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24 is no “preference” to apply if no alternative party that is eligible to be preferred … has come forward.’ ” Brief for Federal Parties 44 (quoting 570 U. S., at 654); Adoptive Couple, 570 U. S., at 654 (“§1915(a)’s preferences are inapplicable in cases where no alternative party has formally sought to adopt the child”). Instead, the burden is on the tribe or other objecting party to produce a higher-ranked placement. Ibid. So, as it stands, petitioners assert an anticommandeering challenge to a provision that does not command state agencies to do anything.

State courts are a different matter. ICWA indisputably requires them to apply the placement preferences in making custody determinations. §§§ [sic]1915(a), (b). Petitioners argue that this too violates the anticommandeering doctrine. To be sure, they recognize that Congress can require state courts, unlike state executives and legislatures, to enforce federal law. See New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 178–179 (1992) (“Federal statutes enforceable in state courts do, in a sense, direct state judges to enforce them, but this sort of federal ‘direction’ of state judges is mandated by the text of the Supremacy Clause”). But they draw a distinction between requiring state courts to entertain federal causes of action and requiring them to apply federal law to state causes of action. They claim that if state law provides the cause of action—as Texas law does here—then the State gets to call the shots, unhindered by any federal instruction to the contrary. Brief for Individual Petitioners 62–63, 66–67.

This argument runs headlong into the Constitution. The Supremacy Clause provides that “the Laws of the United States … shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Art. VI, cl. 2. Thus, when Congress enacts a valid statute pursuant to its Article I powers, “state law is naturally preempted to the extent of any conflict with a