Baird v. Norton

• Decision Date: 04 August 2000
• Docket Number: No. 99-1822,99-1822
• Citation: 266 F.3d 408
• Parties: (6th Cir. 2001) Laura Baird, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Gale A. Norton, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Interior, <A HREF="#fr1-*" name="fn1-*">* and United States Department of the Interior, Defendants-Appellees. Argued:
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Page 408

266 F.3d 408 (6th Cir. 2001)

Laura Baird, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Gale A. Norton, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Interior,^* and United States Department of the Interior, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 99-1822

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

Argued: August 4, 2000

Decided and Filed: September 14, 2001

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan at Lansing. No. 99-00014; David W. McKeague, District Judge.

Kevin J. Moody, Louis B. Reinswasser, MILLER, CANFIELD, PADDOCK & STONE, Lansing, Michigan, for Appellants.

Michael H. Deettmer, U.S. Attorney, Grand Rapids, MI, Joan E. Meyer, ASSISTANT UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Appellees.

Before: MOORE and CLAY, Circuit Judges; RICE, Chief District Judge.^**

MOORE, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which CLAY, J., joined. RICE, D. J. (pp. 413-17), delivered a separate opinion concurring in the judgment.

OPINION

KAREN NELSON MOORE, Circuit Judge.

Michigan state legislators Laura Baird and Gary Peters challenge former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's approval of gaming compacts between the State of Michigan and four Indian tribes. Baird, a member of the Michigan House of Representatives, and Peters, a Michigan state senator, brought suit seeking a declaration that the gaming compacts are invalid and an order directing the secretary to disapprove them.¹ Baird and Peters argue that the compacts approved by Babbitt were never properly entered into by the State of Michigan because the state legislature followed unconstitutional procedures in considering them. Thus, they argue, Secretary Babbitt could not properly approve the compacts under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act ("IGRA"), 25 U.S.C §§2701 et seq. On May 21, 1999, the district court granted the secretary's motion to dismiss, pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(1) and (6). In granting the secretary's motion to dismiss, the district court concluded that Peters did not have Article III standing, as a state legislator, but that Baird did. With respect to Baird, the district court concluded that IGRA did not include an implied right of action, that Baird was not in the zone of interests protected by IGRA, and thus that Baird did not have standing to challenge the secretary's action under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. §702. Because we conclude that neither Baird nor Peters has Article III standing, we AFFIRM the district court's granting of the secretary's motion to dismiss.

I. BACKGROUND

Baird and Peters contend that the Michigan state legislature did not follow procedures required by the state constitution for approval of the gaming compacts at issue. Rather than approve the compacts by legislation, which requires that a majority of the members of both the state house of representatives and state senate vote in favor of the measure, see Mich. Const. art. IV, §26, the state legislature approved the compacts by concurrent resolution -- in this case, by Concurrent Resolution ("CR") 115. Passage of a concurrent resolution, however, requires only a majority of votes cast rather than a majority of all members' votes. Thus, the Michigan House of Representatives, comprised of 110 members, approved the gaming compacts by a vote of forty-eight to forty-seven, with Baird voting in the minority. Although this vote margin would have been insufficient to enact legislation, it was sufficient to pass CR 115. In the Michigan Senate, which has thirty-eight members, CR 115 passed by a vote of twenty-one to seventeen, with Peters in the minority. The Senate vote on the concurrent resolution, then, would have been sufficient to pass legislation approving the compacts.

After passage of CR 115, the gaming compacts were subsequently considered approved when Secretary Babbitt failed to approve or reject them within 45 days. See 25 U.S.C. §2710(d)(8)(C). The compacts were then published in the Federal Register and became effective under 25 U.S.C. §2710(d)(3)(B).

II. ANALYSIS

The threshold issue in this case is whether Baird and Peters have standing to sue based on their status as state legislators aggrieved by the state legislature's use of allegedly unconstitutional procedures. The district court found that Baird has standing but that Peters does not. Peters argues in this appeal that the district court erred in reaching this conclusion, but, for the reasons given below, the district court's conclusion regarding Peters was correct. In this appeal, Baird asserts that the district court properly found that she has standing because of her status as a state legislator, and the appellees have not disputed Baird's Article III standing. This court, however, is "under an independent obligation to examine" its own jurisdiction, and "standing 'is perhaps the most important of [the jurisdictional] doctrines." FW/PBS, Inc. v. City of Dallas, 493 U.S. 215, 231 (1990) (quoting Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 750 (1984)) (alteration in FW/PBS). Because we conclude that Baird, too, lacks Article III standing to sue, we do not have jurisdiction to consider the other issues raised in this appeal.

