Kagan, J., dissenting
Executive Branches.” Ibid. A court may address the legality of a government action only if the person challenging it has standing—which requires that the person have suffered a “concrete and particularized injury.” Ibid. It is not enough for the plaintiff to assert a “generalized grievance[]” about government policy. Gill v. Whitford, 585 U. S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op., at 13). And critically here, the plaintiff cannot rest its claim on a third party’s rights and interests. See Warth v. Seldin, 422 U. S. 490, 499 (1975). The plaintiff needs its own stake—a “personal stake”—in the outcome of the litigation. TransUnion, 594 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7). If the plaintiff has no such stake, a court must stop in its tracks. To decide the case is to exceed the permissible boundaries of the judicial role.
That is what the Court does today. The plaintiffs here are six States: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina. They oppose the Secretary’s loan cancellation plan on varied policy and legal grounds. But as everyone agrees, those objections are just general grievances; they do not show the particularized injury needed to bring suit. And the States have no straightforward way of making that showing—of explaining how they are harmed by a plan that reduces individual borrowers’ federal student-loan debt. So the States have thrown no fewer than four different theories of injury against the wall, hoping that a court anxious to get to the merits will say that one of them sticks. The most that can be said of the theory the majority selects, proffered solely by Missouri, is that it is less risible than the others. It still contravenes a bedrock principle of standing law—that a plaintiff cannot ride on someone else’s injury. Missouri is doing just that in relying on injuries to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a legally and financially independent public corporation. And that means the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.
