Court Opinion

ID: 9431730
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:33:05.140893+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:29.034392
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice
O’Connor, and Justice Kennedy join as to Part I,
concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.
I find no “unmistakably clear language,” Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways and Public Transportation, 483 U. S. 468, 478 (1987), in either CERCLA or SARA that expresses Congress’ intent to abrogate the States’ Eleventh Amendment immunity. However, a majority of the Court concludes otherwise, and therefore I reach the constitutional issue presented here. On that question, I concur in Justice Brennan’s conclusion, but not his reasoning.
I
Our cases make it plain that only the most direct expression of Congress’ intent to make the States subject to suit will suffice to abrogate their sovereign immunity as recognized in the Eleventh Amendment. Thus, we have said that Congress must “explicitly and by clear language indicate on [the] face [of an enactment] an intent to sweep away the immunity of the States”; and that any such law must “háve a history which focuses directly on the question of state liability and which shows that Congress considered and firmly decided to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment immunity of the States.” Quern v. Jordan, 440 U. S. 332, 345 (1979). As we put it more recently: “Congress must express its intention to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment in unmistakable language in *46the statute itself.” Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 243 (1985).
Two statutes are offered by the Court as providing the “unmistakable language” required by our cases to abrogate the States’ Eleventh Amendment immunity: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), 42 U. S. C. §9601 et seq. (1982 ed. and Supp. IV), and the 1986 Amendments to CERCLA, found in the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA), Pub. L. 99-499, 100 Stat. 1613. I consider both of these statutes in turn.
A
I begin by examining CERCLA, in the form in which Congress originally adopted it in 1980. In its initial consideration of this case — under CERCLA before the SARA amendments were added in 1986 — the Third Circuit concluded that the statute did not contain an “unmistakable” abrogation of the Eleventh Amendment. United States v. Union Gas Co., 792 F. 2d 372, 378-382 (1986). The Court disagrees, however, suggesting that because CERCLA includes “States” within its definition of “persons,” 42 U. S. C. §9601(21), and because the statute makes “persons” who are “owners or operators,” 42 U. S. C. §9601(20) (1982 ed., Supp. IV), liable under § 9607, Congress expressed in CERCLA an “unmistakably” clear intent to make the States liable to suit by private parties in federal court. Ante, at 7-8. I reject this conclusion for several reasons.
First, I note that of the four federal judges who examined this question under CERCLA, only one — Judge Higgin-botham in dissent in the Third Circuit’s initial consideration of this case, 792 F. 2d, at 383-386 — found in this statutory scheme the requisite clear statement of Congress’ intent to abrogate the States’ immunity. See n. 7, infra. While such a “judicial headcount” is, of course, not dispositive, it does suggest that whatever one can say about CERCLA, it did *47not include an “unmistakable” declaration of abrogation of state immunity. If we are going to be faithful to Atascadero and Welch as providing our standard for this sort of case, then the fact that experienced jurists could disagree about Congress’ intent under CERCLA is relevant, because the disagreement suggests that the statute’s provisions about state liability were certainly not “unmistakably clear.”
Second, the significance that the Court draws from CERCLA’s inclusion of States within its definition of persons is suspect for its impact on other portions of the statute. The definitional section the Court relies on also includes the “United States Government” within the term “person.” 42 U. S. C. §9601(21). Yet Congress also adopted, in CERCLA, an entirely separate statutory provision rendering the Federal Government suable under the statute’s liability provision, see § 9607(g). If the Court’s views about the significance of including States within the definition of persons is correct, then § 9607(g) was wholly redundant, because — by including the United States Government within the definition of persons — Congress had already stripped the Federal Government of its sovereign immunity.1
*48Rather than assuming that Congress wrote a wholly redundant subsection of § 9607, however, it seems more likely to conclude that Congress did not think that including the United States Government or the States within § 9601(21)’s general definition of “persons” subject to CERCLA’s regime was enough to abrogate the sovereign immunity of either for damages awards.2 Cf. United States v. Testan, 424 U. S. 392, 399 (1976). With respect to the Federal Government, Congress went on to enact a separate provision executing the requisite waiver of immunity, § 9607(g). However, with respect to.the States, Congress made no such additional provision: the conclusion to be drawn is obvious.
