Cite as: 527 U. S. 666 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
College Savings and the United States concede, as they surely must, that these intervening decisions have seriously limited the holding of Parden. They maintain, however, that Employees and Welch are distinguishable, and that a core principle of Parden remains good law. A Parden-style waiver of immunity, they say, is still possible after Employees and Welch so long as the following two conditions are satisfied: First, Congress must provide unambiguously that the State will be subject to suit if it engages in certain specified conduct governed by federal regulation. Second, the State must voluntarily elect to engage in the federally regulated conduct that subjects it to suit. In this latter regard, their argument goes, a State is never deemed to have constructively waived its sovereign immunity by engaging in activities that it cannot realistically choose to abandon, such
may be found in a State's acceptance of a federal grant." Post, at 696. But we make the same suggestion today, while utterly rejecting Parden. As we explain elsewhere in detail, see infra, at 686-687, conditions attached to a State's receipt of federal funds are simply not analogous to Parden-style conditions attached to a State's decision to engage in otherwise lawful commercial activity. Justice Breyer's second case, Welch, overruled Parden in part, as we discuss above, and we think it quite impossible to believe that the following statement in the opinion did not "questio[n] the holding of Parden that the Court today discards," post, at 698: "We assume, without deciding or intimating a view of the question, that the authority of Congress to subject unconsenting States to suit in federal court is not confined to § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment." 483 U. S., at 475. Calling what a prior case has flatly decided a "question" in need of "deciding," and (lest there be any doubt on the point) making it clear that we "intimat[e] no view" as to whether the answer given by that prior case was correct, surely was handwriting on the wall which even an inept cryptologist would recognize as spelling out the caption of today's opinion. As for Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 517 U. S. 44 (1996), we explain elsewhere, see infra, at 682-684, how that case was logically and practically inconsistent with Parden, even though it did not expressly overrule it. Justice Breyer realizes this well enough, or else his call for an overruling of that case, which occupies almost half of his dissent, see post, at 699-705, would be supremely irrelevant to the matter before us.
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