Cite as: 513 U. S. 454 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
Our obligation to avoid judicial legislation also persuades us to reject the Government's second suggestion—that we modify the remedy by crafting a nexus requirement for the honoraria ban. We cannot be sure that our attempt to re-draft the statute to limit its coverage to cases involving an undesirable nexus between the speaker's official duties and either the subject matter of the speaker's expression or the identity of the payor would correctly identify the nexus Congress would have adopted in a more limited honoraria ban. We cannot know whether Congress accurately reflected its sense of an appropriate nexus in the terse, 33-word parenthetical statement with which it exempted series of speeches and articles from the definition of honoraria in the 1992 amendment, see supra, at 460; in an elaborate, nearly 600-word provision with which it later exempted Department of Defense military school faculty and students from the ban; 25
or in neither. The process of drawing a proper nexus, even more than the defense of the statute's application to senior employees, would likely raise independent constitutional concerns whose adjudication is unnecessary to decide this case. Cf. supra, at 478. We believe the Court of Appeals properly left to Congress the task of drafting a narrower statute.26
25 See § 542 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993, 106 Stat. 2413-2414.
26 The dissent condemns our refusal to rewrite the statute. Post, at 501- 503. It notes that, when we considered a challenge to a federal statute that banned expressive displays in the Supreme Court building and on the public sidewalks around it, we had no difficulty striking down the statute only as it applied to the public sidewalks. See United States v. Grace, 461 U. S. 171, 180-183 (1983). Drawing a line between a building and sidewalks with which we are intimately familiar, based on settled First Amendment principles, see id., at 180, is a relatively simple matter. In contrast, drawing one or more lines between categories of speech covered by an overly broad statute, when Congress has sent inconsistent signals as to where the new line or lines should be drawn, involves a far more serious invasion of the legislative domain.
479
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