Finally, and most importantly, the Court’s reading of CERCLA employs the precise analytical approach we rejected in Employees v. Missouri Dept. of Public Health and Welfare, 411 U. S. 279 (1973). There, as is true here, the relevant statutory term that described who was covered by the Act (in Employees, it was the term “employers” in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)), expressly included the state defendant (in Employees, it was the State as an employer of “employees of a State . . . hospital”); invoking these provisions, a private litigant sought to hold the State liable under the statute’s damages remedy. Id., at 282-283. Nonetheless, in Employees, we held that Congress had not thereby abrogated the States’ Eleventh Amendment immu*49nity; instead, we concluded, Congress had meant only to make the States subject to enforcement actions brought by the Federal Government. Id., at 285-286.
In all relevant respects, the portion of CERCLA on which the Court relies and the portion of the FLSA that was before us in jEmployees are indistinguishable, as are the arguments made for considering the statutes to have abrogated the States’ immunity. In Employees, we rejected these arguments; the same result should attach here. Instead, we should conclude, as we did in Employees, that Congress’ intent could have been to let the Act’s policies be achieved through enforcement actions taken by the Federal Government against the States. As we observed in Employees, supra, at 286: “The policy of the Act so far as the States are concerned is wholly served by allowing the delicate federal-state relationship to be managed through” enforcement actions directed by the Federal Executive Branch — and not through litigation by private parties against the States.
Nor is the Court’s result supported by reference to the purposes of CERCLA. Respondent finds much significance in the fact that this statute was designed to be “comprehensive” in nature. 792 F. 2d, at 381 (summarizing respondent’s contention below). But surely the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (Welch), the Rehabilitation Act (Atascadero), and the FLSA (Employees) were all “comprehensive” statutes in their respective fields, and yet this was not enough to deem the Eleventh Amendment abrogated in those cases. Nor is it true that CERCLA’s “comprehensiveness” will be substantially lessened by deeming the States’ immunity to have survived intact. The States remain subject to liability at the hands of the Federal Government; this provides a viable means of achieving CERCLA’s ends. See Reply Brief for Petitioner 10.3
*50Above all, the entire purpose of our “clear statement” rule would be obliterated if this Court were to imply Eleventh Amendment abrogation from our sense of what would best serve the general policy ends Congress was trying to achieve in a statute. Such arguments based on the statute’s general goals, whatever weight they might have under a normal exercise in statutory construction, have no bearing on our analysis of congressional abrogation. Cf. Dellmuth v. Muth, post, at 230-231. If Congress believes that making the States liable to private parties is critical to the scheme it has created in CERCLA, it is up to Congress to say so in unmistakable language. Since it has not, I believe that our “clear statement” precedents bar us from implying such a policy choice — even if it is “latent” in the statutory scheme, or an advisable means of achieving the statute’s ends.
B
The question then becomes whether, as the Court of Appeals found, United States v. Union Gas Co., 832 F. 2d 1343 (1987), the 1986 amendments to CERCLA (known as SARA) added such an “unmistakable” statement of abrogation to the statute.
*51The text of the relevant portion of SARA (now codified at 42 U. S. C. §9601(20)(D) (1982 ed., Supp. IV)) states, in full:
“State or Local Government Limitation — Paragraph (20) of [42 U. S. C. §9601] (defining ‘owner or operator’) is amended as follows:
“(1) Add the following new subparagraph at the end thereof:
“ ‘(D) The term “owner or operator” does not include a unit of State or local government which acquired ownership or control involuntarily through bankruptcy, tax delinquency, abandonment, or other circumstances in which the government involuntarily acquires title by virtue of its function as sovereign. The exclusion provided under this paragraph shall not apply to any State or local government which has caused or contributed to the release ... of a hazardous substance from the facility, and such a State or local government shall be subject to the provisions of this Act in the same manner and to the same extent, both procedurally and substantively, as any nongovernmental entity, including liability under [42 U. S. C. §9607].’” Pub. L. 99-499, 100 Stat. 1615.
Although Congress entitled the amendment “State or Local Government Limitation,” the Court disparages the idea that §9601(20)(D) was enacted solely as a limitation on governmental unit liability. The Court asserts that such a view ignores that § 101(20)(D) “would be unnecessary unless” the States could be liable under §9607. Ante, at 8. But everyone agrees that States may be liable under §9607: the liability of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the United States. Section 9601(20)(D) provides a significant reduction of that potential liability, as it limits the circumstances under which state and local governments will be forced to pay the United States Government for cleanups at involuntarily acquired sites. Given this fact, §9601(20)(D) makes *52perfectly good sense without any contortion of it to imply an intent of Congress to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment.4
