Alito's Second Opinion = Scalia's First Reprimand
I’ve blogged previously that Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia is in fact right about one thing: the absurdity of relying on legislative history when trying to interpret a law. This is an increasingly important jurisprudential principle given the increasing frequency of supposed legislative “histories” being inserted into the record after the fact.
Today the Court issued a less-than-groundbreaking decision, Zedner v. U.S., No. 05-5992, with an opinion from newest justice and, some suggested, Scalia clone Samuel Alito.
The opinion was unanimous — well, almost:
It may seem that there is no harm in using committee reports and other such sources when they are merely in accord with the plain meaning of the Act. But this sort of intellectual piling-on has addictive consequences. To begin with, it accustoms us to believing that what is said by a single person in a floor debate or by a committee report represents the view of Congress as a whole — so that we sometimes even will say (when referring to a floor statement and committee report) that “Congress has expressed” thus-and-so. … There is no basis either in law or in reality for this naive belief. Moreover, if legislative history is relevant when it confirms the plain meaning of the statutory text, it should also be relevant when it contradicts the plain meaning, thus rendering what is plain ambiguous.
So says Justice Scalia in a very brief concurrence.
Well that didn’t take very long. So much for the “Scalito Hypothesis.”
Scalia is, as I said, entirely correct in this: Stick to the plain language unless it is demonstrably impossible to do so.
Too bad he doesn’t heed his own advice when it’s the plain language of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Via How Appealing. More thoughts from Concurring Opinions, Sentencing Law & Policy, Tony Mauro.
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