Court Opinion

ID: 9498740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:26:46.685861+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:02.632201
License: Public Domain

*623FISHER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree that the regulation here should be upheld. I write separately because I disagree with the way in which the majority dismisses the inference that a statute which defines a noun has thereby defined the adjectival form of that noun. See Maj. Op. at 620 (quoting statutory definitions of “disability” and “employee” in 33 U.S.C. § 902(3) and (10), but holding that “it is not clear that we should combine these two terms to define ‘disabled employee’ ... ”). To me the answer is not so obvious. The grammatical imperatives of our language ought not to be disregarded casually, and were there nothing more before us than the statutory language and the implementing regulation, I would be hard-pressed to overlook the linguistic inconsistency between them. In this case, though, there is more, and to me that makes the difference. In my view, congressional acquiescence in the agency’s interpretation is evidence of ambiguity in the statutory language.
It is impossible to mechanically separate the “plain meaning” and “reasonable interpretation” components of the Chevron analysis. If one tries to do so in this case, one is faced with a conundrum. The statute defines “employee” and “disability,” but the implementing regulation uses the term “disabled employee” to mean something quite different from “employee with a disability.” To be sure, Congress’s attention to definitional detail may simply have been lax in this regard; the legislative history indicates that the drafters of the statute probably had in mind a regulatory scheme of the sort adopted by the agency, as opposed to that advocated by the petitioner here. See H.R. Conf. Rep. No. 98-1027, at 33 (1984), reprinted in 1984 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2734, 2783. Nonetheless, “Congress’s constitutional voice is the text of the statutes it enacts,” Szehinskyj v. Attorney Gen. of the United States, 432 F.3d 253 (3d Cir.2005), and while legislative history is often informative, we should be hesitant to take a statute’s legislative history, in and of itself, as dispositive of the statute’s apparently plain textual meaning.
But legislative history is not the only interpretive resource available to us in this case. The courts have long recognized that the meaning of a statute may be inferred partly from the course of its implementation over time. The seminal statement of this principle remains that of Justice Lamar:
It may be argued that while these facts and rulings prove a usage they do not establish its validity. But government is a practical affair intended for practical men. Both officers, law-makers and citizens naturally adjust themselves to any long-continued action of the Executive Department — on the presumption that unauthorized acts would not have been allowed to be so often repeated as to crystallize into a regular practice. That presumption is not reasoning in a circle but the basis of a wise and quieting rule that in determining the meaning of a statute or the existence of a power, weight shall be given to the usage itself — even when the validity of the practice is the subject of investigation.
United States v. Midwest Oil Co., 236 U.S. 459, 473, 35 S.Ct. 309, 59 L.Ed. 673 (1915).
In Midwest Oil, the question was whether the President had the authority to withdraw tracts of public land from mineral exploration, in apparent contravention of statutes that provided for such exploration. The Court held that Congress had implicitly acquiesced in such withdrawals by failing to amend the relevant statutes over a period of' decades during which many withdrawals had been made. The Court counted at least 252 withdrawals to which Congress had thus tacitly consented. The executive branch, *624the Court concluded, was acting as Congress’ agent, implementing the legislative will as is its constitutional duty. Congress watched the executive at its work, but at no point did it “repudiate the action taken”; therefore, “[Congress’] silence was its acquiescence. Its acquiescence was equivalent to consent to continue the practice until the power was revoked by some subsequent action by Congress.” 236 U.S. at 481, 35 S.Ct. 309.8
Of course statutory interpretation has come a long way since 1915, but the central insight of Midwest Oil, that in the search for statutory meaning, “weight shall be given to the usage itself,” is very much at home in the Chevron era. And the usage in this case is powerful evidence of statutory meaning.9 The regulation at issue here has been in effect for over 20 years. It has been applied, not 252 times, but .66,000 times in the past year alone. Longshore and Harbor Workers Compensation Program Fact Sheet, http:// ivwiv. dol. gov/esa/ owcp/dlhwc/lsfact. htm (Labor Department website, listing number of workers receiving disability benefits under the LHWCA in 2005).10 Pursuant to this regulation, the Department of Labor distributes some $747 million in benefits each year. Id. This case does not involve a long-dormant provision revived and turned to a new and dubious purpose; nor does it involve a “suspension] or repeal” of duly enacted legislation. Midwest Oil, 236 U.S. at 505, 35 S.Ct. 309 (Day, J„ dissenting). It involves instead a popular government program which has been consistently administered in just this manner since its inception. And Congress, which has not hesitated to amend the LHWCA in the past, see Pub.L. 92-576, 86 Stat. 1251 (1972); Pub.L. 98-426 (1984), has not thought it necessary to do so here.
Nor have private parties objected. The Court’s searches have revealed only two challenges to the legality of this regulation: this case, and a companion case brought in the Second Circuit, both filed by the same law firm. See Weeks Marine v. Briskie, 161 Fed.Appx. 178 (2d Cir.2006) (finding-statutory language ambiguous and deferring to agency interpretation). The scope of the filing requirement under 20 C.F.R. § 702.285(a) is simply not an issue over which practical men and women, as democratic participants in the practical affairs of government, have had any disagreement. “The very strength of this consensus ... and congressional silence after years of [agency and] judicial interpretation support[ ] adherence to the traditional view.” Gen. Dynamics Land Sys. v. *625Cline, 540 U.S. 581, 594, 124 S.Ct. 1236, 157 L.Ed.2d 1094 (2004).11
Not all regulations that come before us to be interpreted will have enjoyed such consistent application and longstanding congressional acquiescence. In the absence of such evidence, I would be less likely to find ambiguity in the type of grammatical alteration at work here. But I am convinced that in this case, the consistent historical application of the statute is ample evidence that “there is such variation in the connection in which the words are used as reasonably to warrant the conclusion that they were employed in different parts of the act with different intent,” Atlantic Cleaners & Dyers, Inc. v. United States, 286 U.S. 427, 433, 52 S.Ct. 607, 76 L.Ed. 1204 (1932), and that “given the statutory aims and circumstances, a hypothetical member [of -Congress] would likely have wanted judicial deference in this situation.” Stephen Breyer, Active Liberty 106 (2005).
I therefore agree with the majority that the statutory language, insofar as it conflicts with longstanding agency practice in addition to the legislative history, is ambiguous, and that deference is due to the agency’s reasonable interpretation.

