Cite as: 519 U. S. 278 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
sales of gas within their respective jurisdictions. Dorner § 2.06.8
When federal regulation of the natural gas industry finally began in 1938, Congress, too, clearly recognized the value of such state-regulated monopoly arrangements for the sale and distribution of natural gas directly to local consumers. Thus, § 1(b) of the NGA, 15 U. S. C. § 717(b), explicitly exempted "local distribution of natural gas" from federal regulation, even as the NGA authorized the Federal Power
8 In Arkansas Elec. Cooperative Corp. v. Arkansas Pub. Serv. Comm'n, 461 U. S. 375 (1983), we rejected the bright-line distinction between wholesale and retail sales drawn by these older cases and concluded that state regulation of wholesale sales of electricity transmitted in interstate commerce is not precluded by the Commerce Clause. Reasoning that utilities should not be insulated from our contemporary dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence by formalistic judge-made rules, id., at 391, we looked instead to " 'the nature of the state regulation involved, the objective of the state, and the effect of the regulation upon the national interest in the commerce,' " id., at 390 (quoting Illinois Natural Gas Co. v. Central Ill. Public Service Co., 314 U. S. 498, 505 (1942)), to determine whether States have a sufficient interest in regulating wholesale rates within their borders, and had no problem concluding that States do indeed have such an interest, with the result that state regulation of wholesale rates is not precluded by the Commerce Clause (in the absence of pre-emptive congressional action), id., at 394-395. While the holding of Arkansas Electric thereby expanded both the permissible scope of state utility regulation and judicial recognition of the important state interests in such regulation, the reasoning of the case equally implies that state regulation of retail sales is not, as a constitutional matter, immune from our ordinary Commerce Clause jurisprudence, and to the extent that our earlier cases may have implied such immunity they are no longer good law. Nothing in Arkansas Electric undermines the earlier cases' recognition of the powerful state interest in regulating sales to domestic consumers buying at retail, however, which we reaffirm here. In addition, Arkansas Electric does not disturb the relevance of the wholesale/retail distinction for construing the jurisdictional provisions of statutes such as the NGA, which we discuss immediately below. See id., at 380, and n. 3; see also Schneide-wind v. ANR Pipeline Co., 485 U. S. 293, 300-301 (1988) ("The NGA confers upon FERC exclusive jurisdiction over the transportation and sale of natural gas in interstate commerce for resale").
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