Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/washington/02scotus.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 -- The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether private citizens are entitled to go to court to challenge activities of the White House office in charge of the Bush administration’s religion-based initiative.
A lower court had blocked a lawsuit challenging conferences the White House office holds for the purpose of teaching religious organizations how to apply and compete for federal grants. That constitutional challenge, by a group advocating the strict separation of church and state, was reinstated by an appeals court; the administration in turn appealed to the Supreme Court.
The case is one of three appeals the justices added to their calendar for argument in February. A question in one of the other cases is whether a public school principal in Juneau, Alaska, violated a student’s free-speech rights by suspending him from school for displaying, at a public off-campus event, a banner promoting drug use.
Together with a third new case, on whether federal land-management officials can be sued under the racketeering statute for actions they take against private landowners, the additions to the court’s docket raised the metabolism of what had begun to look like an unusually quiet term. It had been just short of a month since the justices accepted any new cases.
As in the case the justices heard on Wednesday on the administration’s refusal to regulate automobile emissions that contribute to climate change, the question in the White House case is the technical one of “standing to sue.” And as the argument on Wednesday demonstrated, standing is a crucially important aspect of litigation against the government.