Cite as: 522 U. S. 448 (1998)
Scalia, J., dissenting
enactment of § 1395ww(h)(2)(A), to correct any erroneous determinations of 1984 GME costs before the 3-year revision window closed, she (or more precisely her predecessor) neglected to do so. We obligingly pull her chestnuts from the fire by accepting a reading of the statute that is implausible. The Court asks the following question:
"Had Congress contemplated that the Secretary would not have responded to the 1986 GME Amendment swiftly enough to catch 1984 NAPR errors within the Secretary's three-year reopening period, what would the Legislature have anticipated as the proper administrative course? Error perpetuation until Congress plugged the hole? Or the Secretary's exercise of authority to effectuate the Legislature's overriding purpose in the Medicare scheme: reasonable (not excessive or unwarranted) cost reimbursement?" Ante, at 459-460.
The answer to that question is easy. But it is the wrong question. Of course it can always be assumed that Congress would prefer whatever would preserve, in light of unforeseen eventualities, "the Legislature's overriding purpose." We are not governed by legislators' "overriding purposes," however, but by the laws that Congress enacts. If one of them is improvident or ill conceived, it is not the province of this Court to distort its fair meaning (or to sanction the Executive's distortion) so that a better law will result. The immediate benefit achieved by such a practice in a particular case is far outweighed by the disruption of legal expectations in all cases—disruption of the rule of law— that government by ex post facto legislative psychoanalysis produces.
I would pronounce the Secretary's reaudit regulation ultra vires and reverse the Court of Appeals.
469
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