Cite as: 535 U. S. 55 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
in these cases, he says, the Committee must have thought that the Government's only answer to nonobjecting defendants should be to prove error harmless, if it could. But this argument ignores the fact that these cases were not merely instances of automatic reversal, but were cited along with harmless-error cases as illustrations of the "considerable disagreement" that arose after McCarthy among Courts of Appeals in treating errors of trivial significance. See Advisory Committee's Notes 1568. Given the Advisory Committee's apparent focus on the disarray among courts, the citations Vonn points to cannot reliably be read to suggest that plain-error review should never apply to Rule 11 errors, when the Advisory Committee Notes never made such an assertion and the reported cases cited by the Committee never mentioned the plain-error/harmless-error distinction.
We think, rather, that the significance of Congress's choice to adopt a harmless-error rule is best understood by taking the Advisory Committee at its word. "It must . . . be emphasized that a harmless error provision has been added to Rule 11 because some courts have read McCarthy as meaning that the general harmless error provision in Rule 52(a) cannot be utilized with respect to Rule 11 proceedings." Id., at 1569. The Committee said it was responding simply to a claim that the harmless-error rule did not apply. Having pinpointed that problem, it gave a pinpoint answer. If instead the Committee had taken note of claims that "Rule 52" did not apply, or that "neither harmless-error nor plain-error rule applied," one could infer that enacting a harmless-error rule and nothing more was meant to rule out anything but harmless-error treatment. But by providing for harmless-error review in response to nothing more than the claim that harmless-error review would itself be erroneous, the Advisory Committee implied nothing more than it said, and it certainly did not implicitly repeal Rule 52(b) so far as it might cover a Rule 11 case.
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