Opinion of BLACKMUN, J. criminal penalties (misdemeanor and fine not to exceed $10,000) for violations of the Act's provisions (§ 1338), and authorizes federal courts, upon the Government's application, to enjoin violations of the Act (§ 1339). Unlike the plurality, I am unwilling to believe that Congress, without any mention of state common-law damages actions or of its intention dramatically to expand the scope of federal pre-emption, would have eliminated the only means of judicial recourse for those injured by cigarette manufacturers' unlawful conduct. Thus, not only does the plain language of the 1969 Act fail clearly to require pre-emption of petitioner's state commonlaw damages claims, but there is no suggestion in the legislative history that Congress intended to expand the scope of the pre-emption provision in the drastic manner that the plurality attributes to it. Our obligation to infer pre-emption only where Congress' intent is clear and manifest mandates the conclusion that state common-law damages actions are not pre-empted by the 1969 Act.6 III Stepping back from the specifics of the plurality's preemption analysis to view the result the plurality ultimately reaches, I am further disturbed. Notwithstanding the Court's ready acknowledgment that """[t]he purpose of Congress is the ultimate touchstone" of pre-emption analysis," ante, at 516 (quoting Malone v. White Motor Corp., 435 U. S. 497, 504 (1978)), the plurality proceeds to create a crazy quilt 6 Every Court of Appeals to consider the question, including the Third Circuit in an earlier opinion in this case, similarly has concluded that state common-law damages claims are not expressly pre-empted under the 1969 Act. See, e. g., Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., 789 F. 2d 181, 185–186 (CA3 1986), cert. denied, 479 U. S. 1043 (1987); Pennington v. Vistron Corp., 876 F. 2d 414, 418 (CA5 1989); Roysdon v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 849 F. 2d 230, 234 (CA6 1988); Palmer v. Liggett Group, Inc., 825 F. 2d 620, 625 (CA1 1987). See also Dewey v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 121 N. J. 69, 85, 577 A. 2d 1239, 1247 (1990); Forster v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 437 N. W. 2d 655, 658 (Minn. 1989). Opinion of BLACKMUN, J. of pre-emption from among the common-law claims implicated in this case, and in so doing reaches a result that Congress surely could not have intended. The most obvious problem with the plurality's analysis is its frequent shift in the level of generality at which it examines the individual claims. For example, the plurality states that fraudulent-misrepresentation claims (at least those involving false statements of material fact in advertisements) are "predicated not on a duty 'based on smoking and health' but rather on a more general obligation-the duty not to deceive," and therefore are not pre-empted by §5(b) of the 1969 Act. Ante, at 528-529. Yet failure-to-warn claimswhich could just as easily be described as based on a "more general obligation" to inform consumers of known risks— implicitly are found to be "based on smoking and health" and are declared pre-empted. See ante, at 524. The plurality goes on to hold that express warranty claims are not preempted because the duty at issue is undertaken by the manufacturer and is not "imposed under State law." Ante, at 525. Yet, as the plurality itself must acknowledge, "the general duty not to breach warranties arises under state law," ibid. (emphasis added); absent the State's decision to penalize such behavior through the creation of a common-law damages action, no warranty claim would exist. In short, I can perceive no principled basis for many of the plurality's asserted distinctions among the common-law claims, and I cannot believe that Congress intended to create such a hodgepodge of allowed and disallowed claims when it amended the pre-emption provision in 1970. Although the plurality acknowledges that §5(b) fails to "indicate that any familiar subdivision of common-law claims is or is not preempted," ante, at 523, it ignores the simplest and most obvious explanation for the statutory silence: that Congress never intended to displace state common-law damages claims, much less to cull through them in the manner the plurality does today. I can only speculate as to the difficulty Opinion of SCALIA, J. lower courts will encounter in attempting to implement today's decision. IV By finding federal pre-emption of certain state commonlaw damages claims, the decision today eliminates a critical component of the States' traditional ability to protect the health and safety of their citizens. Yet such a radical readjustment of federal-state relations is warranted under this Court's precedents only if there is clear evidence that Congress intended that result. Because I believe that neither version of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act evidences such a clear congressional intent to pre-empt state common-law damages actions, I respectfully dissent from Parts V and VI of JUSTICE STEVENS' opinion. JUSTICE SCALIA, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS