68
Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment
Of course, the Court thinks it has done Granderson and probationers like him a great favor with its guesswork: Assuming that the drug proviso mandates incarceration, the Court's intuitions lead it to conclude that the mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment here is 2, rather than 20, months. But in its rush to achieve what it views as justice in this case, the Court has missed a broader point: The statute, by word and design, does not mandate a punishment of imprisonment on revocation. In my respectful submission, had the Court adhered to the text and structure of the statute Congress enacted and the President signed, rather than given effect to its own intuitions of what might have been on Congress' mind at the time, it would have come to a different conclusion. See Deal v. United States, 508 U. S. 129, 136- 137 (1993). And the fortuity that Granderson himself does not contend that the proviso permits a revocation sentence of probation, see ante, at 54, n. 12, is no reason to overlook that option here, given that our interpretation of the statute binds all probationers, not just Granderson. Cf. Elder v. Holloway, 510 U. S. 510, 514-516, and n. 3 (1994).
Perhaps the result the Court reaches today may be sensible as a matter of policy, and may even reflect what some in Congress hoped to accomplish. That result, however, does not accord with the text of the statute Congress saw fit to enact. Put in simple terms, if indeed Congress intended to require the mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment the Court surmises, Congress fired a blank. See Puerto Rico Dept. of Consumer Affairs v. ISLA Petroleum Corp., 485 U. S. 495, 501 (1988) ("[U]nenacted approvals, beliefs, and desires are not laws"). It is beyond our province to rescue Congress from its drafting errors, and to provide for what we might think, perhaps along with some Members of Congress, is the preferred result. See Smith v. United States, 508 U. S. 223, 247, n. 4 (1993) (Scalia, J., dissenting) ("Stretching language in order to write a more effective statute than Congress devised is not an exercise we should
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