Court Opinion

ID: 9429966
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:28:27.252443+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:06.965095
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Rehnquist, and Justice O’Connor join,
dissenting.
Title 5 U. S. C. § 8347(c) states:
“The Office [of Personnel Management] shall determine questions of disability and dependency arising under this subchapter. Except to the extent provided under subsection (d) of this section, the decisions of the Office concerning these matters are final and conclusive and are not subject to review.”
The majority concedes that in cases like petitioner’s, subsection (d) of 5 U. S. C. § 8347 provides only for review of OPM’s decisions by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Nonetheless, the majority concludes that notwithstanding the review preclusion provision of § 8347(c), petitioner is entitled to judicial review of the denial of his claim for disability retirement benefits. In the view of the majority, § 8347(c) must be interpreted to preclude judicial review only of OPM’s factual determinations, not of questions of law. Because I consider the exercise in statutory construction that supports this conclusion fundamentally unsound, I dissent.
The majority begins by asserting that the language of the statute is ambiguous, as it “quite naturally can be read as precluding review only of OPM’s factual determinations *801about ‘questions of disability and dependency.’” Ante, at 779. With all due respect, I confess that I cannot understand how one can “quite naturally” read a provision precluding review of decisions concerning “questions of disability . . . arising under this subchapter” to apply only to factual findings of disability. Had Congress intended to preclude review only of factual findings, it seems unlikely that it would have employed the much more comprehensive term “decisions.” The statute strikes me as ambiguous only in the sense that any statement may be termed “ambiguous” on the theory that the utterer may have meant something other than what he said. Such a nihilistic view of linguistic interpretation may be fashionable in some circles, but it hardly provides an adequate basis for statutory construction. A more conventional reading of the statute — one that takes as its starting point the plain meaning of the statutory language — would leave little alternative to rejecting petitioner’s argument that OPM’s denial of his claim for disability benefits is judicially reviewable.1
Having declared the statute’s language ambiguous, however, the majority seeks to bolster its interpretation through resort to the legislative history. The legislative history relied upon, however, is not that of the Congress that originally enacted the preclusion provision, for that history, as the majority concedes, provides no hint that the statute does not mean what it says. Instead, the majority examines the legislative history of the 1980 amendments to § 8347, which *802created an exception to §8347(c)’s preclusion of judicial review — an exception limited to involuntary mental disability cases. One would normally believe that by creating an express exception to the rule precluding judicial review while maintaining the bar to review in all other eases, Congress would have underscored rather than undermined the force of § 8347(c). The contrary contention is that in “revisiting” §8347, Congress implicitly ratified the so-called Scroggins doctrine, under which disability determinations of the OPM and its predecessor, the Civil Service Commission, were held by the Court of Claims to be reviewable for procedural error notwithstanding § 8347(c).2 In relying on this history, the majority purports to be applying the canon of statutory construction articulated in Lorillard v. Pons, 434 U. S. 575 (1978):
“Congress is presumed to be aware of an administrative or judicial interpretation of a statute and to adopt that interpretation when it re-enacts a statute without change .... So too, where . . . Congress adopts a new law incorporating sections of a prior law, Congress nor*803mally can be presumed to have had knowledge of the interpretation given to the incorporated law, at least insofar as it affects the new statute.” Id., at 580-581.
Of course, neither Lorillard nor the authorities it cites are directly relevant here, for Congress did not “re-enact” the review preclusion in the 1980 legislation, nor did it “incorporate” the language of § 8347(c) in a new statute; rather, it left § 8347(c) intact and created a specific new exception to its preclusion of review. In creating this exception, which was designed solely as a remedy for the perceived problem of misuse by federal agencies of involuntary mental disability retirement proceedings to rid themselves of unpopular employees, Congress can hardly be said to have “adopted” any interpretation of the preclusion provision that it left untouched. Even if Congress was aware of the construction placed upon § 8347(c) by the Court of Claims, its inaction in the face of that construction is an unsatisfactory basis on which to rest the majority’s interpretation of the statute. See, e. g., Aaron v. SEC, 446 U. S. 680, 694, n. 11 (1980).3
