Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/19-631_2d93.pdf
Page Number: 18

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

15 

Opinion of KAVANAUGH, J. 

rather than destroy the rest of the law passed by Congress
and signed by the President.  The Court’s precedents reflect 
a  decisive  preference  for  surgical  severance  rather  than
wholesale destruction, even in the absence of a severability 
clause. 

The Court’s presumption of severability supplies a work-
able solution—one that allows courts to avoid judicial poli-
cymaking or de facto judicial legislation in determining just 
how  much  of  the  remainder  of  a  statute  should  be  invali-
dated.7  The presumption also reflects the confined role of 
the  Judiciary  in  our  system  of  separated  powers—stated 
otherwise,  the  presumption  manifests  the  Judiciary’s  re-
spect for Congress’s legislative role by keeping courts from
unnecessarily disturbing a law apart from invalidating the
provision  that  is  unconstitutional.    Furthermore,  the  pre-
sumption  recognizes  that  plaintiffs  who  successfully  chal-
lenge one provision of a law may lack standing to challenge 
other provisions of that law.  See Murphy v. National Colle-
giate Athletic Assn., 584 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2018) (THOMAS, 
J., concurring) (slip op., at 5–6). 

Those  and  other  considerations,  taken  together,  have
steered the Court to a presumption of severability.  Apply-
ing the presumption, the Court invalidates and severs un-
constitutional provisions from the remainder of the law ra-
ther than razing whole statutes or Acts of Congress.  Put in 
common parlance, the tail (one unconstitutional provision) 

—————— 

7 If courts had broad license to invalidate more than just the offending 
provision,  a  reviewing  court  would  have  to  consider  what  other  provi-
sions to invalidate: the whole section, the chapter, the statute, the public 
law, or something else altogether.  Courts would be largely at sea in mak-
ing that determination, and usually could not do it in a principled way. 
Here, for example, would a court invalidate all or part of the Bipartisan
Budget Act of 2015 rather than all or part of the 1991 TCPA?  After all, 
that 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act, not the 1991 TCPA, added the consti-
tutionally problematic government-debt exception.  That is the kind of 
free-wheeling policy question that the Court’s presumption of severabil-
ity avoids.