Cite as: 518 U. S. 839 (1996)
Opinion of Souter, J.
Because the lease made no reference to the Tribe's taxing power, we held simply that a waiver of that power could not be "inferred . . . from silence," ibid., since the taxing power of any government remains "unless it is has been specifically surrendered in terms which admit of no other reasonable interpretation." Ibid. (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).
In Bowen v. Public Agencies Opposed to Social Security Entrapment, 477 U. S. 41 (1986), this Court confronted a state claim that § 103 of the Social Security Amendments Act of 1983, 97 Stat. 71, 42 U. S. C. § 418(g) (1982 ed., Supp. II), was unenforceable to the extent it was inconsistent with the terms of a prior agreement with the National Government. Under the law before 1983, a State could agree with the Secretary of Health and Human Services to cover the State's employees under the Social Security scheme subject to a right to withdraw them from coverage later. When the 1983 Act eliminated the right of withdrawal, the State of California and related plaintiffs sought to enjoin application of the new law to them, or to obtain just compensation for loss of the withdrawal right (a remedy which the District Court interpreted as tantamount to the injunction, since it would mandate return of all otherwise required contributions, see 477 U. S., at 51). Although we were able to resolve the case by reading the terms of a state-federal coverage agreement to reserve the Government's right to modify its terms by subsequent legislation, in the alternative we rested the decision on the more general principle that, absent an "unmistakable" provision to the contrary, "contractual arrangements, including those to which a sovereign itself is a party, 'remain subject to subsequent legislation' by the sovereign." Id., at 52 (quoting Merrion, supra, at 147). We thus rejected the proposal "to find that a 'sovereign forever waives the right to exercise one of its sovereign powers unless it expressly reserves the right to exercise that power in' the contract," Bowen, supra, at 52 (quoting Merrion, supra, at 148), and
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