Cite as: 525 U. S. 366 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
of § 252 does not. It seems to us not peculiar that the mandated regulations should be specifically referenced, whereas regulations permitted pursuant to the Commission's § 201(b) authority are not. In any event, the mere lack of parallelism is surely not enough to displace that explicit authority. We hold, therefore, that the Commission has jurisdiction to design a pricing methodology.
For similar reasons, we reverse the Court of Appeals' determinations that the Commission had no jurisdiction to promulgate rules regarding state review of pre-existing interconnection agreements between incumbent LECs and other carriers, regarding rural exemptions, and regarding dialing parity. See 47 CFR §§ 51.303, 51.405, and 51.205- 51.215 (1997). None of the statutory provisions that these rules interpret displaces the Commission's general rule-making authority. While it is true that the 1996 Act entrusts state commissions with the job of approving interconnection agreements, 47 U. S. C. § 252(e) (1994 ed., Supp. II), and granting exemptions to rural LECs, § 251(f), these assignments, like the rate-establishing assignment just discussed, do not logically preclude the Commission's issuance of rules to guide the state-commission judgments. And since the provision addressing dialing parity, § 251(b)(3), does not even mention the States, it is even clearer that the Commission's § 201(b) authority is not superseded.10
10 Justice Thomas notes that it is well settled that state officers may interpret and apply federal law, see, e. g., United States v. Jones, 109 U. S. 513 (1883), which leads him to conclude that there is no constitutional impediment to the interpretation that would give the States general authority, uncontrolled by the FCC's general rulemaking authority, over the matters specified in the particular sections we have just discussed. Post, at 411-412. But constitutional impediments aside, we are aware of no similar instances in which federal policymaking has been turned over to state administrative agencies. The arguments we have been addressing in the last three paragraphs of our text assume a scheme in which Congress has broadly extended its law into the field of intrastate telecommunications,
385
Page: Index Previous 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007