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Opinion of the Court
ble laws regulating "areas where ERISA has nothing to say," Dillingham, 519 U. S., at 330, which we have upheld notwithstanding their incidental effect on ERISA plans, see, e. g., ibid., this statute governs the payment of benefits, a central matter of plan administration.
The Washington statute also has a prohibited connection with ERISA plans because it interferes with nationally uniform plan administration. One of the principal goals of ERISA is to enable employers "to establish a uniform administrative scheme, which provides a set of standard procedures to guide processing of claims and disbursement of benefits." Fort Halifax Packing Co. v. Coyne, 482 U. S. 1, 9 (1987). Uniformity is impossible, however, if plans are subject to different legal obligations in different States.
The Washington statute at issue here poses precisely that threat. Plan administrators cannot make payments simply by identifying the beneficiary specified by the plan documents.2 Instead they must familiarize themselves with
serving that the plan documents are silent on whether "invalidation" is to occur upon divorce. The dissent employs just such an approach. See post, at 155-156 (opinion of Breyer, J.). Reading a clear statement as an ambiguous metastatement enables one to avoid all kinds of conflicts between seemingly contradictory texts. Suppose, for example, that the statute required that all pension benefits be paid to the Governor of Washington. That seems inconsistent with the plan documents (and with ERISA), but the inconsistency disappears if one calls the statute an "in-validation" of the principal and alternate beneficiary designations. After all, neither the plan nor ERISA actually says that beneficiaries cannot be invalidated in favor of the Governor. This approach exploits the logical inability of any text to contain a complete set of instructions for its own interpretation. It has the vice—or perhaps the virtue, depending upon one's point of view—of draining all language of its meaning.
2 Respondents argue that in this case, the disposition dictated by the Washington statute is consistent with that specified in the plan documents. Because Mr. Egelhoff designated "Donna R. Egelhoff wife" as the beneficiary of the life insurance policy, they contend that once the Egelhoffs divorced, "there was no such person as 'Donna R. Egelhoff wife'; the designated person had definitionally ceased to exist." Brief for Respondents 44 (emphasis in original); see also post, at 155 (Breyer, J., dissenting). In effect, respondents ask us to infer that what Mr. Egelhoff meant when
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