failed Flast’s first requirement for two independent reasons. The immediate target of the complaint was HEW’s executive decision to convey a particular parcel, rather than a congressional enactment. And the statute authorizing the conveyance was an exercise of Congress’s Property Clause power under Article IV, not its Article I power to tax and spend.

The Court also noted that any claimed effect on the plaintiffs’ tax burden was especially speculative. The land and hospital facilities had been acquired decades before the transfer, and the plaintiffs did not show that invalidating this conveyance would increase federal receipts or otherwise produce a tangible financial benefit to them.

Issue #2

Whether the plaintiffs had Article III standing as citizens or “separationists” based on their objection to an alleged Establishment Clause violation.

Holding

No. An ideological or psychological objection to governmental conduct alleged to violate the Constitution is not a concrete, personal injury sufficient for Article III standing.

Reasoning

Standing is not established merely by asserting a personal interest in having the government obey the Constitution. Claims of that kind are generalized grievances shared by all citizens and would transform federal courts into forums for broad oversight of governmental legality rather than tribunals resolving concrete disputes.

The Establishment Clause does not create a special form of citizen standing. The Court rejected the Third Circuit’s suggestion that the perceived importance or fundamental character of an Establishment Clause claim could relax Article III’s injury requirement. Standing focuses on the plaintiff’s injury, not on the significance of the constitutional issue the plaintiff wishes to litigate.

The plaintiffs identified no direct exposure to, or burden from, the transfer beyond their disagreement with it. They lived in Maryland and Virginia, learned of the Pennsylvania conveyance through a news release, and did not allege a personal economic, religious, or other non-economic injury comparable to that of students subjected to religious exercises in public schools.

The Court declined to create standing simply because the lower court believed there might otherwise be no better plaintiff to enforce the Establishment Clause. The possibility that no injured person has sued does not eliminate Article III’s case-or-controversy limitation; federal courts are not general ombudsmen charged with correcting every alleged constitutional error.

Dissents

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan, joined by Justices Marshall and Blackmun, argued that the majority improperly used standing doctrine to avoid recognizing the substantive right at stake. In his view, whether a plaintiff has suffered an injury cannot be decided in the abstract; it depends on the constitutional provision invoked and the persons that provision was designed to protect.

The Establishment Clause, Brennan maintained, was historically directed in substantial part against compulsory taxation and government support of religion. Drawing on the history discussed in Everson v. Board of Education, he argued that taxpayers are direct beneficiaries of the constitutional prohibition against using public resources to subsidize religious institutions. A taxpayer therefore suffers the very injury the Clause forbids when the government directs public assets to a religious enterprise.

Brennan read Flast as reflecting that distinctive Establishment Clause history, rather than as mechanically limiting taxpayer suits to cash expenditures made under the Spending Clause. In his view, a transfer of federally owned land and improvements to a sectarian college was constitutionally indistinguishable from a cash grant to that college: both distribute publicly funded government largesse in alleged aid of religion.

He also rejected the majority’s distinction between legislative and executive action. Flast itself challenged HEW officials’ administration of a federal program, and executive officials necessarily implement congressional grants of authority. The First Amendment constrains the federal government as a whole, so a taxpayer should be able to challenge an allegedly unconstitutional religious subsidy whether it is conveyed as money or property and whether its immediate administrator is Congress or an executive agency.

Justice Stevens

Reasoning

Justice Stevens concluded that Justice Brennan had correctly shown that the taxpayers had standing. He regarded the majority’s distinction between disposing of money under the Spending Clause and disposing of land under the Property Clause as a trivial and untenable basis for denying judicial review.

In Stevens’s view, Flast gave special significance to Establishment Clause challenges because the relationship between taxation and governmental support of religion is central to the Clause’s purpose. A federal transfer of valuable property to a religious institution implicated that same concern, and he would therefore have affirmed the Third Circuit’s judgment permitting the suit to proceed.