It’s less contradictory in my mind if I don’t frame it as “penalizing” the drafters of Title 7. To me - especially when read together - it says “Congress gives us no choice but to apply the law in a broad fashion, because they explicitly chose not to limit it; and it’s not our fault if this results in unintended consequences.” With an implied wink and a nudge to Congress saying “you can fix this if you’re really all that bothered, you know.” :)
Or maybe put another way: sure, they didn’t and couldn’t possibly have listed all exceptions to the law. But they didn’t really try; rather they listed one exception for everything (churches, basically) and didn’t bother with any other exceptions. And in light of that, the court didn’t consider it appropriate to read in exceptions when Congress very clearly wrote an extremely broad law. Essentially Congress gave no signal it wasn’t supposed to be broad.
It reads like it creates a deliberate impasse. The opinion states that ambiguities in law no longer implicitly give agencies discretion. That means Congress has to write unambiguous laws. But my original post acknowledges they cannot. Based on this ruling, it seems like anything other than a perfect, airtight law means it's effectively non-enforceable. So where does that leave us? It seems like the SC has laid the table for constant rules-lawyering by corporations to get whatever they want. In other words, they've let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
These literalist justices are of the mind that if it wasn’t explicitly written, then it’s not allowed. Generalist/broad swath language is to be ignored. Only specific instruction is to be interpreted.
Thanks for explaining this. In my laypersons opinion I think this outcome is the just one, although I appreciate the dissent as a logical argument. Does something similar to the UK rules of statutory interpretation exist in US law with respect to the US Constitution to prevent absurd outcomes? like the dissenting outcome (IMO) would have been?
> decisions of vast “‘economic and political significance."
How is "economic and political significance" defined? From what I understand of the decision, it's defined as "6 of 9 people on SCOTUS don't like this regulation." And the deeper you dig into it, the more you find that these 6 people are willing to throw out just to be able to strike down this policy decision.
Supposedly, these 6 justices are advocates of textualism--the actual text, as written in the statute, should be dominant in the analysis of what can and can't be done in terms of interpretation. And here they completely ignore that in favor of trying to second-guess what Congress intended because... they can't use textualism to achieve what they want, I guess.
This seems like a particularly weird place to lay charges of activism.
The majority decision claims "It is unlikely that Congress wished to confer a right to class or collective actions in §7, since those procedures were hardly known when the NLRA was adopted in 1935." That's either an activist position or an original intent position; it relies on comparing circumstances today to the circumstances Congress is presumed to have had in mind.
The Court's current originalists are textualists to a man, and have consistently rejected arguments of the form "this law's authors didn't anticipate modern conditions". But today, they decided to restrict a right provided by the text of the law, and did so by appealing to circumstance and intent. (edited for clarity)
Legislation was written from the bench today, and it wasn't Ginsburg doing it.
What about this ruling stops Congress from explicitly granting interpretive power on some aspects of a law? The default now is implicit interpretive power, this ruling flips it.
The alternative would be declaring the act void for vagueness. A statute that "forbids or requires something in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application" violates the constitutional provision of due process. So the SCOTUS ruling makes sense in terms of choosing the least disruptive option wrt. general expectations.
> Isn't the way the law is written the real root cause here? Judges and courts don't write laws...
This is a complicated question, but I would argue that the answer is no. Congress trying to anticipate every corner case ahead of time would be a nightmare, so instead the courts exist to take general laws and apply them to specific cases.
Even if congress tried to write a law with no unspecified edge cases, they would fail, because any law they pass has to be within the powers granted to them by the constitution, and those powers are vague. The relevant power here is literally "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". That's it, one sentence, it's vague and there is no fixing it. If congress tries to legislate something that falls a bit outside of it, or that violates any of the various rights and freedoms specified in equally vague sentences, the law, at least as applied such that is violates the constitution, doesn't exist.
It's also not quite true that judges and courts don't write law in our common law system. They do, that's what the "common" part is about. Statutory law takes precedence, common law fills in the gaps. Here's an example of a case where the Texas Supreme Court directly addresses that they are creating new exceptions to the law, and that they can do so because the relevant law in the first place was invented by the courts: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59148e86add7b04934555a...
Thanks for that explanation. I hadn't had time to read the whole opinion. Perhaps my statement came off too harsh. I am nothing close to a lawyer, but I found the "parade of horribles" to be a little troubling. Shouldn't the Congress be the one evaluating the consequences on the law? I guess the counterargument is that those things are so horrible that we can assume that isn't what Congress meant.
When reading Supreme Court opinions, I am often blown away by the well reasoned, logical arguments, that support findings I disagree with. You can disagree, but you can't say they don't have some facts and logic to stand on.
If you've never read an actual Supreme Court opinion, I would highly encourage you to do do. The linked article here is just awful. It doesn't even provide the case name. The opinions are surprising easy to read, and flow pretty well. The language isn't difficult, and they can be surprising humorous. If you can make it through a C++ book, then you'll have no problem understanding the basics.
