Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 513 U.S. 374, 21 (1995)

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394

LEBRON v. NATIONAL RAILROAD PASSENGER CORPORATION

Opinion of the Court

ernmental character was at most to enable the Court to make, later in the opinion, without applying the "more rigorous standard" urged by the railroads, the superfluous argument that "[e]ven were the Court of Appeals correct that the railroads have a private contractual right . . . we disagree with the Court of Appeals' conclusion that the Due Process Clause limited Congress' power to [affect that right as it did]." Id., at 476. Moreover, for the purpose at hand in Atchison it was quite proper for the Court to treat Congress's assertion of Amtrak's nongovernmental status in § 541 as conclusive. As we have suggested above, even if Amtrak is a Government entity, § 541's disavowal of that status certainly suffices to disable that agency from incurring contractual obligations on behalf of the United States. For these reasons, we think that Atchison's assumption of Amtrak's nongovernmental status (a point uncontested by the parties in the case, since it was not Amtrak's governmental character that the railroads relied upon to establish an obligation of the United States) does not bind us here.

V

The question before us today is unanswered, therefore, by governing statutory text or by binding precedent of this Court. Facing the question of Amtrak's status for the first time, we conclude that it is an agency or instrumentality of the United States for the purpose of individual rights guaranteed against the Government by the Constitution.

This conclusion seems to us in accord with public and judicial understanding of the nature of Government-created and -controlled corporations over the years. A remarkable feature of the heyday of those corporations, in the 1930's and 1940's, was that, even while they were praised for their status "as agencies separate and distinct, administratively and financially and legally, from the government itself, [which] has facilitated their adoption of commercial methods of accounting and financing, avoidance of political controls, and

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