464
Opinion of the Court
Turning to the question of remedy, the Court of Appeals agreed with the District Court that § 501(b)'s application to Executive Branch employees is severable from the remainder of the statute. The legislative history convinced the court that Congress had adopted the honoraria ban primarily in response to the growing concern about payments to its own Members; moreover, the statute itself disclosed that "the honorarium ban was adopted as part of a package of which a key ingredient was a sharp increase in the salary of members of Congress, judges, and a limited class of senior executive branch officials." Id., at 1278 (citation omitted). Accordingly, the court fashioned a remedy that, in effect, rewrote the statute by eliminating the words "officer or employee" from § 501(b) "except in so far as those terms encompass members of Congress, officers and employees of Congress, judicial officers and judicial employees." Id., at 1279.8
Over two dissents, the Court of Appeals denied a petition for rehearing en banc. 3 F. 3d 1555 (1993). We granted certiorari. 511 U. S. 1029 (1994).
III
Federal employees who write for publication in their spare time have made significant contributions to the marketplace of ideas. They include literary giants like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who were employed by the Customs Service; Walt Whitman, who worked for the De-actual experience of difficulty, and one can hypothesize rules of thumb that could constrain government discretion." 990 F. 2d, at 1276-1277.
8 In dissent, Judge Sentelle maintained that the statute was constitutional. He also objected to the court's remedy. In his opinion, the majority's severance of the statutory provisions relating to the Executive Branch was "nothing less than judicial legislation," 990 F. 2d, at 1296 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted), and its reluctance to invalidate the honoraria ban as to Members of Congress would have been "better served by striking the statute down as applied" to the plaintiff class. Id., at 1298.
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