Opinion ID: 3008418
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Settled Precedent Bars Summers’ Extratextual Arguments

Text: Summers and his aligned amici contend that several factors outside the Act’s actual language support a more flexible statutory reading. The Court correctly rejects these arguments, and notably the dissent implicitly does likewise.
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]
On a related front, amici supporting Summers exhort us to throw off our interpretive “shackles” and embrace a “thorough” and “expansive methodology” that relies on various interpretive tools that look beyond the Legislature’s chosen language. Given the lack of textual ambiguity, I reject this eclectic approach. [57] The text that lawmakers passed is the truest index of legislative will, and the Legislature defines “general contractor” in terms of what a contractor does , not in terms of what a contractor owns . The definition uses the word “owner” exactly one time, to make clear that motor carriers that use owner operators to provide transportation services are excluded. There is indeed an owner-related exclusion in the Act, but it is specific, not general. Notably, the dissent, while siding with Summers , also declines this nontextual approach. True, we periodically consult external materials when text is nebulous and susceptible to varying interpretations, but even then, we proceed “cautiously,” [58] mindful that such materials conflict as often as they converge and that our goal is “to solve, but not to create, an ambiguity.” [59] Even in rare cases where we mine secondary sources to help clarify ambiguity, judges, while not limited to the text, should always be limited by the text. [60] Indeed, this case demonstrates vividly the perils of uncritical reliance on legislative history. It is distressing that those citing the legislative record in this case sometimes do so: $ inaccurately : misstating when key legislative changes to the draft Act occurred; [61] $ selectively : playing up friendly snippets that they believe reinforce a wished-for interpretation and ignoring snippets that subvert it; [62] $ misleadingly : mischaracterizing the import of legislative actions; [63] And then, when confronted with a tidbit from the record that can be spun Entergy’s way, Summers dismisses it as something uttered mistakenly. [64] Laws exist to guide behavior, and by resting on statutory language rather than embarking on a scavenger hunt for extratextual clues prone to contrivance, [65] we ensure that everyday Texans struggling to decode the law and manage their affairs consistent with it can rely on a statute “to mean what it says,” [66] without having to hire lawyers to scour the legislative record for unexpressed (and often contradictory) indicia of intent. As we recently held, if text is not hazy, we must resist morphing statutory construction into statutory excavation and instead “take the Legislature at its word and not rummage around in legislative minutiae.” [67]
relief as injured direct employees Summers insists we must adopt a relaxed interpretation more consonant with fairness because reading “general contractor” to limit contract workers to the same recovery that direct workers receive would render the term “meaningless and absurd.” [68] While a looser reading is warranted when a straight-up reading produces a patently nonsensical result (not merely an unpleasant one), this is not such a case. Under Summers ’ reading, a separate contractor would escape tort liability, but a premises owner who performs every contracting-related chore the separate contractor would perform would not. More to the point, a general contractor that oversees work on its own property could not qualify as a general contractor under the Act. That was perhaps true in the 1983-1989 Act, as Wilkerson held, but the Legislature’s top-to-bottom rewrite amended the law. One can complain that current comp benefits are inadequate, but it is unpersuasive to equate equality — direct and contract employees receiving the same benefits when the employer owns the jobsite — with absurdity. [69] There is nothing nonsensical (or even uncommon [70] ) about a premises owner serving as its own general contractor or a reading of the Act that results in expanded jobsite coverage by urging premises owners to secure coverage for their subcontractors’ workers. [71] The comp system quid pro quo — exchanging uncertain tort recovery for no-fault medical and income benefits — has been the embedded public policy of Texas since Woodrow Wilson became President, and wider coverage — that is, more injured workers receiving such compensation — only advances that policy.
in the Workers’ Compensation Act The 1989 restructuring of the Texas workers’ compensation scheme — labeled “the most divisive legislative endeavor in contemporary Texas politics” [72] — consumed the 71st Legislature for one regular and “two special sessions fraught with obstinacy and emotion.” [73] What emerged embodied innumerable and quintessential legislative judgments. The recovery of workers’ comp benefits is dictated by the Legislature’s definitions, not by this Court’s declarations. We must refrain from rewriting the text lawmakers chose, here by reinserting third-party language the Legislature deleted. [74] Laid bare, Summers ’ core complaint is that benefits under the Act are too stingy. We are ill-equipped to assess this charge. The Act, whatever its alleged shortcomings, embodies century-old public policy, and courts must read the Legislature’s words as enacted, not revise them as desired. “The wisdom or expediency of the law is the Legislature’s prerogative, not ours” [75] — a fundamental point we recently reaffirmed: “arguments that the statute is unwise or unfair must be addressed to the Texas Legislature.” [76] It may be correct that lawmakers in 1989 did not intend to permit a dual-hat role for premises owners. Workers’ comp reform was a Herculean, multiple-session undertaking, one made tougher with short deadlines for drafting and short fuses for drafters. Heaven knows laws sometimes pass quickly amid urgent circumstances with scant discussion, yielding untoward ramifications over time. Recent examples of voting-without-reading abound, including the newly passed $789,000,000,000 (and 1,073-page) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which provided “a rare window into the mad cookery of complex legislation” — the final draft “filled with hand-written copy-editing marks, insertions scrawled in the margins, deletions of whole paragraphs boxed with X’s slashing through them, and a variety of curious hash marks and other annotations.” [77] Even Evelyn Wood would struggle mightily to read the bill, much less cast an informed vote. Even when laws are meticulously drafted and thoughtfully debated, legislative handiwork must often bend to a still more powerful force: the law of unintended consequences. [78] To be sure, people are inventive at finding ways to confound lawmakers’ wishes rather than conform to them. But even if we suspected lawmakers intended to retain a third-party requirement despite deleting third-party language, we could not judicially reinsert the requirement, however desirable as a policy matter. Legislative text is often elastic, like the “general contractor” definition in this case, but the judicial role is not. When divining what lawmakers intended to do, we must focus on what they in fact did do and presume they meant what their words mean. Where language is not unclear, a judge’s doctrinal toolbox is limited. I do not share the view that reliance on text is pretext, that reading laws as written is mere figleafing to disguise judicial willfulness aimed at imposing ideologically congenial results. Purposive decisionmaking is achieved more readily (and easily) by straying from text than by sticking to it, and hewing to the Legislature’s as-written language has repeatedly led me to results I strongly dislike. Obviously, if lawmakers in 2009 (or later) dislike the Court’s interpretation of the words their 1989 predecessors chose — or believe their predecessors drafted with imprecision — the remedy, and it is a simple one, rests wholly with them. This is precisely how the separation of powers works among co-equal branches of government. The presumption that lawmakers intended what they enacted is not just required and well-settled but desired and well-founded. It is an accommodation rooted in carefulness, not certitude. The Legislature can easily reinsert an upstream-contract provision if it believes our interpretation is wooden legalism that honors the letter of the law but not its spirit, thus letting premises owners slip through an unintended loophole.