In House of Representatives v. Burwell, the House claims that the administration’s funding of one section of the ACA violates Congress’s famous “power of the purse.” The Constitution not only grants to Congress the power to tax and spend to “pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare;” it adds that only Congress can authorize these payments (Article I Section 9 cl. 7: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law”).

Neither side disputes the basic rules. The administration does not claim authority to spend without Congressional approval; it argues that Congress actually did make an appropriation; the House says that Congress did no such thing. There’s no easy answer to that question, because appropriating money isn’t a matter of magic words; if Congress passing a statute directing the executive to make certain expenditures, the executive may be required to fund them out of “lump-sum” appropriations (the entire sum approved for a given cabinet department) with no need for a special line item. Collyer will get to the issue of whose statutory reading is right later; first she had to decide that the House really could sue.

The idea of “legislative standing”—that a member of a legislative body, or the legislative body itself can sue the executive when it does something the legislature doesn’t like—has bounced around the federal courts for nearly a century. The claims often fall apart on the precise question of injury. If the executive simply ignores the “no appropriation” clause, then the House has a complete remedy—impeachment of the executive official responsible (up to and including the President); such a violation could also later be prosecuted under a federal statute called the Anti-Deficiency Act. But mere misinterpretation or misapplication of the law, the argument goes, doesn’t deprive any member of the House of his or her authority, or strip the body of its ability to enact law and appropriations. The legislature can amend the statute to remove any ambiguity.

The Court once held that a group of state legislators had standing to sue their secretary of state for (they claimed) wrongly certifying the legislature as having approved a constitutional amendment. Their claim was that this action nullified their votes. (It was a hollow victory: The Court immediately dismissed the case as a “political question.”) It has also held that a group of members of Congress did not have standing to challenge a law providing the president a line-item veto; the law took power from the House, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, but did not injure these members in particular: “In the vote on the Line Item Veto Act, their votes were given full effect. They simply lost that vote.”

Last term, the Court upheld standing for the Arizona Legislature in its suit against the independent commission set up by voters to draw electoral districts. The initiative would “would ‘completely nullif[y]’ any vote by the Legislature” to draw districts, the Court reasoned, thus injuring the entire body, not just some members. (Another hollow victory; the Court then held that the voters had the power to evict the legislature from redistricting.)