Court Opinion

ID: 9430436
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:44.278044+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:24.518632
License: Public Domain

*866Justice Stevens,
dissenting.
The class of persons that Congress intended to benefit by creating the “Earned Income Credit” Program in 1975 is composed entirely of low-income families.1 The Court has fairly described the purposes of the 1975 legislation:
“The earned-income credit was enacted to reduce the disincentive to work caused by the imposition of social security taxes on earned income (welfare payments are not similarly taxed), to stimulate the economy by tunneling funds to persons likely to spend the money immediately, and to provide relief for low-income families hurt by rising food and energy prices.” Ante, at 864.
The mechanism by which Congress tunneled the funds to those persons was to treat the credits as though their recipients had overpaid their taxes, giving them a right to a “refund” of a hypothetical overpayment. This relatively obscure provision of the Internal Revenue Code gave rise to no particular difficulties for the ensuing six years.
The principal beneficiaries of the Intercept Program enacted by Congress as part of what is appropriately called the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 were state governments which had claims for recoupment of welfare payments made to families that were unable to enforce a departed parent’s child-support obligations. Thus, the real adversaries in this case are the Sorensons — a low-income family — on the one hand, and the State of Washington, on the other, which will ultimately receive the intercepted “refund” under the Court’s holding. The question is whether Congress in 1981 intended to divert these federal funds from the original beneficiaries of the Earned Income Credit Program to the treasuries of state governments. Notwithstanding the Court’s careful and admittedly accurate parsing of the language of the statute, I am not persuaded that Congress had any such intent.
*867The Court confidently asserts that “it defies belief that Congress was unaware” of the impact of its Intercept Program upon the Earned Income Credit Program when it enacted OBRA in 1981. See ante, at 863. The Court does not pause to tell us why, if that be so, Congress did not even mention this important change at any point in the legislative history of OBRA. With all due respect to the Court and to our hardworking neighbors in the Congress, I think “it defies belief” to assume that a substantial number of legislators were sufficiently familiar with OBRA to realize that somewhere in that vast piece of hurriedly enacted legislation there was a provision that changed the 6-year-old Earned Income Credit Program.2
I agree that the Court’s reading of the statutory language is faithful to its grammar. I am not persuaded, however, that it actually reflects the intent of the Congress that enacted OBRA. I therefore would accept the construction of the relevant statutes adopted by the Courts of Appeals for the Second and Tenth Circuits. See Rucker v. Secretary of Treasury, 751 F. 2d 351, 356-357 (CA10 1984); Nelson v. Regan, 731 F. 2d 105, 110-112 (CA2), cert. denied sub nom. Manning v. Nelson, 469 U. S. 853 (1984). I respectfully dissent.

 121 Cong. Rec. 8861 (1975) (remarks of Sen. Long).

 “Smoking a big cigar, the Speaker [of the House of Representatives] got angry again over the slap-dash quality of the bill [that became the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981], with parts of it photocopied from memorandums, other parts handwritten at the last minute, and some final sections hastily crossed out in whorls of pencil marks.
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“But then he smiled, too, noting such cryptic and accidental entries in the bill as a name and phone number — ‘Ruth Seymour, 225-4844’ — standing alone as if it were a special appropriation item.” N. Y. Times, July 1, 1981, p. A16, col. 1.