530
Opinion of the Court
the Court constitutional decisions which could have been avoided had those errors been invoked earlier."
We do not think Communist Party blocks our consideration of Rules 315(c)-(f). The issue there was raised by the petitioner's failure on an earlier trip to this Court to pursue a procedural objection to agency action. Litigation of the procedural point would not only have obviated the Court's need to review the constitutionality of an Act of Congress when the case got here, but could have saved five years of litigation during which time "the Board and the Court of Appeals [had] each twice more reconsidered [the] steadily growing record . . . ." Id., at 31-32, n. 8. After all that time, petitioner sought review of the procedural point.
Nothing like that can be said about these cases. Addressing the issue now would not "make waste" of years of efforts by the FCC or the Court of Appeals, id., at 32, n. 8, would not threaten to leave a constitutional ruling pointless, and would direct the Court's attention not to an isolated, "long-stale" procedural error by the agency, ibid., but to the invalidation of FCC rules meant to have general and continuing applicability. There is no indication of litigation tactics behind the failure last time to appeal on these rules, which were reexamined on remand at the behest of the court, not the Government or the competing carriers.
Any issue "pressed or passed upon below" by a federal court, United States v. Williams, 504 U. S. 36, 41 (1992) (internal quotation marks omitted), is subject to this Court's broad discretion over the questions it chooses to take on certiorari, and there are good reasons to look at Rules 315(c)-(f). The Court of Appeals passed on a significant issue, and one placed in a state of flux, see Virginia Bankshares, Inc. v. Sandberg, 501 U. S. 1083, 1099, n. 8 (1991) (citations omitted), by the split between these cases and US West Communications v. MFS Intelenet, Inc., 193 F. 3d 1112, 1121 (CA9 1999), (affirming identical state-commission rules), cert. denied, 530 U. S. 1284 (2000). We accordingly rejected the incumbents'
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