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Opinion of the Court
defines a sentencing factor. Even those of us disposed to treat legislative history as authority, however, find the quoted statements unimpressive. Assuming that "penalty enhancement" was meant to be synonymous with "sentencing factor," the legislative history also contains contrary indications in some of the statements made by the 1996 amend-ment's sponsors, suggesting an assumption that subsection (2) established an element or elements that had to be proven at trial. See 142 Cong. Rec. 19769 (1996) (statement of Sen. Biden) ("[T]he defendant had been convicted of raping the woman" (emphasis added)). This hardly seems the occasion to doubt that "subsequent legislative history is a 'hazardous basis for inferring the intent of an earlier' Congress." Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. LTV Corp., 496 U. S. 633, 650 (1990) (quoting United States v. Price, 361 U. S. 304, 313 (1960)). Indeed, our leeriness of relying on hindsight expressed in legislative history is only confirmed by recognizing what oddity there would be in defining the fact of serious bodily injury by reference to a distinct offense with its own offense elements, like sexual abuse, while at the same time assuming that the fact so defined is merely a sentencing consideration.
Nor do we think the legislative history that attracted the Court of Appeals is any more helpful to the Government. See 60 F. 3d, at 553. The Committee Reports and floor debate on the statute refer to its augmentation of the criminal law in the singular, not the plural, speaking only of a new federal "crime" or "offense" of carjacking in the singular. See, e. g., H. R. Rep. No. 102-851, pt. 1, p. 17 (1992); 138 Cong. Rec. 32500 (1992) (statement of Rep. Dingell). But what we make of the singular-plural distinction turns on the circumstances. Characterizing a cluster of provisions as enacting something to be described by the singular terms "offense" or "crime" would signify a good deal if the speakers or writers were addressing a point on which the distinction mattered. That is not, however, what they were doing in the
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