726
Scalia, J., dissenting
or terms of more than one year, a prisoner shall be eligible for release on parole after serving one-third of such term . . ."). The question whether further supervised release may be required after revocation of supervised release is so entirely different from the question whether further parole may be accorded after revocation of parole, that the Court's appeal to the parole practice demonstrates nothing except the dire scarcity of arguments available to support its conclusion.7
7 The Court also appeals to pre-Guidelines practice regarding probation and special parole. Ante, at 711-712, n. 11. The pre-Guidelines probation practice is altogether inapt, since the governing statute explicitly provided for resentencing after violation, and specifically allowed the court to "impose any sentence which might originally have been imposed." 18 U. S. C. § 3653 (1982 ed.) (repealed). This makes it quite impossible for probation practice to support the Court's "broader point that a court's powers at the original sentencing are the baseline from which powers at resentencing are determined," ante, at 711, n. 11; all it proves is that they are the baseline where the statute says so. Indeed, the fact that the statute found it necessary to say so tends to contradict the Court's position.
Special parole, while more akin to supervised release than either parole or probation, hardly provides clear support for the Court's reading of § 3583(e)(3). In fact, the majority of Courts of Appeals have read the relevant statute regarding special parole, 21 U. S. C. § 841(c) (1982 ed.) (re-pealed), as not allowing reimposition of special parole in circumstances analogous to those at issue here. See Manso v. Federal Detention Center, 182 F. 3d 814, 817 (CA11 1999) (citing cases). The Court's reliance on the Parole Commission's 1977 interpretation of the special parole statute, see 28 CFR § 2.57(c) (1999), is misplaced. The principle that Congress is presumed to legislate in light of existing administrative interpretations does not stretch to cover an administrative interpretation of a statute dealing with a different subject, of recent vintage, and unsupported by judicial opinion. Cf. Bragdon v. Abbott, 524 U. S. 624, 645 (1998) (repetition of existing statutory language assumed to incorporate "uniform body of administrative and judicial precedent" that had "settled the meaning" of existing provision); Haig v. Agee, 453 U. S. 280, 297 (1981) (assuming congressional awareness of "longstanding administrative construction"). Further, some courts have found it unclear whether the Parole Commission's regulation itself envisions reimposition of special parole. See, e. g., Fowler v. United States Parole Commission, 94 F. 3d 835, 841 (CA3 1996).
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