Cite as: 534 U. S. 84 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
life, we would understand an analogous instruction—say, "Test drive some cars, including Plymouth, Nissan, Chevrolet, Ford, and Kitchenaid"—not as creating ambiguity, but as reflecting a mistake. Here too, in context, common sense suggests that the cross-reference is simply a drafting mistake, a failure to delete an inappropriate cross-reference in the bill that Congress later enacted into law. Cf. Little Six, Inc. v. United States, 229 F. 3d 1383, 1385 (CA Fed. 2000) (Dyk, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc) ("The language of the provision has all the earmarks of a simple mistake in legislative drafting").
B
The Gaming Act's legislative history on balance supports our conclusion. The subsection as it appeared in the original Senate bill applied both to taxation and to reporting and withholding. It read as follows:
"Provisions of the Internal Revenue Code . . . concerning the taxation and the reporting and withholding of taxes with respect to gambling or wagering operations shall apply to Indian gaming operations . . . the same as they apply to State operations." S. 555, 100th Cong., 1st Sess., 37 (1987).
With the "taxation" language present, it would have made sense to include chapter 35, which concerns taxation, in a parenthetical that included other provisions that concern reporting and withholding. But the Senate committee deleted the taxation language. Why did it permit the cross-reference to chapter 35 to remain? Committee documents do not say.
The Tribes argue that the committee intentionally left it in the statute in order to serve as a substitute for the word "taxation." An amicus tries to support this view by pointing to a tribal representative's testimony that certain Tribes were "opposed to any indication where Internal Revenue
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