Opinion ID: 112041
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Court explains:

Text: As we see it, § 504 does not demand inquiry into whether factors other than mental illness rendered an individual veteran's drinking so entirely beyond his control as to negate any degree of `willfulness' where Congress and the Veterans' Administration have reasonably determined for purposes of the veterans' benefits statutes that no such factors exist. Ante, at 551. As I see it, § 504 demands precisely the inquiry the Court says is unnecessary. While Congress certainly has the authority to determine that primary alcoholism always should be attributed to willful misconduct, I find no support whatever for the Court's conclusion that Congress made that determination when it amended § 1662(a) in 1977. The Court is correct, of course, see ante, at 546, when it says that we must assume that Congress intended the term willful misconduct in § 1662(a)(1) to have the same meaning it had been given in other veterans' benefits statutes. Indeed, the legislative history indicates that Congress did inten[d] that the same standards be applied as are utilized in determining eligibility for other VA programs under title 38. S. Rep. No. 95-468, pp. 69-70 (1977). If § 504 had not been amended one year later to cover specifically all executive agency programs, including the VA's benefits programs, see Pub. L. 95-602, §§ 119, 122(d)(2), 92 Stat. 2982, 2987, 29 U. S. C. § 794, there would be little reason to question the application of the VA's interpretation of the willful-misconduct regulation to § 1662(a)(1). But the Court goes further and finds that Congress' reference to the VA's willful-misconduct regulation in amending § 1662(a) is a congressional adoption of the VA's rule. The Court transforms Congress' uncontroversial statement that the willful-misconduct regulation should be given the same meaning throughout the statutory scheme into a specifi[c] determin[ation] by Congress that primary alcoholics are presumed to have engaged in willful misconduct. See ante, at 551, n. 11; see also ante, at 547 (Congress' 1977 determination that primary alcoholism is not the sort of disability that warrants an exemption); ante, at 548 (Congress had  `narrow, precise, and specific'  intent to exclude primary alcoholics in enacting § 1662(a)(1)); ante, at 551 (original congressional intent [in amending § 1662(a)] that primary alcoholics not be excused from the 10-year delimiting period). This magical transformation is the linchpin in the Court's analysis, for unless Congress itself actually took a position in 1977 endorsing the association of primary alcoholism with willful misconduct, the subsequent amendment of § 504 in 1978 to include benefit programs like the VA's would simply be read to impose new constraints on the VA's treatment of alcoholics. There is nothing whatever that is inconsistent about Congress' willingness, in 1977, to allow the VA to apply its own rules in determining which alcoholic veterans were entitled to benefits, and its decision, one year later, to require such determinations to comply with the antidiscrimination provisions of § 504 then being amended. In order to escape § 504's requirements, the majority must conclude that in 1977 Congress defined a primary alcoholic as not otherwise qualified, within the meaning of § 504, for the extension of time available under § 1662(a)(1). The language of § 1662(a)(1) itself merely establishes that a willfully incurred disability, as a general matter, does not entitle a veteran to the extension of time. And the Senate Report, upon which the Court exclusively relies, makes only passing reference to the relevant regulations  regulations which encompass the VA's entire policy on the applicability of the willful-misconduct provisions, not just the application of that term to alcoholism. Finally, even those portions of the regulations expressly addressed to alcoholism do not state that primary alcoholism is to be equated with willful misconduct. That interpretation is derived from a 1964 Administrator's Decision, which itself discusses the VA's irrebuttable presumption only briefly. Administrator's Decision, Veterans' Administration No. 988, Interpretation of the Term Willful Misconduct as Related to the Residuals of Chronic Alcoholism 1 (1964). [3] See 37 Fed. Reg. 20335, 20336 (1972) (proposing regulation and announcing that it was intended to incorporate principles of the 1964 administrative issue). Surely something more than two sentences quoted from a Senate Report should be required before we interpret general statutory language to conflict with the most natural reading of subsequent specific legislation. It is only the Court's strained reading of § 1662(a)(1) to embrace a congressional determination that primary alcoholism is not the sort of disability that warrants an exemption, ante, at 547, that leads the Court to reject as a disfavored implicit repeal § 504's requirement that qualifications for the exemption be determined on a case-by-case basis. The  `basic principle of statutory construction that a statute dealing with a narrow, precise, and specific subject is not submerged by a later enacted statute covering a more generalized spectrum,'  ante, at 547-548, has no application here, where the earlier enactment is not narrowly or specifically addressed to the matter treated generally in the subsequent enactment: federal agencies' treatment of alcoholics. I have been no more successful than the VA or the Court in turning up evidence that Congress expressly considered, or intended, in amending § 1662 (a), to adopt legislatively the VA's presumption that primary alcoholism always is attributable to willful misconduct. I therefore see no reason to defer to the VA's rule in interpreting a subsequent and entirely separate congressional enactment that the VA has not been empowered to administrate.