Cite as: 524 U. S. 498 (1998)
Breyer, J., dissenting
the same understanding that led legislators in both political parties to conclude that the Coal Act of 1992 represented a fair solution to a difficult problem.
Given the critical importance of the reasonable expectations of both the miners and the operators during the period before their implicit agreement was made explicit in 1974, I am unable to agree with the plurality's conclusion that the retroactive application of the 1992 Act is an unconstitutional "taking" of Eastern's property. Rather, it seems to me that the plurality and Justice Kennedy have substituted their judgment about what is fair for the better informed judgment of the members of the Coal Commission and Congress.6
Accordingly, I conclude that, whether the provision in question is analyzed under the Takings Clause or the Due Process Clause, Eastern has not carried its burden of overcoming the presumption of constitutionality accorded to an Act of Congress, by demonstrating that the provision is unsupported by the reasonable expectations of the parties in interest.
Justice Breyer, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, and Justice Ginsburg join, dissenting.
We must decide whether it is fundamentally unfair for Congress to require Eastern Enterprises to pay the health care costs of retired miners who worked for Eastern before 1965, when Eastern stopped mining coal. For many years Eastern benefited from the labor of those miners. Eastern helped to create conditions that led the miners to expect continued health care benefits for themselves and their families
6 It may well be true that the majority might have been able to fashion a wiser solution to a difficult problem. Nevertheless, as Chief Justice Hughes observed in a dissent joined by Justices Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo: "The power committed to Congress to govern interstate commerce does not require that its government should be wise, much less that it should be perfect." Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Alton R. Co., 295 U. S. 330, 391-392 (1935).
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