Cite as: 532 U. S. 706 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
sis was the supervisory function of responsible direction. "Under § 2(11)," we noted, "an employee who in the course of employment uses independent judgment to engage in 1 of the 12 listed activities, including responsible direction of other employees, is a supervisor. Under the Board's test, however, a nurse who in the course of employment uses independent judgment to engage in responsible direction of other employees is not a supervisor." 511 U. S., at 578-579. We therefore rejected the Board's analysis as "inconsistent with . . . the statutory language," because it "rea[d] the responsible direction portion of § 2(11) out of the statute in nurse cases." Id., at 579-580. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Board's interpretation of "independent judgment," applied to nurses for the first time after our decision in Health Care, has precisely the same object. This interpretation of "independent judgment" is no less strained than the interpretation of "in the interest of the employer" that it has succeeded.2 Cf. Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U. S. 359, 374 (1998) (an agency that announces one principle but applies another is not acting rationally under the Act).
The Board contends, however, that Congress incorporated the Board's categorical restrictions on "independent judgment" when it first added the term "supervisor" to the Act in 1947. We think history shows the opposite. The Act as originally passed by Congress in 1935 did not mention supervisors directly. It extended to "employees" the "right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations,
2 Justice Stevens argues in this case, see post, at 725-726 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part), as the Board argued in NLRB v. Health Care & Retirement Corp. of America, 511 U. S. 571, 579 (1994), that the strain is eased by the ambiguity of a different term in the statute, "responsibly to direct." That argument is no more persuasive now than when we rejected it in Health Care: "[A]mbiguity in one portion of a statute does not give the Board license to distort other provisions of the statute," ibid.
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