388
Scalia, J., concurring in judgment
ing more than the settled character of implied preemption doctrine that courts will dependably apply, and in any event, the existence of conflict cognizable under the Supremacy Clause does not depend on express congressional recognition that federal and state law may conflict, Hines, 312 U. S., at 67. The State's inference of congressional intent is unwar-ranted here, therefore, simply because the silence of Congress is ambiguous. Since we never ruled on whether state and local sanctions against South Africa in the 1980's were preempted or otherwise invalid, arguable parallels between the two sets of federal and state Acts do not tell us much about the validity of the latter.
V
Because the state Act's provisions conflict with Congress's specific delegation to the President of flexible discretion, with limitation of sanctions to a limited scope of actions and actors, and with direction to develop a comprehensive, multilateral strategy under the federal Act, it is preempted, and its application is unconstitutional, under the Supremacy Clause.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, concurring in the judgment.
It is perfectly obvious on the face of this statute that Congress, with the concurrence of the President, intended to "provid[e] the President with flexibility in implementing its Burma sanctions policy." Ante, at 375, n. 9. I therefore see no point in devoting a footnote to the interesting (albeit unsurprising) proposition that "[s]tatements by the sponsors of the federal Act" show that they shared this intent, ibid., and that a statement in a letter from a State Department officer shows that flexibility had "the explicit support of the
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