Cite as: 521 U. S. 320 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
chapter 154 applies to pending cases when its terms fit those cases at the particular procedural points they have reached. (As to that, of course, there may well be difficult issues, and it may be that application of Landgraf's default rule will be necessary to settle some of them.)
The next point that is significant for our purposes is that everything we have just observed about chapter 154 is true of changes made to chapter 153. As we have already noted, amended § 2254(d) (in chapter 153 but applicable to chapter 154 cases) governs standards affecting entitlement to relief. If, then, Congress was reasonably concerned to ensure that chapter 154 be applied to pending cases, it should have been just as concerned about chapter 153, unless it had the different intent that the latter chapter not be applied to the general run of pending cases.
Nothing, indeed, but a different intent explains the different treatment. This might not be so if, for example, the two chapters had evolved separately in the congressional process, only to be passed together at the last minute, after chapter 154 had already acquired the mandate to apply it to pending cases. Under those circumstances, there might have been a real possibility that Congress would have intended the same rule of application for each chapter, but in the rough-and-tumble no one had thought of being careful about chapter 153, whereas someone else happened to think of inserting a
proceedings pending on or commenced after the date of enactment of this Act." 511 U. S., at 260 (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted). But, even if that language did qualify, its use of the sort of absolute language absent from § 107(c) distinguishes it. Cf. United States v. Williams, 514 U. S. 527, 531-532 (1995) (finding a waiver of sovereign immunity "unequivocally expressed" in language granting jurisdiction to the courts over "[a]ny civil action against the United States for the recovery of any internal-revenue tax alleged to have been erroneously or illegally assessed or collected" (emphasis in Williams; internal quotation marks omitted)); id., at 541 (Scalia, J., concurring) ("The [clear-statement] rule does not . . . require explicit waivers to be given a meaning that is implausible . . .").
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