There is a second fact about the relevant part of SARA that makes it an odd candidate for an Eleventh Amendment abrogation provision: it only applies to facilities acquired by state and local governments “involuntarily ... by virtue of [their] function[s] as sovereign.” See § 9601(20)(D). If this amendment is the means by which Congress intended to make the States liable to suit, it did so only with respect to those properties which a State acquired involuntarily; States would remain immune for sites which they owned and operated by choice. A State would be immune from private suit under § 9607 for costs associated with the cleanup of a state-created, owned, and operated hazardous-waste dump, but it would be liable for discharges at sites it acquired when an owner abandoned his property. Surely if the two cases are to be distinguished, the logical distinction would be exactly the opposite one.
Recognizing that Congress could not have intended such a result, the Court avoids this conclusion by saying that this part of SARA “explains and qualifies the entire definition of ‘owner or operator’ — not just that part of the definition applicable to involuntary owners.” Ante, at 12-13. But this is plainly wrong: the portion of the sentence which the *53Court says renders the States liable (“a State or local government shall be subject . . . ”) is introduced by the words, “[t]he exclusion provided under this paragraph shall not apply . . . § 9601(20)(D). Thus, the liability-creating portion of § 9601(20)(D) exists only as a “limit” on the liability-limiting portion of §9601(20)(D).5 Under the Court’s reading of the statute, we are left with the paradox of Congress being tougher on States that find themselves involuntary operators of waste sites, than it was on those that had owned and operated such facilities on their own accord.
The Court argues that the last clause of the last sentence of §9601(20)(D) — making involuntary-owner state and local governments that cause the release of toxic chemicals “subject to the provisions of [CERCLA] in the same manner and to the same extent, both procedurally and substantively, as any nongovernmental entity” — provides the clear statement of abrogation required by our cases. But like the Court’s reliance on the inclusion of States within CERCLA’s definition of “persons” subject to the Act (which I discussed above), *54this method of analysis is directly contrary to the approach we took in Employees v. Missouri Dept. of Public Health and Welfare, 411 U. S. 279 (1973). The Court insists that its reliance on this part of SARA is correct because, if the statute is interpreted to mean something other than abrogating state immunity, the provision is rendered redundant and meaningless. Ante, at 11-12.
The provision, however, has meaning as something less than an abrogation provision because, like the statute in question in Employees, it exists to make the States liable to the Federal Government. While the Court is surely correct when it observes that, under United States v. California, 332 U. S. 19, 26-27 (1947), no statutory provision is required as a general matter to permit the United States to sue a State, here, the Congress forbade such actions in the first part of §9601(20)(D) with respect to some States (i. e., involuntary owners of waste sites). Thus, the portion of § 9601(20)(D) on which the Court rests its case is precisely like the 1966 amendment to § 3(d) of the FLSA that was before us in Employees: it operates to put some States back into the class of entities that may be liable to the United States, after Congress had previously exempted them from such actions. See Employees, supra, at 282-283. As in Employees, the statute should be read as only authorizing suits by the United States against the States, absent a more clear statement of an authorization of private actions.8
*55In Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U. S. 651, 673 (1974), we said of the related question of interpreting a state statute to find a waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity, that such a waiver would only be found “where stated ‘by the most express language or by such overwhelming implications from the text as [will] leave no room for any other reasonable construction’ ” of the statute in question. Here, there is room for a “reasonable construction” of SARA that does not entail an Eleventh Amendment abrogation; i. e., that Congress intended it as a modification of the liability of the States to the Federal Government. Even if the Court’s interpretation of § 9601(20)(D) were itself “reasonable,” the existence of an alternative, non-abrogating “reasonable” interpretation of the section dictates rejection of its view.
Consequently, I do not think that SARA’s liability-limiting amendment to CERCLA contains an “unmistakably clear” statement by Congress that it wanted to abrogate the *56States’ solemn immunity to private suit under the Eleventh Amendment.7
II
My view on the statutory issue has not prevailed, however; a majority of the Court has ruled that the statute, as amended, plainly intended to abrogate the immunity of the *57States from suit in the federal courts. I accept that judgment. This brings me to the question whether Congress has the constitutional power to abrogate the States’ immunity.8 In that respect, I agree with the conclusion reached by Justice Brennan in Part III of his opinion, that Congress has the authority under Article I to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment immunity of the States, although I do not agree with much of his reasoning.
Accordingly, I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

