404
Opinion of the Court
brid tolling rule the dissent is compelled to devise in order to give the consolidation provision meaning.
It is worthwhile pausing to consider just how many steps the dissent must take to reconcile the consolidation provision with the tolling rule it prefers. The dissent's construction would require that the Court conclude, without any briefing, that our decision in Griggs does not apply to agency review. The dissent would as well disrupt administrative law in general by overturning the practice of the Court of Appeals with the most experience reviewing agency decisions when faced with agency reconsideration motions made after petition for review (the District of Columbia Circuit), thereby resolving a circuit split without any briefing or argument. See post, at 412. Our construction avoids each of these extraordinary steps. It creates a practice parallel to that of appellate courts reviewing district court judgments subject to pending Rule 60(b) motions filed more than 10 days after judgment and requires us to take no firm position on whether Griggs applies to agency review where tolling does occur.
But the full import of our decision in Griggs, and the concomitant problem addressed in Wade, are in some sense secondary to our fundamental point of dispute with the dissent. In our view the consolidation provision reflects Congress' intent to depart from the normal tolling rule in this context, whereas on the dissent's view it does not. Congress itself was explicit in stating that the consolidation provision is an exception to the applicability of the Hobbs Act procedures, see supra, at 393, and it took the deliberate step of amending the Act in 1990 to add the provision. The challenge for the dissent is not, then, just to give the consolidation provision some work to do that is consistent with the tolling rule, but to give it some work as an exception to the applicability of the Hobbs Act procedures, a meaning that explains why Congress might have taken trouble to add it. The dissent's construction of the consolidation provision gives it effect, if any, only in what must be those rare instances where aliens first
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