116
Souter, J., dissenting
State that they are suing, the Eleventh Amendment simply does not apply to them. We must therefore look elsewhere for the source of that immunity by which the Court says their suit is barred from a federal court.13
II
The obvious place to look elsewhere, of course, is Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U. S. 1 (1890), and Hans was indeed a leap in the direction of today's holding, even though it does not take the Court all the way. The parties in Hans raised, and the Court in that case answered, only what I have called the second question, that is, whether the Constitution, without
enth Amendment; on the contrary, just because these early statutes underscore the early Congresses' recognition of the availability of federal-question jurisdiction, the silence of the Eleventh Amendment is all the more deafening.
13 The majority chides me that the "lengthy analysis of the text of the Eleventh Amendment is directed at a straw man," ante, at 69. But plain text is the Man of Steel in a confrontation with "background principle[s]" and " 'postulates which limit and control,' " ante, at 68, 72. An argument rooted in the text of a constitutional provision may not be guaranteed of carrying the day, but insubstantiality is not its failing. See, e. g., Monaghan, Our Perfect Constitution, 56 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 353, 383-384 (1981) ("For the purposes of legal reasoning, the binding quality of the constitutional text is itself incapable of and not in need of further demonstration"); cf. Bourjaily v. United States, 483 U. S. 171, 178 (1987) (Rehnquist, C. J.) ("It would be extraordinary to require legislative history to confirm the plain meaning of [Federal Rule of Evidence] 104"); Garcia v. United States, 469 U. S. 70, 75 (1984) (Rehnquist, J.) ("[O]nly the most extraordinary showing of contrary intentions from [the legislative history] would justify a limitation on the 'plain meaning' of the statutory language"). This is particularly true in construing the jurisdictional provisions of Article III, which speak with a clarity not to be found in some of the more open-textured provisions of the Constitution. See National Mut. Ins. Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co., 337 U. S. 582, 646-647 (1949) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting); Schauer, Easy Cases, 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 399, 424 (1985) (noting the "seemingly plain linguistic mandate" of the Eleventh Amendment). That the Court thinks otherwise is an indication of just how far it has strayed beyond the boundaries of traditional constitutional analysis.
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