Cite as: 523 U. S. 517 (1998)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
Justice Scalia, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join the opinion of the Court except that portion which takes seriously, and thus encourages in the future, an argument that should be laughed out of court. The Government contended that 31 U. S. C. § 3713(a) must have priority over the Federal Tax Lien Act of 1966, because in 1966 and again in 1970 Congress "failed to enact" a proposal put forward by the American Bar Association that would have subordinated § 3713(a) to the Tax Lien Act, citing hearings before the House Committee on Ways and Means, and a bill proposed in, but not passed by, the Senate. See Brief for United States 25-27, and n. 10 (citing American Bar Association, Final Report of the Committee on Federal Liens 7, 122-124 (1959), contained in Hearings on H. R. 11256 and 11290 before the House Committee on Ways and Means, 89th Cong., 2d Sess., 85, 199 (1966); S. 2197, 92d Cong., 1st Sess. (1971)). The Court responds that these rejected proposals "provide no support for the hypothesis that both Houses of Congress silently endorsed" the supremacy of § 3713, ante, at 534, because those proposals contained other provisions as well, and might have been rejected because of those other provisions, or because Congress thought the existing law already made § 3713 supreme. This implies that, if the proposals had not contained those additional features, or if Members of Congress (or some part of them) had somehow made clear in the course of rejecting them that they wanted the existing supremacy of the Tax Lien Act to subsist, the rejection would "provide support" for the Government's case.
That is not so, for several reasons. First and most obviously, Congress cannot express its will by a failure to legislate. The act of refusing to enact a law (if that can be called an act) has utterly no legal effect, and thus has utterly no place in a serious discussion of the law. The Constitution sets forth the only manner in which the Members of Congress have the power to impose their will upon the country:
535
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