Cite as: 505 U. S. 144 (1992)
Opinion of White, J.
761-762). In so reciting, the Court extracts from the relevant passage in a manner that subtly alters the Court's meaning. In full, the passage reads: "While this Court never has sanctioned explicitly a federal command to the States to promulgate and enforce laws and regulations, cf. EPA v. Brown, 431 U. S. 99 (1977), there are instances where the Court has upheld federal statutory structures that in effect directed state decisionmakers to take or to refrain from taking certain actions." Ibid. (citing Fry v. United States, 421 U. S. 542 (1975) (emphasis added)).2 The phrase highlighted by the Court merely means that we have not had the occasion to address whether Congress may "command" the States to enact a certain law, and as I have argued in Parts I and II of this opinion, these cases do not raise that issue. Moreover, it should go without saying that the absence of any on-point precedent from this Court has no bearing on the question whether Congress has properly exercised its constitutional authority under Article I. Silence by this Court on a subject is not authority for anything.
The Court can scarcely rest on a distinction between federal laws of general applicability and those ostensibly directed solely at the activities of States, therefore, when the decisions from which it derives the rule not only made no such distinction, but validated federal statutes that constricted state sovereignty in ways greater than or similar to
2 It is true that under the majority's approach, Fry is distinguishable because it involved a statute generally applicable to both state governments and private parties. The law at issue in that case was the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, which imposed wage and salary limitations on private and state workers alike. In Fry, the Court upheld this statute's application to the States over a Tenth Amendment challenge. In my view, Fry perfectly captures the weakness of the majority's distinction, because the law upheld in that case involved a far more pervasive intrusion on state sovereignty—the authority of state governments to pay salaries and wages to its employees below the federal minimum—than the take title provision at issue here.
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