*804There is no basis in the legislative history for concluding that Congress endorsed Scroggins review in cases subject to § 8347(c): that history indicates with reasonable clarity that Congress believed that the exception it was creating in § 8347(d)(2) was an exception to an otherwise absolute preclusion of judicial review. The Committee Reports describing the legislation amending §8347 nowhere indicate any congressional recognition of the possibility that under § 8347 as it then existed, limited judicial review of OPM’s disability decisions might be available. The House Report speaks in categorical terms of § 8347(c)’s “bar to judicial review,” H. R. Rep. No. 96-1080, p. 3 (1980), while the Senate Report refers to the “bar to any review of OPM’s decisions on disability,” S. Rep. No. 96-1004, p. 3 (1980). And although, as the majority points out, the House Report does contain a discussion of the Scroggins decision and of two other Court of Claims decisions that the majority classes as following Scroggins, the Report’s discussion evinces no belief that Scroggins permits any form of judicial review. Rather, the Report excoriates Scroggins and its progeny as extreme examples of the pernicious effects of precluding judicial review of involuntary mental disability retirement cases.4 The Committee Reports *805thus represent a different interpretation of Scroggins than that offered by the majority; they by no means suggest that anyone in Congress believed that in leaving the § 8347(c) bar to review intact in all cases other than involuntary mental disability retirement cases, Congress would be endorsing the view that § 8347(c) permitted limited judicial review in all of those other cases.
The discussion on the House floor of the bill amending §8347 provides a further indication that Congress did not believe § 8347(c) permitted any judicial review at all in cases to which it applied. Representative Spellman, who chaired the Committee that reported the bill, explained that the provision allowing judicial review of involuntary mental disability retirement cases was necessary because “MSPB’s decision in these cases currently are [sic] final and not subject to court review.” 126 Cong. Rec. 14815 (1980).5 The follow*806ing colloquy then took place between Representative Spell-man and Representative Rudd:
“Mr. RUDD: Mr. Speaker, I would simply like to ask a couple of questions of the gentlewoman from Maryland about this legislation.
“I think recourse to the courts is always available for wrongs that have been committed, but apparently this makes it a little easier for a judicial review of an employee-employer relationship decision. Is that correct?
“Mrs. SPELLMAN: I would like to explain to the gentleman from Arizona that unfortunately access to the courts is not available to these employees at this time.
“Mr. RUDD: My question is that this legislation would expedite it, so to speak?
“Mrs. SPELLMAN: Exactly. The gentleman is absolutely right.
“Mr. RUDD: With the understanding that the courts are always available for wrongs that have been committed, for equity, for justice, with this addition to the legislation, would that be in the way of an intimidation to the employer, a Federal employer?
“Mrs. SPELLMAN: No; I guess I did not make it clear. For employees today who are asked to take fitness-for-duty exams and are found to be unfit for duty, even based upon a telephone call with a psychiatrist, they do not have access to the courts. The law precludes them from having that access today. What we are attempting to do is treat them like citizens of the *807United States of America should be treated, opening up that review by the court.” Id., at 14817.
Representative Spellman’s status as the Chairman of the Committee that authored the amendments to § 8347 gives her explanation of what those amendments were intended to accomplish some authority. See, e. g., Train v. Colorado Public Interest Research Group, 426 U. S. 1, 14-17 (1976); Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, 254 U. S. 443, 475 (1921). Her remarks on the floor are unequivocal indications that those who wrote the bill amending § 8347 perceived it to create an exception to an otherwise unqualified bar to judicial review. Spellman’s explanation of the bill substantially undermines the plausibility of the majority’s conclusion that in leaving the § 8347(c) bar in place for all cases other than involuntary mental disability cases Congress believed it was leaving open the possibility of limited judicial review in cases to which § 8347(c) applied.
The majority insists that Congress believed limited review to be available under § 8347(c) because OPM told it that that was the case. This conclusion in large part is based on the testimony of an OPM representative before the House Subcommittee that initially drafted the legislation that, as amended, ultimately emerged as the bill amending §8347. The OPM representative informed the members of the Subcommittee that judicial review for procedural error was not barred by § 8347(c). What the majority fails to mention is that this testimony was immediately followed by a statement from the Subcommittee’s own Associate Counsel, who stated:
“It is the subcommittee position that litigation is necessary even though the previous witness talked about employees not needing any further access to the courts because procedural issues are already taken up on a due process basis by the courts without any special legislation.
*808“This is a fairly decent theory except the Court of Claims doesn’t agree.” Hearing on H. R. 2510 et al. before the Subcommittee on Compensation and Employee Benefits of the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, 96th Cong., 1st Sess., 11 (1979) (statement of Thomas R. Kennedy, Associate Counsel, Subcommittee on Investigations).
