It'll be upheld---there’s a constitutional obligation to protect citizens from federal interference.

B. Standing to Assert Sovereign Interests: Preemption & Cooperative Federalism

Preemption and cooperative federalism cases concern a very different sort of interest: a state’s sovereign interest in enforcing its laws and defending them against federal encroachment. Yet in these cases, too, states have faced relatively few difficulties in establishing standing. The Supreme Court has stated that “a State clearly has a legitimate interest in the continued enforceability of its own statutes.”205 Federal courts regularly entertain state suits challenging federal limits on state sovereignty.206 And as a normative matter, various commentators consider a state’s capacity to litigate state prerogatives under cooperative federalism statutes or in the face of federal preemption as essential to its ability to exercise self-governance within the nation’s federal system.207

1. Preemption Cases

Although the Supreme Court has not directly held that states have standing to challenge federal preemption of their laws, it has implied as much by deciding state-filed preemption cases on the merits.208 Missouri v. Holland209 illustrates such an approach. There, the state of Missouri, challenging the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, asserted a proprietary interest in the birds within its borders, but the Supreme Court’s brief discussion of standing did not rest on this proprietary interest.210 Rather, in accepting without question the state’s ability to sue, the Court emphasized the statute’s alleged interference with sovereign rights reserved for the states under the Tenth Amendment.211

A state’s standing to challenge federal preemption is supported by its “sovereign interest in the continued enforceability of its law”—the same interest at stake when a state “defends [its laws] against a constitutional challenge brought by a private party.”212 Federal interference with a state’s ability to carry out its constitutionally recognized responsibility to protect the health and welfare of its citizens inflicts an injury upon the state.213 A state’s interest in this regard is especially strong when the federal government preempts state regulation without offering any regulation of its own to protect that state’s citizens.214 But even when the federal government has developed its own regulatory scheme, a state’s loss of regulatory autonomy remains a sufficiently concrete and particularized injury to establish standing.215