.I would lay particular stress on two interpretive points: First, my invocation of Midwest Oil is in no respect a comment on the relationship between the respective inherent constitutional magisteria of Congress and the President. Second, the case at bar involves a "systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned,” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 610, 72 S.Ct. 863, 96 L.Ed. 1153 (1952) (Frankfurter, L, concurring) (emphasis added), as opposed to a practice kept secret from either Congress or the public.
In appealing to legislative acquiescence in this case, in other words, I do not'in any way open the twin cans of worms of inherent executive authority and executive action pursued in secret. In this case the power exercised by the Secretary of Labor was wielded pursuant to statute, and was wielded openly and publicly.

. The question whether congressional acquiescence shapes meaning or is evidence of meaning is, though of undoubted philosophical interest, of little practical moment here.

. That is to say, in each of those 66,000 cases, the statute, implemented through the regulation, gave the injured worker's employer or insurance carrier (or in some cases, the Labor Department itself) the right to request income verification reporting by the employee, but only while compensation is being paid.

. There is perhaps a certain irony in citing General Dynamics here, insofar as General Dynamics appealed to congressional acquiescence in rejecting a claim of statutory ambiguity and overturning an agency’s interpretation of a statute it administered, while here we appeal to congressional acquiescence in finding the statutoiy language ambiguous so as to affirm the agency’s interpretation.' (The text in the lacuna above reads "is enough to rule out any serious claim of ambiguity.”) The difference, though, is just the difference between the facts of the two cases. In this case, it would probably stretch the language too far to hold that it unambiguously requires the agency’s reading. Accord Weeks Marine, supra, 161 Fed.Appx. at 619 n. 4.