joins, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part. Today's decision announces what, on its face, is an extraordinary and unprecedented principle of federal statutory construction: that express pre-emption provisions must be construed narrowly, "in light of the presumption against the pre-emption of state police power regulations." Ante, at 518. The life span of this new rule may have been blessedly brief, inasmuch as the opinion that gives it birth in Part I proceeds to ignore it in Part V, by adjudging at least some of the common-law tort claims at issue here pre-empted. In my view, there is no merit to this newly crafted doctrine of narrow construction. Under the Supremacy Clause, U. S. Const., Art. VI, cl. 2, our job is to interpret Congress's decrees of pre-emption neither narrowly nor broadly, but in accordance with their apparent meaning. If we did that job in the present case, we would find, under the 1965 Act, preemption of petitioner's failure-to-warn claims; and under the 1969 Act, we would find pre-emption of petitioner's claims complete. Opinion of SCALIA, J. I The Court's threshold description of the law of preemption is accurate enough: Though we generally "assum[e] that the historic police powers of the States [are] not to be superseded by ... Federal Act unless that [is] the clear and manifest purpose of Congress,"" ante, at 516 (quoting Rice v. Santa Fe Elevator Corp., 331 U. S. 218, 230 (1947)), we have traditionally not thought that to require express statutory text. Where state law is in actual conflict with federal law, see, e. g., Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Comm'n, 461 U. S. 190, 204 (1983), or where it "stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress," Hines v. Davidowitz, 312 U. S. 52, 67 (1941), or even where the nature of Congress's regulation, or its scope, convinces us that "Congress left no room for the States to supplement it," Rice, supra, at 230, we have had no difficulty declaring that state law must yield. The ultimate question in each case, as we have framed the inquiry, is one of Congress's intent, as revealed by the text, structure, purposes, and subject matter of the statutes involved. See, e. g., English v. General Electric Co., 496 U. S. 72, 78–79 (1990); Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U. S. 85, 95 (1983). The Court goes beyond these traditional principles, however, to announce two new ones. First, it says that express pre-emption provisions must be given the narrowest possible construction. This is in its view the consequence of our oft-repeated assumption that, absent convincing evidence of statutory intent to pre-empt, "the historic police powers of the States [are] not to be superseded,"" see ante, at 516. But it seems to me that assumption dissolves once there is conclusive evidence of intent to pre-empt in the express words of the statute itself, and the only remaining question is what the scope of that pre-emption is meant to be. Thereupon, I think, our responsibility is to apply to the text ordinary principles of statutory construction. 66666 Opinion of SCALIA, J. That is precisely what our express pre-emption cases have done. Less than a month ago, in Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 504 U. S. 374 (1992), we held that the Airline Deregulation Act's provision pre-empting state laws "relating to [airline] rates, routes, or services," 49 U. S. C. App. § 1305(a)(1), was broad enough to reach state fare advertising regulations despite the availability of plausible limiting constructions. We made no mention of any "plain-statement" rule, or rule of narrow construction, but applied the usual ""assumption that the ordinary meaning of [the statutory] language accurately expresses the legislative purpose. Morales, supra, at 383 (quoting FMC Corp. v. Holliday, 498 U. S. 52, 57 (1990)) (emphasis added). And last Term, in Norfolk & Western R. Co. v. Train Dispatchers, 499 U. S. 117 (1991), we interpreted an express pre-emption provision broadly despite the fact that a well-respected canon of statutory construction supported a narrower reading. See id., at 129; id., at 136 (STEVENS, J., dissenting). We said not a word about a "presumption against . . . preemption," ante, at 518, that was to be applied to construction of the text. 99999 In light of our willingness to find pre-emption in the absence of any explicit statement of pre-emptive intent, the notion that such explicit statements, where they exist, are subject to a "plain-statement" rule is more than somewhat odd. To be sure, our jurisprudence abounds with rules of "plain statement," "clear statement," and "narrow construction" designed variously to ensure that, absent unambiguous evidence of Congress's intent, extraordinary constitutional powers are not invoked, or important constitutional protections eliminated, or seemingly inequitable doctrines applied. See, e. g., United States v. Mitchell, 445 U. S. 535, 538 (1980) (waivers of federal sovereign immunity must be "unequivocally expressed"); Will v. Michigan Dept. of State Police, 491 U. S. 58, 65 (1989) (clear statement required to compel States to entertain damages suits against themselves in state |