Cite as: 512 U. S. 267 (1994)
Souter, J., dissenting
in the general usage of 1946, and in the 11 years since the construction was settled by Transportation Management, Congress has not seen fit to disturb it by amending § 7(c). Compare, e. g., Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara Cty., 480 U. S. 616, 629-630, n. 7 (1987), with Califano v. Sanders, 430 U. S. 99, 105-107 (1977). The settled construction should therefore stand.
This Court, like the court below, tries to avoid Transportation Management by implying that the Court's definition of burden of proof in § 7(c) as burden of production was inessential to its holding, since the Court only allowed the burden of persuasion to be placed on the employer after the NLRB had met its burden of persuasion on the elements of an unfair labor practice. 992 F. 2d 1277, 1281-1284 (CA3 1993); cf. ante, at 278 ("[T]he holding in that case remains intact"). The problem with this reading of Transportation Management, however, is that it is not at all what this Court said, or could have said. The reasoning chosen by the Court to justify its conclusion was that burden of proof in § 7(c) means burden of production, and thus is no impediment to the Board's rule. And in so explaining, the Court cited the leading case from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that had held "proof" synonymous with "production" in the text under examination. Environmental Defense Fund, supra.
The Court also reasons that the burden of proof holding of Transportation Management should be abandoned as conflicting with Steadman v. SEC, 450 U. S. 91 (1981), a decision announced just two Terms prior to Transportation Management. But Steadman and Transportation Management are simply not inconsistent with each other. Indeed, neither the parties to Transportation Management nor the Court itself saw Steadman as even relevant to the questions presented in Transportation Management. In Steadman, a mutual funds manager argued that in a disciplinary proceeding to determine whether he had violated the federal securities
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