Barrett, J., concurring
enactment conduct does not control the meaning of a statute, but “this Court has long said that courts may consider the consistency of an agency’s views when we weigh the persuasiveness of any interpretation it proffers in court.” Bittner v. United States, 598 U. S. 85, 97 (2023) (citing Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U. S. 134, 140 (1944)). The agency’s track record can be particularly probative in this context: A longstanding “want of assertion of power by those who presumably would be alert to exercise it” may provide some clue that the power was never conferred. FTC v. Bunte Brothers, Inc., 312 U. S. 349, 352 (1941). Once again, Brown & Williamson is a good example. There, we balked at the FDA’s novel attempt to regulate tobacco in part because this move was “[c]ontrary to its representations to Congress since 1914.” 529 U. S., at 159. And in Utility Air, we were dubious when the EPA discovered “newfound authority” in the Clean Air Act that would have allowed it to require greenhouse-gas permits for “millions of small sources—including retail stores, offices, apartment buildings, shopping centers, schools, and churches.” 573 U. S., at 328.
If the major questions doctrine were a substantive canon, then the common thread in these cases would be that we “exchange[d] the most natural reading of a statute for a bearable one more protective of a judicially specified value.” Barrett 111. But by my lights, the Court arrived at the most plausible reading of the statute in these cases. To be sure, “[a]ll of these regulatory assertions had a colorable textual basis.” West Virginia, 597 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 18). In each case, we could have “[p]ut on blinders” and confined ourselves to the four corners of the statute, and we might have reached a different outcome. Sykes v. United States, 564 U. S. 1, 43 (2011) (Kagan, J., dissenting). Instead, we took “off those blinders,” “view[ed] the statute as a whole,” ibid., and considered context that would be important to a reasonable observer. With the full picture in
