42
Opinion of the Court
Compact Clause creations.11 Again, the federal tribunal cannot be regarded as alien in this cooperative, trigovern-mental arrangement. This is all the more apparent here, where the very claims in suit—the FELA claims of Hess and Walsh—arise under federal law. See supra, at 33.
Because Compact Clause entities owe their existence to state and federal sovereigns acting cooperatively, and not to any "one of the United States," see supra, at 33, n. 2, their political accountability is diffuse; they lack the tight tie to the people of one State that an instrument of a single State has:
"An interstate compact, by its very nature, shifts a part of a state's authority to another state or states, or to the agency the several states jointly create to run the compact. Such an agency under the control of special interests or gubernatorially appointed representatives is two or more steps removed from popular control, or even of control by a local government." M. Ridgeway, Interstate Compacts: A Question of Federalism 300 (1971).
In sum, within any single State in our representative democracy, voters may exercise their political will to direct state policy; bistate entities created by compact, however, are not subject to the unilateral control of any one of the States that compose the federal system.
Accordingly, there is good reason not to amalgamate Compact Clause entities with agencies of "one of the United States" for Eleventh Amendment purposes. This Court so recognized in Lake Country Estates, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 440 U. S. 391 (1979), the only case, prior
11 See Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corp. v. Feeney, 495 U. S. 299, 314- 316 (1990) (Brennan, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (observing that no single State has dominion over an entity created by interstate compact and that state/federal shared power is the essential attribute of such an entity); M. Ridgeway, Interstate Compacts: A Question of Federalism 297-300 (1971) (emphasizing limits of individual State's authority over interstate compact entities).
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