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GEIER v. AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR CO.

Opinion of the Court

quires. See, e. g., 49 CFR § 571.212 (1999).
Insofar as peti-
tioners’ argument would permit common-law actions that
“actually conﬂict” with federal regulations, it would take
from those who would enforce a federal law the very ability
to achieve the law’s congressionally mandated objectives that
the Constitution, through the operation of ordinary pre-
emption principles, seeks to protect. To the extent that
such an interpretation of the saving provision reads into a
particular federal law toleration of a conﬂict that those prin-
ciples would otherwise forbid, it permits that law to defeat
its own objectives, or potentially, as the Court has put it
before, to “ ‘destroy itself.’ ” AT&T, supra, at 228 (quoting
Abilene Cotton, supra, at 446). We do not claim that Con-
gress lacks the constitutional power to write a statute that
mandates such a complex type of state/federal relationship.
Cf. post, at 900, n. 16. But there is no reason to believe
Congress has done so here.

The dissent, as we have said, contends nonetheless that
the express pre-emption and saving provisions here, taken
together, create a “special burden,” which a court must im-
pose “on a party” who claims conﬂict pre-emption under
those principles. Post, at 898. But nothing in the Safety
Act’s language refers to any “special burden.” Nor can one
ﬁnd the basis for a “special burden” in this Court’s prece-
It is true that, in Freightliner Corp. v. Myrick, 514
dents.
U. S. 280 (1995), the Court said, in the context of interpreting
the Safety Act, that “[a]t best” there is an “inference that an
express pre-emption clause forecloses implied pre-emption.”
Id., at 289 (emphasis added). But the Court made this state-
ment in the course of rejecting the more absolute argument
that the presence of the express pre-emption provision en-
Id.,
tirely foreclosed the possibility of conﬂict pre-emption.
at 288. The statement, headed with the qualiﬁer “[a]t best,”
and made in a case where, without any need for inferences
or “special burdens,” state law obviously would survive, see
id., at 289–290, simply preserves a legal possibility. This