488
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
challenged provision was invalid." Id., at 506. In Brockett itself, the state statute contained a severability clause announcing that the remainder of the Act would continue in effect should "any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance" be held invalid. Id., at 506, n. 14. Because the opinions in Grace and Garner made no mention of the existence of statutory severability clauses, these cases can perhaps best be explained as having involved implied severability. After delineating the range of the statute's impermissible applications, the Court implicitly concluded that the legislatures at issue—Congress in Grace and the Tennessee Legislature in Garner—would have preferred that the remainder of the statutes continue intact. These cases are entirely consistent with our severability precedents, in which we have held that "Congress' silence is just that—silence—and does not raise a presumption against severability." Alaska Airlines, Inc. v. Brock, 480 U. S. 678, 686 (1987).
As the Court of Appeals noted below, "[s]ection 501(b) does not contain a severability clause, and the legislative history yields no direct evidence of intent concerning severability." 990 F. 2d 1271, 1278 (CADC 1993). Under Alaska Airlines, this fact is by no means dispositive; the operative question instead is whether Congress would have promulgated § 501(b) had it known that it could not lawfully proscribe honoraria of employees below GS-16 for activities unrelated to Government employment. See 480 U. S., at 684; Stern, Separability and Separability Clauses in the Supreme Court, 51 Harv. L. Rev. 76, 82-83 (1937) (in dealing with the question of severable applications, the Court asks "whether the legislative body would intend the law to be given effect to whatever extent was constitutionally possible"). I think this question can be answered in the affirmative here. In severing this particular application, we leave the provision intact as to high-level Executive Branch employees and to the Legislative and Judicial Branches. Common sense suggests, and
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