One important thing to understand is that the US government enjoys absolute immunity from suit under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity”. It may only be sued w

One important thing to understand is that the US government enjoys absolute immunity from suit under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity”. It may only be sued with its express consent, normally provided by statute. Congress periodically passes laws such as the Federal Tort Claims Act creating categories of offenses that it consents to being sued under. If you sue the government for something that Congress has not already authorized, standing doesn’t even enter into it. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sovereign_immunity https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sovereign_immunity Typically (as in the case at issue in this article) government officials are sued in their individual capacity, since suing them in their capacity would immediately fail. In this context they’re just people and do not have sovereign immunity. Instead the Supreme Court created (they might say “recognized” but we should call things what they are) something called “qualified immunity” in 1982 for such cases, subject to certain limits. Because conservative jurists tend to be pro-law-enforcement the list of things that can defeat a qualified immunity defense has grown smaller and smaller over the years. At some point the Supreme Court ruled that to overcome a qualified immunity defense the violation had to obviously and exactly fall into one of the small number of categories that they had developed from prior cases. That’s where we are now. (IANAL)