Plaintiffs Mackinac Center for Public Policy and Cato Institute have brought a lawsuit to express their displeasure with the U.S. Department of Education’s Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Account Adjustment, an initiative that they disagree with but that causes them no concrete harm. Their effort therefore faces an insurmountable obstacle: because they are not injured by the Account Adjustment, they have no standing to bring this challenge. In an attempt to circumvent this fundamental flaw in their lawsuit, they have manufactured a speculative and attenuated legal theory that resembles a Rube Goldberg machine in the complexity of its endeavor to link cause and effect. That effort falls far short of the “irreducible constitutional minimum” required by Article III. Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330, 338 (2016).
Read the Brief here.