The witness then proceeded to provide his own analysis of the Scroggins line of cases, the gist of which was that § 8347(c) effectively barred any judicial review of OPM’s disability decisions. The Subcommittee hearings thus provide a slim basis for the notion that Congress believed that limited review was permitted by § 8347(c) — indeed, to the extent that the hearings suggest anything, it is that Congress believed § 8347(c) meant just what it said.
The majority also places heavy emphasis on two letters written by the Director of OPM to the House and Senate Committees considering the amendments to §8347. Each letter contains the statement that OPM believed that “[i]t is appropriate . . . that OPM decisions on voluntary applications be conclusive, re viewable only to determine whether there has been a substantial procedural error, misconstruction of governing legislation, or some like error going to the heart of the administrative determination.” Letter from Alan K. Campbell to Rep. James M. Hanley (May 14, 1980), reprinted in H. R. Rep. No. 96-1080, p. 8 (1980); Letter from Alan K. Campbell to Sen. Abraham A. Ribicoff (Sept. 25, 1980), reprinted in S. Rep. No. 96-1004, p. 4 (1980). Because this language tracks the description of judicial review under the so-called Scroggins formula, the majority urges that these letters put Congress on notice that such review was permitted under § 8347(c). But the Campbell letters nowhere mention Scroggins or state that what Campbell believed to be appropriate was in fact the law. Nor, indeed, do the letters indicate that the limited form of review Campbell believed appropriate in voluntary disability cases was judicial review at all: for all that appears, the letters may have *809been referring to the review of OPM decisions available in the MSPB.6 The oblique reference to review of voluntary-disability claims in the Campbell letters is insufficient to establish that Congress believed that its passage of the amendments to §8347 constituted an endorsement of Scroggins review.
The only evidence the majority can point to that suggests that anyone in or connected with Congress believed in the existence of Scroggins review is the 1978 Subcommittee Report discussed ante, at 783. The author of this Committee print did take the position that § 8347(c) permitted some review — albeit severely limited review — of the Civil Service Commission’s disability decisions. I doubt, however, that the interpretation of § 8347(c) advanced in a 1978 Committee print can be attributed to the Congress that amended § 8347 two years later. In the intervening period, the Subcommittee’s staff apparently changed its position on the effect of § 8347(c), see swpra, at 807-808, and the Committee Reports on the bill amending § 8347 — particularly when read in light of Representative Spellman’s explanatory remarks on the House floor — leave the definite impression that the House and Senate Committees that reported the bill believed the bar in § 8347(c) to be absolute.
The majority’s approach, then, amounts to this. A farfetched reading of a reasonably clear statute is posited. On the strength of this “ambiguity,” resort is had to the legislative history, not of the enacting Congress, but of a Congress nearly three decades later that neither re-enacted nor amended the language in question. A thorough combing of the legislative history reveals fragmentary support for the notion that Congress may have been aware of a particular *810incorrect construction placed on the statute in question in a few cases decided by the Court of Claims. Notwithstanding that the weight of the evidence is against the hypothesis that Congress was aware of this construction, it is concluded that Congress not only assumed that the courts would continue to place this construction on the statute, but also actually enacted this assumption into law when it amended the statute in another respect. Through this remarkable exercise in reconstruction of the legislative process, the Court departs from both of the fundamental principles of statutory construction: that a court’s object is to give effect to the intent of the enacting legislature, and that the surest guide to the intent of the legislature is the language of the statute itself.
I do not mean to endorse the simplistic view that the words printed in the United States Code can answer all questions regarding the meaning of statutes. Resort to legislative history will always be a necessary tool of statutory construction, and the circumstances under which courts should turn to legislative history and the weight to be accorded particular sources of history cannot be prescribed by inflexible canons of construction. Statutory interpretation requires a certain amount of freedom to choose the materials best suited to illuminating the meaning of the particular provisions at hand. But when the history is less useful than the statutory language itself — when, for example, the history can serve only as a basis for debatable speculations on what some Congress other than the one that enacted the statute thought that the statute meant when it did something else — courts should resist the temptation to let their enthusiasm for reports, hearings, and committee prints lead them to neglect the comparatively unambiguous meaning of the statute itself. In this case, the majority seems to me to have fallen prey to that temptation and thereby missed the proper interpretation of the statute.
I therefore dissent.