 In an effort to avoid the force of this observation, the Court unleashes its oft-repeated statement that it relies on a “combination” of CERCLA and SARA to reach its conclusion. Ante, at 9, n. 2. The Court says that it is my “failure to recognize” this quality in its analysis that leads to my “confusion” about this case. Ibid.
I do not “fail to recognize” the Court’s approach — I reject it outright. The search for an “unmistakable statement” of abrogation is the search for unmistakable proof that Congress purposefully intended to set aside the States’ immunity. It is, therefore, the search for a historical fact that either was or was not true at the time Congress legislated. The Court’s “combination” analysis loses sight of this underlying theory behind orn-eases and, unfortunately, substantially undermines our precedents.
As I see it, the analysis must be this: either Congress abrogated the Eleventh Amendment when it enacted CERCLA — in which ease, § 9607(g) was superfluous when adopted — or Congress did not do so until it adopted SARA — which is a peculiar view, for reasons I explain in Part I-B below— or Congress did not have an intent to abrogate in either instance. Blur*48ring the choice among these possible historical facts by resting on a “combination” analysis is only an effort to make this difficult case artificially easier.

 This conclusion is also supported by the fact that in two other places in § 9607, where Congress wished a particular provision to apply to private persons and the United States and the States, it used the phrases “[n]o person (including the United States or any State) ...” and “any person (including the United States or any State).” See §§ 9607(i), (j). If Congress believed (as the Court contends that it did) that its inclusion of States within CERCLA’s definition of “person” was adequate to bring the States fully within the operation of § 9607, then the parenthetical phrases I quote here would have been wholly redundant.

 Respondent approaches the policy question with the view that limitless state liability under CERCLA is the best means to achieve the statute’s ends. However, Congress clearly did not think so: it limited state *50and local governmental liability under § 9607 in several respects. First, there is the involuntary-ownership exclusion of § 9601(20)(D), adopted in the 1986 SARA amendments, that is discussed in detail in Part I-B, infra.
In addition, Congress also adopted in SARA a limitation on state and local government liability (to the Federal Government) for actions taken at toxic waste sites in response to emergencies. Pub. L. 99-499, § 107(d)(2), 100 Stat. 1629; 42 U. S. C. § 9607(d)(2) (1982 ed., Supp. IV). As the House Commerce Committee observed, this legislative exemption was designed to “remov[e] a disincentive for governments to respond to emergencies covered by CERCLA.” H. R. Rep. No. 99-253, pt. 1, p. 73 (1985). Thus, Congress did not view ever expanding governmental liability as the only way to achieve CERCLA’s ends.
Of course, even if policy reasons did counsel expansive state liability under CERCLA, our “clear statement” rule mandates that the choice is to be left to Congress — to resolve with an explicit declaration of its decision— and not to be implied by this Court.

 A similar observation explains another section of SARA which the Court, ante, at 9-10, attempts to use as support for its reading of § 9601 (20)(D): § 9607(d)(2), which was enacted by Congress to encourage state and local governments to conduct emergency cleanups of waste sites by exempting them from potential liability for those cleanup activities. See 42 U. S. C. § 9607(d)(2) (1982 ed., Supp. IV); H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 99-962, pp. 203-204 (1986). About this amendment, the Court again suggests that “Congress need not exempt States from liability unless they would otherwise be liable.” Ante, at 10.
As with § 9601(20)(D), however, this limitation is best understood as a limit on state liability to the United States; it need not be read as an implicit statement that elsewhere the Eleventh Amendment has been waived for private lawsuits, in order to make it a vital part of the statute. Cf. Employees v. Missouri Dept, of Public Health and Welfare, 411 U. S. 279, 285-287 (1973).

 The Court also rejects this conclusion by saying that the inclusion of the liability-creating exception to the liability-limiting exception of §9601(20)(D) serves to enlighten us as to Congress’ “background understanding” of the effect of CERCLA in the first place: that States would be liable under § 9607. In this instance, and throughout, see n. 1, supra, the Court does not make it clear whether it is the SARA amendments of 1986, or CERCLA itself, that renders the States liable to suit under § 9607.
Yet the difference may be a significant one. Section 9607 is a strict-liability provision. See, e. g., New York v. Shore Realty Co., 759 F. 2d 1032, 1042 (CA2 1985); United States v. Bliss, 667 F. Supp. 1298, 1304 (ED Mo. 1987). If CERCLA as originally enacted — without any help from SARA — rendered States liable to private suits under §9607, then they must be subject to that section’s strict-liability rule as well.
But under § 9601(20)(D), state and local governments are liable only if they have “caused or contributed” to a release of toxic materials. If § 9601(20)(D) is the source of the Eleventh Amendment waiver, and if, as the Court contends, its provisions are meant to address all state and local governments that own or operate toxic sites, then perhaps Congress abrogated the Eleventh Amendment only far enough to make States liable under this less stringent rule — whether they are voluntary or involuntary owners of a site.

