Cite as: 539 U. S. 1 (2003)
Scalia, J., dissenting
ing the adjective "unique. " While there is something unique about statutes whose pre-emptive force is closely patterned after that of the LMRA (which we had held to support removal), there is nothing whatever unique about a federal cause of action that displaces state causes of action. Displacement alone, if today's opinion is to be believed, would have sufficed to establish the existence of removal jurisdiction.
The best that can be said, from a precedential perspective, for the rule of law announced by the Court today is that variations on it have twice appeared in our cases in the purest dicta. Rivet v. Regions Bank of La., 522 U. S. 470, 476 (1998) ("[O]nce an area of state law has been completely preempted, any claim purportedly based on that pre-empted state-law claim is considered, from its inception, a federal claim, and therefore arises under federal law" (internal quotation marks omitted)); Caterpillar, 482 U. S., at 393 ("[I]f a federal cause of action completely pre-empts a state cause of action any complaint that comes within the scope of the federal cause of action necessarily 'arises under' federal law" (some internal quotation marks omitted)). Dicta of course have no precedential value, see U. S. Bancorp Mortgage Co. v. Bonner Mall Partnership, 513 U. S. 18, 24 (1994), even when they do not contradict, as they do here, prior holdings of the Court.
The difficulty with today's holding, moreover, is not limited to the flimsiness of its precedential roots. As has been noted already, the holding cannot be squared with bedrock principles of removal jurisdiction. One or another of two of those principles must be ignored: Either (1) the principle that merely setting forth in state court facts that would support a federal cause of action—indeed, even facts that would support a federal cause of action and would not support the claimed state cause of action—does not produce a federal question supporting removal, Caterpillar, 482 U. S., at 391, or (2) the principle that a federal defense to a state
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