766
Opinion of the Court
(1988) (Scalia, J., concurring) (Chevron deference applies to agency's interpretation of its own statutory jurisdiction)). But we have no occasion to review the call for deference here, the interpretation urged in respondent's brief being clearly the better reading of the statute under ordinary principles of construction.
The FTC Act is at pains to include not only an entity "organized to carry on business for its own profit," 15 U. S. C. § 44, but also one that carries on business for the profit "of its members," ibid. While such a supportive organization may be devoted to helping its members in ways beyond immediate enhancement of profit, no one here has claimed that such an entity must devote itself single-mindedly to the profit of others. It could, indeed, hardly be supposed that Congress intended such a restricted notion of covered supporting organizations, with the opportunity this would bring with it for avoiding jurisdiction where the purposes of the FTC Act would obviously call for asserting it.
Just as the FTC Act does not require that a supporting organization must devote itself entirely to its members' profits, neither does the Act say anything about how much of the entity's activities must go to raising the members' bottom lines. There is accordingly no apparent reason to let the statute's application turn on meeting some threshold percentage of activity for this purpose, or even satisfying a softer formulation calling for a substantial part of the nonprofit entity's total activities to be aimed at its members' pecuniary benefit. To be sure, proximate relation to lucre must appear; the FTC Act does not cover all membership organizations of profit-making corporations without more, and an organization devoted solely to professional education may lie outside the FTC Act's jurisdictional reach, even though the quality of professional services ultimately affects the profits of those who deliver them.
There is no line drawing exercise in this case, however, where the CDA's contributions to the profits of its individual
Page: Index Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007