768
Breyer, J., dissenting
tion of that part increases the minimum penalty to 10 years and the maximum penalty to life if the offender has a previous drug felony conviction. The Commission's Career Offender Guideline treats the statutory term "authorized" as if it referred to the "maximums" that § 841 provides, except for this last-mentioned part.
II
We must decide whether the career offender statute permits the Commission to write this Career Offender Guideline—a Guideline that looks to the maximum sentences that individual criminal statutes authorize for the behavior that constitutes the offense. That Guideline does not look to the maximum sentence that an individual criminal statute authorizes for recidivism—perhaps the most important offender characteristic. In a sense, it says that the career offender statute, which tells the Commission to transform statutory maximums into approximate Guideline minimums, is Congress' basic recidivism provision. That is to say, the Commission's Guideline essentially reads the career offender statute as permitting an implementing Guideline that substitutes for, rather than supplements, other statutory recidivism-based maximum-sentence enhancements.
The question that divides this Court is not about the wisdom of this implementing interpretation. It is whether the "career offender" statute's words "maximum term authorized" are open to the Commission's interpretation or whether they unambiguously forbid it. In my view, the words, whether read by themselves, read within the context of sentencing law, or read against the historic background of sentencing reform, do not unambiguously forbid the Guideline. Rather, their ambiguity indicates that Congress simply has not "addressed the precise question." Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843.
First, the language itself—the words "maximum term authorized"—is ambiguous. As I previously pointed out,
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