Opinion ID: 6115774
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: operability of the valid portions

Text: The central question therefore is whether severing the unconstitutional portions of SORA leaves a complete and operable statute in place. The majority proclaims that even if removing the 2006 and 2011 amendments from SORA resulted in a constitutional statute, 4 those amendments “cannot be excised from retroactive application because doing so renders the statute unworkable.” But severance does not require taking a machete to the statute—few statutes would remain operable after that approach. Instead, “[w]hen confronting a constitutional flaw in a statute, the court should try to invalidate no more of the statute than necessary.” 2 Singer, Sutherland Statutes and Statutory Construction (7th ed, November 2020 update), § 44:4; see also Alaska Airlines, Inc v Brock, 480 US 678, 684; 107 S Ct 1476; 94 L Ed 2d 661 (1987) (“ ‘[A] court should refrain from invalidating more of the statute than is necessary . . . .’ ”) (citation omitted). When considering whether smaller portions could be severed, the majority acknowledges that two pieces of the statute—the student-safety zones in MCL 28.733 to 28.736, as amended by 2005 PA 121, and the in-person reporting requirements in MCL 28.725(1), as amended by 2011 PA 17—“could be excised from retroactive application without affecting the statute’s workability.” In other words, the majority essentially admits that we could sever two portions of the statute and leave the rest operable. Of course, finding that the rest of the statute could remain operable without these requirements is not difficult—SORA did, in fact, operate without them before the 2006 and 2011 amendments that added them. Under these circumstances, MCL 8.5 requires severance. And yet the majority shies away from this conclusion because deciding which parts to sever, in these circumstances, involves “essentially legislative choices.” But the relevant legislative choice here was made by the Legislature when it enacted MCL 8.5. And it is hard to see how MCL 8.5 could survive the majority’s logic; if the decision on how to sever certain “discrete” portions of SORA is impermissibly legislative, then severability would never be 5 permissible. See Fallon, Facial Challenges, Saving Constructions, and Statutory Severability, 99 Tex L Rev 215, 224 (2020) (“[C]haracterizations of the judicial role in severing statutes as involving an impermissible ‘rewriting’ prove too much insofar as they imply that courts should never sever statutes with invalid applications that Congress sought to prescribe.”). By rejecting the Legislature’s choice, codified in MCL 8.5, the majority reaches the baffling conclusion that wiping out an entire statute is more respectful of legislative intent than removing a few words or sections.