Thanks, I did not know about that one. I suppose it says something about US precedent that it was ruled unconstitutional, and also says something (quite different) about our representatives in Congress.
It's worth reading the full dissent and majority opinion but its a textualist argument that the original legislation did not intend to include homosexuality and transgender in the Title VII law against sex discrimination and its not the courts job to legislate and that if these are to be included its congress' job to amend the laws to be more specific.
I know the reasoning. It was a (very) novel interpretation of the constitution (both the extension of corporate personhood and the notion of money-as-speech were completely new tricks) that allowed it. Again, it's just excuse-making. If you don't want to do something you write a narrow opinion and put the responsibility on congress to provide specificity. If you want to do something big you throw out a law based on the constitution.
In this case, they held the way they did because they did not want to write a broad finding, and absolutely not because their hands were bound by some imaginary principle.
What is disquieting in this context is that SCOTUS is generally not in the business of handing out declaratory judgments. After all, if they start extrapolating on what could happen if a given course of action were taken, that gets disquietingly close to legislating from the bench.
It's odd behavior for Originalists, who, if anything, one would assume, would hew far more closely to the power of the courts at the time the Constitution was framed, which was very little.
That’s because most of the decisions are like this one: “hey, I think this law is being interpreted wrongly” and then the Court says “no idea how you read it like that, it says this”. As they say in the closing statement, “We reiterate that today’s decision addresses only the narrow question whether §1806(f ) displaces the state secrets privilege. Because we conclude that §1806(f ) does not have that effect under either party’s interpretation of the statute, we do not decide which interpretation is correct. Nor do we decide whether the Government’s evidence is privileged or whether the District Court was correct to dismiss respondents’ claims on the pleadings.” This is how most of them come down, and how most of them should come down: “Congress wrote it like this, if you want to change it, get Congress to pass a new law”.
I mean, obviously, yes, I agree -- the conditions are not even remotely parallel, and this decision is clearly just a case of the Supreme Court expanding a law in a direction that is _clearly_ the correct direction. They are acting here as legislators, fixing a bad law to be better, and the "logic" they use to justify it is clearly incorrect and not internally consistent, and is just a patina of justification around the decision to legislate from the bench.
We should be way more angry at our representatives in Congress who have refused to incorporate this language into the law than at the justices who oppose this opinion on what seem to me to be much more well-reasoned grounds that are unrelated to their opinions on the treatment of these classes of people.
Still, expediency here counts for something, and in the end this is a positive move with tangible gains in the near term.
It struck me as odd as well, but the article mentions near the end that it apparently does happen from time to time, which I was not aware of. I share your viewpoint, though. Not sure why the USSC would ever ask the executive branch whether or not it should hear a case. The justices are more than capable of determining if it warrants their time.
I suspect the reason for the request is that this could have a significant and unexpected downstream effect should they hear the case and end up ruling in an unforeseen manner. They could conceivably alter the copyright laws in serious ways that no one wants.
That being said, I still think they should probably never ask for guidance like this because the effect of their ruling is not their problem. They need to uphold the law. If there are unforeseen, undesirable consequences then it is the job of the legislative branch to rectify that. This is what happened with the Affordable Care Act. The USSC was given testimony that confirmed the language, meaning, and reason behind one of the key portions - the requirement that states must implement their own exchange to receive Federal subsidies for healthcare to pass along to the newly insured citizens. This became a major issue because a large number of states didn't create their own exchanges but the Obama administration still wanted to dole out the subsidies. Instead of upholding the law as written in clear language and which was confirmed by the actual writers of that section of the bill, they instead did the exact opposite and basically ruled that since ruling to uphold it as-is would essentially destroy Obamacare, they would have to allow the subsidies because that one clause would effectively destroy the entire program since the states didn't take it up as expected (but not required). What should have happened in that scenario is that the USSC should have upheld the language as written, which would have forced the legislative branch to actually change/fix the law with an amendment. But this was no longer politically possible and the court knew that, so they instead ignored the law and basically re-wrote it - which is a power they don't actually have.
In his opinion Justice Thomas explains why the law, as written by Congress, does not provide the degree of broad legal immunity that people think it does. He explains how past rulings in lower courts are interpretations of the "spirit" of the law, not the letter of the law. In that sense he is completely deferring to Congress.
"The Court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the Legislative Branch."
In this case, that's exactly what the majority concluded. In layman's terms, this is a decision that says, "We aren't doing a thing. Congress made a promise. If you want to rescind it, go talk to congress, not us."
Or maybe put another way: sure, they didn’t and couldn’t possibly have listed all exceptions to the law. But they didn’t really try; rather they listed one exception for everything (churches, basically) and didn’t bother with any other exceptions. And in light of that, the court didn’t consider it appropriate to read in exceptions when Congress very clearly wrote an extremely broad law. Essentially Congress gave no signal it wasn’t supposed to be broad.
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