Sotomayor, J., dissenting
other words, does not require assuming that Congress constricted the precursor statute’s application to robbery when it enacted today’s ACCA; whatever robberies would have qualified under the old statute presumably could have still qualified under the residual clause during its nearly 20-year existence.
In short, the statutory history does not undermine the conclusion that the ACCA’s elements clause, under our precedents, is not broad enough to encompass Florida’s robbery statute. Congress deleted the word “robbery,” kept the word “burglary,” supplemented burglary with the catchall residual clause that still captured many robberies outside the elements clause, and used the phrase “physical force” in the elements clause to define a type of “violent felony,” which Johnson tells us requires more force than the term’s common-law meaning denotes. See 559 U. S., at 138–143, 145. Statutory history cannot get the majority past both the text and the force of stare decisis here.
C
That leaves the majority with only the practical consequences that it asserts would follow if this Court were to hold that Florida robbery does not qualify under the ACCA’s elements clause. See ante, at 7–8. While looking to how an interpretation of a federal statute would affect the applicability of related state statutes can be a useful approach in these cases, see, e. g., Castleman, 572 U. S., at 167, the results that follow from a proper reading of
previous law, it could be accomplished merely “by sudden snatching”) qualified as an ACCA predicate under the residual clause without deciding whether it also qualified under the elements clause. See United States v. Welch, 683 F. 3d 1304, 1310–1314 (2012). Other Circuits likewise ruled, in the years before the clause’s demise, that other state robbery statutes qualified under the residual clause. See, e. g., United States v. Mitchell, 743 F. 3d 1054, 1062–1063 (CA6 2014) (collecting cases).
