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524US2

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 498 (1998)

553

Breyer, J., dissenting

the same understanding that led legislators in both politi-
cal parties to conclude that the Coal Act of 1992 represented
a fair solution to a difﬁcult problem.

Given the critical importance of the reasonable expecta-
tions of both the miners and the operators during the period
before their implicit agreement was made explicit in 1974,
I am unable to agree with the plurality’s conclusion that the
retroactive application of the 1992 Act is an unconstitutional
“taking” of Eastern’s property. Rather, it seems to me that
the plurality and Justice Kennedy have substituted their
judgment about what is fair for the better informed judg-
ment of the members of the Coal Commission and Congress.6
Accordingly, I conclude that, whether the provision in
question is analyzed under the Takings Clause or the Due
Process Clause, Eastern has not carried its burden of over-
coming the presumption of constitutionality accorded to
an Act of Congress, by demonstrating that the provision is
unsupported by the reasonable expectations of the parties
in interest.

Justice Breyer, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice

Souter, and Justice Ginsburg join, dissenting.

We must decide whether it is fundamentally unfair for
Congress to require Eastern Enterprises to pay the health
care costs of retired miners who worked for Eastern before
1965, when Eastern stopped mining coal. For many years
Eastern beneﬁted from the labor of those miners. Eastern
helped to create conditions that led the miners to expect con-
tinued health care beneﬁts for themselves and their families

6 It may well be true that the majority might have been able to fashion
a wiser solution to a difﬁcult problem. Nevertheless, as Chief Justice
Hughes observed in a dissent joined by Justices Brandeis, Stone, and Car-
dozo: “The power committed to Congress to govern interstate commerce
does not require that its government should be wise, much less that it
should be perfect.” Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Alton R. Co., 295 U. S.
330, 391–392 (1935).