200
Opinion of White, J.
Moreover, it is utterly reasonable that, in crafting a delicate compromise between the three overburdened States that provided low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities and the rest of the States, Congress would have to ratify some punitive measure as the ultimate sanction for noncompliance. The take title provision, though surely onerous, does not take effect if the generator of the waste does not request such action, or if the State lives up to its bargain of providing a waste disposal facility either within the State or in another State pursuant to a regional compact arrangement or a separate contract. See 42 U. S. C. § 2021e(d)(2)(C).
Finally, to say, as the Court does, that the incursion on state sovereignty "cannot be ratified by the 'consent' of state officials," ante, at 182, is flatly wrong. In a case involving a congressional ratification statute to an interstate compact, the Court upheld a provision that Tennessee and Missouri had waived their immunity from suit. Over their objection, the Court held that "[t]he States who are parties to the compact by accepting it and acting under it assume the conditions that Congress under the Constitution attached." Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Comm'n, 359 U. S. 275, 281-282 (1959) (emphasis added). In so holding, the Court determined that a State may be found to have waived a fundamental aspect of its sovereignty—the right to be immune from suit—in the formation of an interstate compact even when in subsequent litigation it expressly denied its waiver. I fail to understand the reasoning behind the Court's selective distinctions among the various aspects of sovereignty that may and may not be waived and do not believe these distinctions will survive close analysis in future cases. Hard public policy choices sometimes require strong measures, and the Court's holding, while not irremediable, essentially misunderstands that the 1985 take title provision was part of a complex interstate agreement about which New York should not now be permitted to complain.
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