Cite as: 516 U. S. 264 (1996)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
simply hard to maintain a rigorously analytical attitude, when the point of departure for the inquiry is the fairyland in which legislative history reflects what was in "the Congress's mind."
In any case, it seems to me that if legislative history is capable of injecting into a statute an "intent" that its text alone does not express, the drafting history alluded to in today's opinion should have sufficed to win this case for respondent. It shows that interbank liability was not merely omitted from subsection (a), entitled "Civil liability." It was removed from that subsection, simultaneously with the addition of subsection (f), 12 U. S. C. § 4010(f), which gave the Federal Reserve Board power to "impose on or allocate among depository institutions the risks of loss and liability in connection with any aspect of the payment system" (language that is at least as compatible with adjudication as with rulemaking). Now if the only function of this new subsection (f) had been to give the Board rulemaking power, there would have been no logical reason to eliminate interbank disputes from the "Civil liability" subsection, whose basic prescription (banks are civilly liable for violations of the statute or of rules issued under the statute 1) applies no less in the interbank than in the bank-customer context. Nor can the removal of interbank disputes from subsection (a) be explained on the ground that Congress had decided to apply different damages limits to those disputes. The former subsection (a), in both House and Senate versions, already provided varying damages limits for individual suits and class actions, see S. 790, 100th Cong., 1st Sess., § 609(a) (1987); H. R. Rep. No. 100-52, pp. 10-11 (1987), and it would have been logical to set forth the newly desired interbank variation there as well, leaving to the new subsection (f) only
1 The Senate version of subsection (a) did not refer to violations of rules, see S. 790, 100th Cong., 1st Sess., § 609(a) (1987), but it was the House version of subsection (a), see H. R. Rep. No. 100-52, p. 10 (1987), which did specifically mention rules, that was retained.
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