On Standing, Sovereignty, and Constitutional Awkwardness

<p><span>Federal courts have increasingly embraced sovereign-based standing as a vehicle for resolving high-stakes disputes between state governments and the federal executive. And states have availed themselves of this powerful new weapon in various battles against the Trump Administration, alleging injuries that are unique to the expansive doctrine of state standing—specifically, harms to a state’s “sovereign” or “quasi-sovereign” interests. The District of Columbia now joins that trend, asserting that the deployment of the National Guard inflicts an “irreparable sovereign injury” to its right to self-governance under the Home Rule Act. The District Court agreed, finding that the deployment usurped the District’s “delegated” sovereign powers under the Home Rule Act, and issued a preliminary injunction.</span></p> <p><span>This Note argues that the District Court’s acceptance of this claim fundamentally misunderstands both the District’s constitutional status and the nature of “sovereignty” itself. The District of Columbia is constitutionally sui generis—it is neither a state, a territory, nor an enclave, but a federal district created to serve uniquely national purposes. Although Congress has granted the District substantial autonomy through statutory home rule, that autonomy does not—and could not—constitute sovereignty. Sovereignty in the American constitutional order is a status-based and nondelegable attribute, possessed by states by virtue of their constitutional position, by American Indian tribes as preexisting polities, and, to a degree, by certain territories through deliberate constitutional settlements that insulate their authority from unilateral congressional revision. The District’s local government fits none of these categories: it remains municipal in character, exercising power that is permissive, revocable, and fully subordinate to Congress’s plenary authority.</span></p> <p><span>By disentangling sovereignty from functional autonomy, this Note shows why extending sovereign-based standing to D.C. is both doctrinally unsound and institutionally destabilizing. Such an extension would erode the conceptual limits of sovereignty, exacerbate the politicization of public-law litigation, and invite the emergence of a uniquely powerful municipal “omniplaintiff.” But importantly, this Note does not argue that rejecting D.C.’s sovereign standing insulates federal action from judicial review; D.C. may still challenge the deployments through several non-sovereign-based theories. Rather, by policing the dimensions of sovereignty and the District’s status, this Note respects the Constitution’s deliberate line-drawing and clarifies the proper bounds of sovereign standing in an era of aggressive intergovernmental litigation.<i></i></span></p>