 The majority suggests that Congress ordinarily is more explicit when it seeks to preclude review altogether. Ante, at 779-780. But this argument was ruled out by our decision in United States v. Erika, Inc., 456 U. S. 201 (1982), in which we held that preclusion of review could be inferred from Congress’ failure to provide explicitly for review. The majority attempts to distinguish Erika on the ground that Congress’ silence in the statute under consideration there was less ambiguous than its affirmative preclusion of review in the statute at issue here. Ante, at 790-791, n. 28. Such argumentation is, to put it mildly, unconvincing.

 Scroggins v. United States, 184 Ct. Cl. 530, 397 F. 2d 295, cert. denied, 393 U. S. 952 (1968), is an unlikely source for the doctrine that disability decisions are reviewable. In Scroggins, the Court of Claims stated that under § 8347(c), “at best, a court can set aside the Commission’s determination ‘only where there has been a substantial departure from important procedural rights, a misconstruction of the governing legislation, or some like error “going to the heart of the administrative determination.” ’ ” Id., at 534, 397 F. 2d, at 297 (emphasis added). The court went on to hold that it had no power to overturn the Civil Service Commission’s decision to retire an employee against his will on mental disability grounds notwithstanding that the decision lacked any evidentiary support. The so-called Scroggins doctrine apparently is the product of frequent repetition of the Scroggins court’s dictum regarding the circumstances under which it might have the power to review a disability decision. As the majority points out, reversal under the Scroggins formula was, at least as of 1980, virtually unheard of. See ante, at 790, and n. 26.

 Faced with a question of the proper construction of § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Court in Aaron rejected a line of argument almost identical to that which it accepts today:
“The Commission finds further support for its interpretation... in the fact that Congress was expressly informed of the Commission’s interpretation on two occasions when significant amendments to the securities laws were enacted . . . and on each occasion Congress left the administrative interpretation undisturbed. . . . But, since the legislative consideration of those statutes was addressed principally to matters other than that at issue here, it is our view that the failure of Congress to overturn the Commission’s interpretation falls far short of providing a basis to support a construction of § 10(b) so clearly at odds with its plain meaning and legislative history.” 446 U. S., at 694, n. 11.
I do not suggest that Congress’ inaction in the face of an authoritative statutory interpretation brought to its attention is never probative of the proper interpretation of the statute. In Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U. S. 574 (1983), for example, the Court based its acceptance of *804the Internal Revenue Service’s interpretation of § 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code in part on Congress’ failure to repudiate that interpretation. The Court emphasized, however, that its decision to rely on legislative nonaction as a guide to the statute’s meaning was justified because of Congress’ “prolonged and acute awareness” of the IRS interpretation, which had been brought to Congress’ attention by legislation designed to overturn it at least 13 times in the space of a dozen years. Id., at 600-601. The Court cautioned that “[o]rdinarily, and quite appropriately, courts are slow to attribute significance to the failure of Congress to act on particular legislation.” Id., at 600.

 The House Report stated:
“Under present law disability determinations are not subject to review (see, 5 U. S. C. 8347(c)). The committee was made aware of the adverse effect of this bar to judicial review by two Court of Claims decisions issued on June 14, 1968, in two psychiatric disability retirement cases. These cases were McGlasson v. United States, 397 F. 2d 303 (1968), and *805Scroggins v. United States, 397 F. 2d 295 (1968).” H. R. Rep. No. 96-1080, at 4.
The majority suggests that because Scroggins and its progeny in fact held that limited judicial review was available under § 8347(c), “statements in which Scroggins was cited cannot serve to indicate that Congress believed there was an absolute bar to judicial review.” Ante, at 786. The fallacy in this argument is obvious: it assumes that Congress read Scroggins the same way the majority reads it today. The Committee Report, however, indicates that this assumption is unwarranted: in its Report to the full House, the Committee presented the Scroggins decision as an instance of the preclusion of review, not as a decision holding review available. That this may not have been an entirely accurate view of Scroggins is of course irrelevant, for under the majority’s approach to the interpretation of this statute, “the relevant inquiry is not whether Congress correctly perceived the then state of the law, but rather what its perception of the state of the law was.” Brown v. GSA, 425 U. S. 820, 828 (1976), quoted ante, at 790. In any event, the Committee’s apparent interpretation of Scroggins as a review preclusion case rather than a case actually establishing the existence of a form of judicial review is by no means unwarranted. See n. 2, supra.

 Representative Spellman, in her prepared statement explaining the purpose of the bill, also remarked that “OPM would support H. R. 2510 if the judicial review were limited to procedural questions involving these *806disability decisions rather than questions of both procedure and the medical facts of the case.” 126 Cong. Rec. 14816 (1980). Procedural review, of course, is precisely what the majority contends was already available despite § 8347(c). Representative Spellman’s remark, however, would have made little or no sense if she had shared this view.

 Only a Congressman who had actually read the Scroggins decision and recognized Campbell’s use of the language employed in that opinion would have had any basis for concluding that Campbell was alluding to the availability of Scroggins review. I think it is safe to assume that few Congressmen were familiar enough with the jurisprudence of the Court of Claims to recognize OPM’s plagiarism.