872
Opinion of the Court
quires. See, e. g., 49 CFR § 571.212 (1999). Insofar as petitioners' argument would permit common-law actions that "actually conflict" with federal regulations, it would take from those who would enforce a federal law the very ability to achieve the law's congressionally mandated objectives that the Constitution, through the operation of ordinary preemption principles, seeks to protect. To the extent that such an interpretation of the saving provision reads into a particular federal law toleration of a conflict that those principles would otherwise forbid, it permits that law to defeat its own objectives, or potentially, as the Court has put it before, to " 'destroy itself.' " AT&T, supra, at 228 (quoting Abilene Cotton, supra, at 446). We do not claim that Congress lacks the constitutional power to write a statute that mandates such a complex type of state/federal relationship. Cf. post, at 900, n. 16. But there is no reason to believe Congress has done so here.
The dissent, as we have said, contends nonetheless that the express pre-emption and saving provisions here, taken together, create a "special burden," which a court must impose "on a party" who claims conflict pre-emption under those principles. Post, at 898. But nothing in the Safety Act's language refers to any "special burden." Nor can one find the basis for a "special burden" in this Court's precedents. It is true that, in Freightliner Corp. v. Myrick, 514 U. S. 280 (1995), the Court said, in the context of interpreting the Safety Act, that "[a]t best" there is an "inference that an express pre-emption clause forecloses implied pre-emption." Id., at 289 (emphasis added). But the Court made this statement in the course of rejecting the more absolute argument that the presence of the express pre-emption provision entirely foreclosed the possibility of conflict pre-emption. Id., at 288. The statement, headed with the qualifier "[a]t best," and made in a case where, without any need for inferences or "special burdens," state law obviously would survive, see id., at 289-290, simply preserves a legal possibility. This
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