In Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32, 44, 115 L. Ed. 2d 27, 111 S. Ct. 2123 (1991), the Supreme Court addressed a federal district court's inherent power to impose financial sanctions for abuses of the judicial process. The district court had assessed attorney's fees for bad faith conduct. Although a scheme for assessing sanctions was provided by both statute and rule, the Court held that the scheme did not displace the trial court's inherent power to assess sanctions. While Congress has the authority to limit the exercise of the inherent power of lower federal courts because those courts were created by act of Congress, the Supreme Court does "not lightly assume that Congress" has intended to do so. Id. at 47. Significantly, the Court held that a district court could resort to inherent power to punish abuse of the judicial system even when there existed statutory mechanisms for imposing punishment for the specific type of abuse in question: There is, therefore, nothing in the other sanctioning mechanisms or prior cases interpreting them that warrants a conclusion that a federal court may not, as a matter of law, resort to its inherent power to impose attorney's fees as a sanction for bad-faith conduct. This is plainly the case where the conduct at issue is not covered by one of the other sanctioning provisions. But neither is a federal court forbidden to sanction bad-faith conduct by means of the inherent power simply because that conduct could also be sanctioned under the statute or the Rules. A court must, of course, exercise caution in invoking its inherent power, and it must comply with the mandates of due process, both in determining that the requisite bad faith exists and in assessing fees. Furthermore, when there is bad-faith conduct in the course of litigation that could be adequately sanctioned under the Rules, the court ordinarily should rely on the Rules rather than the inherent power. But if in the informed discretion of the court, neither the statute nor the Rules are up to the task, the court may safely rely on its inherent power. Id. at 50