. The Court goes on to observe, however, that even if this interpretation is accepted as explaining almost all of the last sentence of § 9601(20)(D), it still does not account for Congress “stress[ing] that States would be liable ‘to the same extent ... as any nongovernmental entity,’” ante, at 11. The Court contends that the first part of the last sentence of § 9601(20)(D) Ci. e., “such a State . . . shall be subject”) would have been enough to accomplish the end of merely making involuntary-owner States liable to actions by the United States; the addition of the phrase “as any nongovernmental entity” means that Congress must have intended something more. To this I have three responses.
First, Congress may have added the phrase in which the Court puts so much stock (“as any nongovernmental entity”) as a statutory “exclamation *55point”: Congress may have reasoned that while state and local governments that are involuntary owners should be exempted from liability under CERCLA, those that actually cause subsequent discharges should be liable under the statute, with their involuntary ownership no defense or excuse whatsoever when the United States seeks recovery. In this view, Congress simply added the relevant phrase to strongly emphasize that involuntary ownership is no defense if a state or local government causes a discharge. Put another way, it is incongruous to attribute such sweeping significance — an Eleventh Amendment abrogation, something we have found present in only the most extraordinary circumstances — to this one phrase in the definitional portion of SARA/CERCLA.
Second, Congress could have used the phrase “as any nongovernmental entity” to insure that local governments that cause discharges at involuntarily acquired sites would be liable under §9607. Congress may have merely wanted to be forceful in using its pre-emptive power to set aside any state-law immunity doctrines for such local government entities, without necessarily going so far as to execute an “unmistakably clear” abrogation of state government immunity. Cf. Quern v. Jordan, 440 U. S. 332, 338-341 (1979). Finally, even if my reading of this phrase makes it somewhat superfluous to the statute, the redundancy created by my interpretation of this one clause is not nearly as severe as the redundancy created by the Court’s reading of the statute, and discussed in the text, supra, at 47.

 One additional observation concerning SARA may be made. At the time SARA was enacted, one Court of Appeals —the Third Circuit, in its initial decision in this case, United States v. Union Gas Co., 792 F. 2d 372 (1986) — and one District Court — also as part of this litigation, United States v. Union Gas Co., 575 F. Supp. 949 (ED Pa. 1983) — had ruled on the question whether CERCLA as it was then written abridged States’ Eleventh Amendment immunity. Both of these courts held that it did not; no federal court had ruled to the contrary.
The Court’s view of SARA is that, in enacting § 9601(20)(D), Congress had an “unmistakably clear” intent to amend CERCLA so as to reverse the force of these holdings finding a lack of abrogation in CERCLA’s original text. Yet just eight days after it adopted SARA, Congress enacted the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1986, Pub. L. 99-506, 100 Stat. 1807, which included a provision setting aside the force of our holding in Atas-cadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234 (1985), that Congress had failed to provide a clear statement of abrogation of the Eleventh Amendment. The words Congress chose in that Act are instructive: “A State shall not be immune under the Eleventh Amendment. . . from suit in Federal court for a violation of [portions of the Act].” 100 Stat. 1845.
While I would not go so far as to hold that Congress must use these precise words (i. e., make reference to the Eleventh Amendment) before it will be deemed to have abrogated States’ immunity, the words used by Congress to set aside Atascadero are legions more “unmistakably clear” than the tangled mess in § 9601(20)(D), which the Court concludes set aside the then-existing case law with respect to CERCLA.
Of course, I do not believe that only the “magic words” found in the Rehabilitation Act amendment will suffice to achieve abrogation. Cf. ante, at 13, n. 4. Instead, my view (based on our prior decisions in Atascadero and Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways and Public Transportation, 483 U. S. 468 (1987)) is that Congress’ intent to abrogate must be expressed clearly, in a plain statement in the text of the enactment — and is not to be derived by parsing together various fragments scattered about a statute, as if it were a legislative quote acrostic. See also n. 1, supra.

 As a preliminary matter, I reiterate my view that, for the reasons stated by the plurality in Welch v. Texas Dept. of Highways, supra, at 478-488, Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U. S. 1 (1890), should not be overruled.