376
Opinion of the Court
admit. And it is just this plenitude of Executive authority that we think controls the issue of preemption here. The President has been given this authority not merely to make a political statement but to achieve a political result, and the fullness of his authority shows the importance in the congressional mind of reaching that result. It is simply implausible that Congress would have gone to such lengths to empower the President if it had been willing to compromise his effectiveness by deference to every provision of state statute or local ordinance that might, if enforced, blunt the consequences of discretionary Presidential action.10
And that is just what the Massachusetts Burma law would do in imposing a different, state system of economic pressure against the Burmese political regime. As will be seen, the state statute penalizes some private action that the federal Act (as administered by the President) may allow, and pulls levers of influence that the federal Act does not reach. But the point here is that the state sanctions are immediate,11
see 1996 Mass. Acts 239, ch. 130, § 3 (restricting all contracts after law's effective date); Mass. Gen. Laws § 7:22K (1997)
10 The State makes arguments that could be read to suggest that Congress's objective of Presidential flexibility was limited to discretion solely over the sanctions in the federal Act, and that Congress implicitly left control over state sanctions to the State. Brief for Petitioners 19-24. We reject this cramped view of Congress's intent as against the weight of the evidence. Congress made no explicit statement of such limited objectives. More importantly, the federal Act itself strongly indicates the opposite. For example, under the federal Act, Congress explicitly identified protecting "national security interests" as a ground on which the President could suspend federal sanctions. § 570(e), 110 Stat. 3009-167. We find it unlikely that Congress intended both to enable the President to protect national security by giving him the flexibility to suspend or terminate federal sanctions and simultaneously to allow Massachusetts to act at odds with the President's judgment of what national security requires.
11 These provisions strongly resemble the immediate sanctions on investment that appeared in the proposed section of H. R. 3540 that Congress rejected in favor of the federal Act. See H. R. 3540, 104th Cong., 2d Sess., § 569(1) (1996).
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