Page:Alabama v. North Carolina, 560 U.S. (2010) slip opinion.pdf/40

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see how the Court can find that a year and a half of doing nothing—which North Carolina admits it did between December 1997 and July 1999—constitutes “tak[ing] appropriate steps.” If a student promises to “take appro­priate steps to ensure” that he will pass the bar and then refuses to study, has he not broken his promise? More to the point, if a builder promises that he will “take appro­priate steps to ensure” that a customer will be able to move into a new home in two years, and then does nothing at all, has the builder not broken his promise?

As the majority notes, “[o]ther contemporaneously en­acted interstate compacts” delineated a host State’s obli­gations in more detail than the Southeast Compact does. Ante, at 16–17. But this fact may just as easily be read to indicate what the parties here intended, rather than, as the majority argues, what they did not intend. Regard­less, the language of the Compact and the context in which it was enacted—as part of a congressional effort to en­courage regional solutions to this Nation’s low-level radio­active waste problem, see Consent Act, 99 Stat. 1859; Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, §4(a)(1), 94 Stat. 3348—both indicate that North Carolina was supposed to take “appropriate steps” to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. And North Carolina’s General Assembly passed a state statute recognizing and accepting this responsibility. See N. C. Gen. Stat. §104G–4 (creating a state agency to “site, finance, [and] build” a waste dis­posal facility). How can it be that two years of inactivity followed by withdrawal satisfies this promise?

The answer, says the Court, is that any further “appro­priate steps” would have cost a significant amount of money. Ante, at 14–15. In 1997, the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Commission (Commission), the entity responsible for administering the Compact, made clear that it would not advance North Carolina any more money toward building a facility. See