Page:Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski.pdf/18

Rh points to have nothing to do with arbitration or §16 (unlike the two provisions discussed above, which were enacted in the same 1988 law as §16 and codified alongside §16 in the Federal Arbitration Act, respectively, ).

Moreover, and in any event, the majority’s cited statutes do not support the majority’s mandatory-general-stay rule. The majority invokes statutes that expressly preclude automatic stays of all trial court proceedings. But if the majority is correct that Congress intended the opposite when a statute is silent, then stays of all trial court proceedings would be required. Yet, the majority’s own holding does not go that far. See. Instead, the majority requires stays for some proceedings (those related to the merits) but not others (those related to costs and fees), ibid.—a line that appears nowhere in the majority’s cited statutes.

At the end of the day, the best the majority can do is point to a smattering of provisions that do not contain the rule that the majority adopts. And those provisions do not even relate to §16 or the majority’s rule (staying litigation generally but not proceedings on costs and fees). Neither those statutes, nor any other, imposes on arbitrability appeals the stay rule that the Court announces.

Unable to locate its rule in a statute, the majority opinion pivots to “background principle[s].” But there is no background mandatory-general-stay rule.

To the contrary, the background rule is that courts have case-by-case discretion regarding whether or not to issue a stay. “[T]he power to stay proceedings is incidental to the power inherent in every court to control the disposition of the causes on its docket.” Landis v. North American Co., 299 U. S. 248, 254 (1936). That power is discretionary—it “calls for the exercise of judgment, which must weigh competing interests” in each particular case. Id., at 254–255.