Opinion ID: 6115774
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the legislature’s manifest intent

Text: The first question when applying MCL 8.5 is whether the Legislature manifested its intent to make SORA inseverable. The majority fails to point to, nor have I discovered, any statutory text or other material that would suggest—let alone “manifest”—the Legislature’s intent to shield SORA from the normal presumption favoring severability. Nor does the majority address whether the Legislature would have enacted SORA without its unconstitutional portions. As discussed below, the nature of this question focuses on the Legislature’s unexpressed intentions and thus is difficult to answer. Nevertheless, under my analysis below, only discrete portions of the statute would be severed. I have a difficult time believing that the Legislature, had it reflected on this possibility, would prefer that a complex and far-reaching statute like SORA should be eliminated simply because a few insular sections have been removed. Accordingly, there is no basis for concluding that the Legislature has manifested an intent that SORA be inseverable.