264
Opinion of the Court
V
Our holding leaves the jurisdiction of the federal courts well within Article III's limits. As long ago as Osborn, this Court held that Article III's "arising under" jurisdiction is broad enough to authorize Congress to confer federal-court jurisdiction over actions involving federally chartered corporations. See 9 Wheat., at 823-828.16 We have consistently reaffirmed the breadth of that holding. See Pacific R. Removal Cases, 115 U. S., at 11-14; In re Dunn, 212 U. S. 374, 383-384 (1909); Bankers Trust, 241 U. S., at 305-306; Puerto
construed in Osborn and D'Oench, Duhme, confers both capacity to sue and jurisdiction. While capacity to sue in both federal and state courts was already clearly established before the 1947 amendment, it may have been feared that the addition of the word "Federal" to confer federal jurisdiction would be misread to limit the Red Cross's capacity to sue in state courts, if it were not reaffirmed by explicit inclusion of the word "State."
It is the dissent's conclusion that the 1947 amendment was meant to "eliminat[e] the possibility that the language 'courts of law and equity within the jurisdiction of the United States' that was contained in the original charter might be read to limit the grant of capacity to sue in federal court," post, at 275 (emphasis and citation omitted); that is difficult to justify. Such a motivation is nowhere even hinted at in the Advisory Report, the document both Houses of Congress acknowledged as the source for the amendment, see supra, at 261 (quoting congressional reports); indeed, the relevant part of the Advisory Report does not even mention state courts, see Advisory Report 35-36, reprinted at App. to Brief for Appellants in No. 90-1873, at 132-133. It is hardly a "reasonable construction," post, at 275, of the amendment to view it as granting something the Advisory Report never requested. While the dissent notes one of Senator George's comments supporting its hypothesis, it ignores the other, which explicitly notes a federal jurisdiction-conferring motivation behind the amendment. See supra, at 261, n. 13.
Neither party reads the 1947 amendment to clarify the Red Cross's capacity to sue in state courts, and, as there is no evidence of such an intent, we do not embrace that reading here.
16 Again, it should be pointed out that statutory jurisdiction in this case is not based on the Red Cross's federal incorporation, but rather upon a specific statutory grant. In contrast, the constitutional question asks whether Article III's provision for federal jurisdiction over cases "arising under federal law" is sufficiently broad to allow that grant.
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