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Page Number: 33.0

6 

YATES v. UNITED STATES 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

most  compelling  evidence”  will  persuade  this  Court  that 
Congress  intended  “nearly  identical  language”  in  provi-
sions dealing with related subjects to bear different mean-
ings.  Communication Workers v. Beck, 487 U. S. 735, 754 
(1988);  see  A.  Scalia  &  B.  Garner,  Reading  Law:  The
Interpretation  of  Legal  Texts  252  (2012).    Context  thus 
again confirms what text indicates.

And legislative history, for those who care about it, puts 
extra icing on a cake already frosted.  Section 1519, as the 
plurality  notes,  see  ante,  at  2,  6,  was  enacted  after  the 
Enron  Corporation’s  collapse,  as  part  of  the  Sarbanes-
Oxley Act of 2002, 116 Stat. 745.  But the provision began
its life in a separate bill, and the drafters emphasized that 
Enron  was  “only  a  case  study  exposing  the  shortcomings 
in our current laws” relating to both “corporate and crimi-
nal”  fraud.    S.  Rep.  No.  107–146,  pp. 2,  11  (2002).    The 
primary  “loophole[ ]”  Congress  identified,  see  id.,  at  14, 
arose from limits in the part of §1512 just described: That 
provision,  as  uniformly  construed,  prohibited  a  person
from  inducing  another  to  destroy  “record[s],  document[s], 
or  other  object[s]”—of  every  type—but  not  from  doing  so 
himself.  §1512(b)(2);  see  supra,  at  5.  Congress  (as  even
the plurality agrees, see ante, at 6) enacted §1519 to close 
that yawning gap.  But §1519 could fully achieve that goal 
only  if  it  covered  all  the  records,  documents,  and  objects
§1512  did,  as  well  as  all  the  means  of  tampering  with
them.  And  so  §1519  was  written  to  do  exactly  that—“to
apply  broadly  to  any  acts  to  destroy  or  fabricate  physical 
evidence,”  as  long  as performed  with  the  requisite  intent. 
S.  Rep.  No.  107–146,  at  14.    “When  a  person  destroys 
evidence,”  the  drafters  explained,  “overly  technical  legal 
distinctions  should  neither  hinder  nor  prevent  prosecu-
tion.”  Id.,  at  7.    Ah  well:  Congress,  meet  today’s  Court,
which  here  invents  just  such  a  distinction  with  just  such
an  effect.  See  United  States  v.  Philadelphia  Nat.  Bank, 
374 U. S. 321, 343 (1963) (“[C]reat[ing] a large loophole in