Cite as: 537 U. S. 149 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
business might not be assigned before October 1, 1993. As the companies themselves point out, the Commissioner led Congress to believe as late as 1995 that all possible assignments had been made on time, see n. 3, supra, and such little legislative history as there is on the point tends to show that Congress assumed that any assignments that could be made at all (say, to an operator still in business) would be made on time. On October 8, 1992, on the heels of the Conference Committee Report on the Act and just before the vote in the Senate adopting the Act, Senator Wallop gave a detailed explanation of the Coal Act's provisions for unassigned beneficiaries, which assumed that the "unassigned" would be true orphans:
"As a practical matter, not all beneficiaries can be assigned to a specific last signatory operator, related person or assigned operator for payment purposes. This is because in some instances, none of those persons remain in business, even as defined to include non-mining related businesses. Thus, provisions are made for unassigned beneficiary premiums." 138 Cong. Rec. 34003 (1992).
The Senator's report says that the transfer to the Combined Fund from the UMWA Pension Plan and AML Fund would be made because "unassigned beneficiaries were not employed by the assigned operators at the time of their retirement . . . . [I]f no operator remains in business under the formulations described above, that retiree becomes an unassigned beneficiary. . . . [The Coal Act's] purpose is to assure that any beneficiary, once assigned, remains the responsibility of a particular operator, and that the number of unassigned beneficiaries is kept to an absolute minimum." Ibid.10 It seems not to have crossed Congress's mind that
10 Postenactment statements, though entitled to less weight, are to the same effect. At a hearing before the House Committee of Ways and Means on September 9, 1993, one member asked whether SSA had estab-
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