686
Opinion of the Court
employers and defendants." Welch, 483 U. S., at 477. Cf. Atascadero, 473 U. S., at 246.4
The United States points to two other contexts in which it asserts we have permitted Congress, in the exercise of its Article I powers, to extract "constructive waivers" of state sovereign immunity. In Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Comm'n, 359 U. S. 275 (1959), we held that a bistate commission which had been created pursuant to an interstate compact (and which we assumed partook of state sovereign immunity) had consented to suit by reason of a suability provision attached to the congressional approval of the compact. And we have held in such cases as South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U. S. 203 (1987), that Congress may, in the exercise of its spending power, condition its grant of funds to the States upon their taking certain actions that Congress could not require them to take, and that acceptance of the funds entails an agreement to the actions. These cases seem to us fundamentally different from the present one. Under the Compact Clause, U. S. Const., Art. I, § 10, cl. 3, States cannot form an interstate compact without first obtaining the express consent of Congress; the granting of such consent is a gratuity. So also, Congress has no obligation to use its Spending Clause power to disburse funds to the States; such
4 As for the suggestion of Justice Breyer that we limit state sovereign immunity to noncommercial state activities because Congress has so limited foreign sovereign immunity, in accord with the "modern trend," see post, at 699 (dissenting opinion) (citing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA), 28 U. S. C. § 1605(a)(2)), see also Justice Stevens's dissent, post, at 692: This proposal ignores the fact that state sovereign immunity, unlike foreign sovereign immunity, is a constitutional doctrine that is meant to be both immutable by Congress and resistant to trends. The text of the Eleventh Amendment, of course, makes no distinction between commercial and noncommercial state activities—and so if we were to combine Justice Breyer's literalistic interpretation of that Amendment with his affection for FSIA, we would have a "commercial activities" exception for all suits against States except those commenced in federal court by citizens of another State, a disposition that hardly "makes sense," post, at 699.
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