Opinion ID: 3008418
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Failed bills predating and postdating the Act’s 1989

Text: overhaul carry no interpretive force Summers and various amici exhort us to construe language that passed in light of language that failed to pass. As the Court makes clear, we cannot. Precedent from both the United States Supreme Court and from this Court counsel against supplanting unequivocal enacted text with equivocal unenacted inferences drawn from failed legislation. First, counsel supporting Summers direct us to the 1989 overhaul effort itself. It is undisputed that the 71st Legislature was consumed with the task of restructuring the State’s then-76-year-old workers’ compensation system. [41] The regular 140-day session failed to produce a reform bill, and Governor Clements immediately called a special session. Summers places great weight on the fact that during this first of two special sessions, House members once considered an omnibus bill that used “owner or general contractor” in section 406.123’s predecessor. House-Senate negotiations collapsed, reportedly over two unrelated issues, [42] and lawmakers adjourned and went home for several months. Later that year, Governor Clements called a second special session, and in its final hours the Legislature passed Senate Bill 1, which did not expressly include the word “owner,” a fact Summers views as dispositive . This argument is unavailing, as the United States Supreme Court recently explained: “It is always perilous to derive the meaning of an adopted provision from another provision deleted in the drafting process.” [43] The word’s momentary presence during Special Session No. 1 and absence several months later during Special Session No. 2 suggests nothing that can override the express terms of the enacted statute. [44] Under Summers’ position, we must assign great meaning to never-enacted language (“owner”) that appeared in a prior session’s bill draft but no meaning to once-enacted language (“contracted with another party”) that the Legislature affirmatively removed from an on-the-books statute. We cannot bestow all significance on proposed alterations in failed bills while ignoring enacted alterations to the statute itself. Settled law requires the opposite approach, respecting changes to actual statutes and discounting changes to would-be statutes. Second, counsel supporting Summers ask us to examine post-1989 legislative efforts and conclude that intent to bar premises owners from invoking statutory-employer immunity is implicit in the Legislature’s consideration, but not adoption, of various bills since 1989 related to premises-owner liability. [45] Summers sees the failure of these measures as tantamount to a legislative command to exclude premises owners from asserting the exclusive-remedy defense. We cannot draw such an inference for two reasons. First, the Act itself controls, and its definitions include no such exclusion. Far more probative than proposed legislation is passed legislation, what the people’s elected representatives actually enacted as a collective body. The Legislature’s “broad definition, narrow exception” approach to “general contractor” and deletion of the upstream-contract language constitute dual reasons for not barring dual roles for those meeting the Act’s liberal definitional criteria. Second, we eschew guesswork, and a bill’s failure to pass sheds no light because, as even casual Capitol observers know, bills fall short for countless reasons, many of them “wholly unrelated” to the bill’s substantive merits or “to the Legislature’s view of what the original statute does or does not mean.” [46] Bills rise and fall for reasons both incalculable and inscrutable, and courts’ reluctance to draw inferences from subsequent legislative inaction is deeply rooted, as explained by the United States Supreme Court a half-century ago: “Such non-action by Congress affords the most dubious foundation for drawing positive inferences. . . . Whether Congress thought the proposal unwise . . . or unnecessary, we cannot tell; accordingly, no inference can properly be drawn from the failure of the Congress to act.” [47] We, too, reject searching for confirmation or contradiction in later sessions’ unsuccessful bill drafts. [48] As non-adoption infers nothing authoritative about an earlier statute’s meaning, we do not consult failed bills to divine what a previous Legislature intended. Even if our precedent allowed us to conflate inaction with intention, the bills, as the Court notes, were not only unsuccessful but immaterial. The bill that comes closest, Senate Bill 1404 from the 76th Legislature in 1999, would have amended “general contractor” to include “an owner or lessor of real property.” [49] Any relevance ends there. Senate Bill 1404 would have let general contractors (whether owners or not) invoke the exclusive-remedy defense either by providing coverage directly or “by entering into a written agreement with another person under which the other person provides the coverage.” [50] Today’s question differs significantly: whether a premises owner who meets every current statutory-employer criteria is nonetheless excluded. So while some bills over time would have extended comp-bar immunity to owners (1) who merely require coverage (Senate Bill 1404), [51] (2) who directly provide coverage but do not also act as their own general contractors (House Bills 2279 and 3024), [52] (3) who are a parent or subsidiary corporation of an entity that provides coverage (House Bill 3120, House Bill 3459, and Senate Bill 675), [53] or (4) who are engaged in construction or building with a general contractor and a subcontractor where one of them provides coverage (House Bills 2982 and 1626), [54] those expansions of immunity are committed to the Legislature’s broad policymaking discretion. They are not today’s case, which examines whether Entergy is disqualified under existing law despite meeting every applicable criteria . As for Senate Bill 1404, the legislative record is completely bare as to the individual sponsor’s (or anyone else’s) objective. The bill was referred to committee and then left pending; no hearing, no testimony, no bill analysis, no action whatsoever. Even if the bill were on all fours, a single bill — filed the day before the filing deadline [55] and never heard from again — hardly constitutes the Legislature “repeatedly reject[ ing ]” the notion of a premises owner acting dually as a general contractor under the Workers’ Compensation Act. In fact, even if there were a failed bill that added “owner” to the existing definition and nothing else, it would be immaterial. Lawmakers may have thought such a bill unwise, or maybe unnecessary. Who knows? Either way, it is imprudent for courts to draw forensic truths from legislative machinations, ascribing intent and motivations based on nothing more than a judge’s hunch as to what 181 autonomous lawmakers collectively had in mind. As Judge Easterbrook observes, “Intent is elusive for a natural person, fictive for a collective body.” [56]