Baird and Peters argue that they suffered two different injuries as a result of the secretary's failure to reject the compacts at issue. First, Baird and Peters argue that they have been injured by being deprived of the procedural safeguards required by the Michigan Constitution for the passage of legislation, such as the reading of proposed legislation three times and the requirement that the legislation be in the possession of both houses at least five days before any vote. See Mich. Const. 1963, art. IV, §26. The district court correctly rejected these claimed injuries as insufficient to give the appellants standing in the present case. These constitutional measures are clearly designed to "preclude last-minute, hasty legislation and to provide notice to the public of legislation under consideration," Anderson v. Oakland County Clerk, 353 N.W.2d 448, 455 (Mich. 1984), and not to protect individual state legislators. Because of this denial of procedural safeguards, then, Baird and Peters have, at most, a generalized grievance shared by all Michigan residents alike. Such a grievance does not give them standing to sue. See Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War, 418 U.S. 208, 220 (1974) ("[S]tanding to sue may not be predicated upon an interest ... which is held in common by all members of the public, because of the necessarily abstract nature of the injury all citizens share.").

Second, Baird and Peters argue that their votes were nullified by the state legislature's use of improper procedures in enacting the gaming compacts. Under certain circumstances, vote nullification may give legislators standing to challenge improper procedures. See Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997); Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 (1939). But Baird and Peters have not suffered a vote-nullification injury sufficient to give them standing in the present case.

The leading case on legislator standing based on vote nullification is Coleman v. Miller. In Coleman, the Supreme Court held that a group of Kansas state senators had standing to sue when they claimed that their votes had been effectively nullified by the state legislature's use of an allegedly unconstitutional procedure. In voting on a proposed constitutional amendment, the forty-member Kansas State Senate had divided evenly, with twenty Kansas state senators voting for ratification and twenty against. The Kansas lieutenant governor then cast the tie-breaking vote in favor, and the amendment was treated as ratified as a result. See Coleman, 307 U.S. at 436. The Coleman plaintiffs, including the twenty state senators who had voted against ratifying the amendment, claimed that the lieutenant governor's vote had been improper and unconstitutional and thus sought a writ of mandamus to compel state officials to recognize that the amendment had not been properly ratified. See id. The Supreme Court concluded that the Coleman plaintiffs had standing to challenge the procedure, based on the effective nullification of their votes, but held against them on the merits of their claim. See id. at 437, 456.

The Supreme Court recently clarified its holding in Coleman in Raines v. Byrd. Raines involved a challenge to the constitutionality of the Line Item Veto Act, Pub. L. No. 104-130, 110 Stat. 1200 (1996). Four senators and two House members brought the suit, claiming that the Act would reduce their voting effectiveness on future appropriations bills. See Raines, 521 U.S. at 814. The Raines plaintiffs relied heavily on Coleman's suggestion that legislators have "a plain, direct, and adequate interest in maintaining the effectiveness of their votes." Id. at 825. The Raines Court rejected this broad reading of Coleman, however, holding that the legislators lacked standing because they had alleged no more than "the abstract dilution of institutional legislative power." Id. at 826. The Court distinguished the facts in Raines from those inColeman, stressing that the six Raines plaintiffs had not alleged "that they voted for a specific bill, that there were sufficient votes to pass the bill, and that the bill was nonetheless deemed defeated." Id. at 824. Instead, the Raines plaintiffs had simply voted against a bill, "their votes were given full effect" in that vote, but the bill was passed despite their nay votes.Id. In short, the Raines plaintiffs' complaint was that they had lost a vote and believed that the resulting legislation was unconstitutional, but this was not a sufficient injury to give them standing to sue based on nullification.

The state legislators in Coleman, in contrast, had alleged a vote-nullification injury sufficient to give them standing to sue because, had these state senators been "correct on the merits," their votes would have been sufficient to defeat ratification. See Raines...