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12 

ONEOK, INC. v. LEARJET, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

regulation  was  aimed  directly  at  interstate  pipelines.    It 
wrote  that  the  state  law  was  designed  to  keep  “a  natural 
gas company from raising its equity levels above a certain
point” in order to keep the company’s revenue requirement 
low, thereby ensuring lower wholesale rates.  Id., at 307– 
308.  Indeed,  the  Court  expressly  said  that  the  state  law 
was pre-empted because it was “directed at . . . the control 
of rates and facilities of natural gas companies,” “precisely 
the  things  over  which  FERC  has  comprehensive  author-
ity.”  Id., at 308 (emphasis added).

The  dissent  rejects  the  notion  that  the  proper  test  for 
purposes  of  pre-emption  in  the  natural  gas  context  is
whether  the  challenged  measures  are  “aimed  directly  at 
interstate  purchasers  and  wholesales  for  resale”  or  not. 
Northern  Natural,  supra,  at  94.  It  argues  that  this  ap­
proach  is  “unprecedented,”  and  that  the  Court’s  focus 
should  be  on  “what  the  State  seeks  to  regulate  . . .  ,  not 
why the State seeks to regulate it.”  Post, at 6 (opinion of 
SCALIA, J.).  But the “target” to which our cases refer must 
mean  more  than  just  the  physical  activity  that  a  State
regulates.  After  all,  a  single  physical  action,  such  as 
reporting  a  price  to  a  specialized  journal,  could  be  the
subject of many different laws—including tax laws, disclo­
sure laws, and others.  To repeat the point we made above,
no one could claim that FERC’s regulation of this physical 
activity  for  purposes  of  wholesale  rates  forecloses  every 
other form of state regulation that affects those rates.

Indeed,  although  the  dissent  argues  that  Schneidwind 
created a definitive test for pre-emption in the natural gas
context  that  turns  on  whether  “the  matter  on  which  the 
State  asserts  the  right  to  act  is  in  any  way  regulated  by
the  Federal  Act,”  post,  at  3  (quoting  485  U. S.,  at  310, 
n. 13), Schneidewind could not mean this statement as an 
absolute  test.    It  goes on  to  explain  that  the  Natural  Gas 
Act  does  not  pre-empt  “traditional”  state  regulation,  such 
as state blue sky laws (which, of course, raise wholesale—