726
Scalia, J., dissenting
I thought we had renounced the vice of "simplistically . . . assum[ing] that whatever furthers the statute's primary objective must be the law." Rodriguez v. United States, 480 U. S. 522, 526 (1987) (per curiam) (emphasis in original). Deduction from the "broad purpose" of a statute begs the question if it is used to decide by what means (and hence to what length) Congress pursued that purpose; to get the right answer to that question there is no substitute for the hard job (or, in this case, the quite simple one) of reading the whole text. "The Act must do everything necessary to achieve its broad purpose" is the slogan of the enthusiast, not the analytical tool of the arbiter.3
Second, the Court maintains that the legislative history of the 1973 Act supports the Secretary's definition. See ante, at 704-706. Even if legislative history were a legitimate and reliable tool of interpretation (which I shall assume in order to rebut the Court's claim); and even if it could appropriately be resorted to when the enacted text is as clear as this, but see Chicago v. Environmental Defense Fund, 511 U. S. 328, 337 (1994); here it shows quite the opposite of what the Court says. I shall not pause to discuss the Court's reliance on such statements in the Committee Reports as " '[t]ake' is defined . . . in the broadest possible manner to include every conceivable way in which a person can 'take' or attempt to 'take' any fish or wildlife.' " S. Rep. No. 93-307, p. 7 (1973) (quoted ante, at 704). This sort of empty flourish—to the effect that "this statute means what it means all the way"—
3 This portion of the Court's opinion, see ante, at 699, n. 12, discusses and quotes a footnote in TVA v. Hill, 437 U. S. 153, 184-185, n. 30 (1978), in which we described the then-current version of the Secretary's regulation, and said that the habitat modification undertaken by the federal agency in the case would have violated the regulation. Even if we had said that the Secretary's regulation was authorized by § 1538, that would have been utter dictum, for the only provision at issue was § 1536. See id., at 193. But in fact we simply opined on the effect of the regulation while assuming its validity, just as courts always do with provisions of law whose validity is not at issue.
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