452
Opinion of the Court
There are, however, reasons counting against such a reading. If, as is likely, the drafters were treating junior claimants or interest holders as a class at this point (see Ahlers, 485 U. S., at 202),24 then the simple way to have prohibited the old interest holders from receiving anything over objection would have been to omit the "on account of" phrase entirely from subsection (b)(2)(B)(ii). On this assumption, reading the provision as a blanket prohibition would leave "on account of" as a redundancy, contrary to the interpretive obligation to try to give meaning to all the statutory language. See, e. g., Moskal v. United States, 498 U. S. 103, 109-110 (1990); United States v. Menasche, 348 U. S. 528, 538-539 (1955).25 One would also have to ask why Congress
Bancorp Mortgage Co. v. Bonner Mall Partnership, O. T. 1993, No. 93- 714, p. 14.
The Government conceded that, in the case before us, it had no need to press this more stringent view, since "whatever [the] definition of 'on account of,' a 100 percent certainty that junior equit[y] obtains property because they're junior equity will satisfy that." See Tr. of Oral Arg. 29 (internal quotation marks added).
24 It is possible, on the contrary, to argue on the basis of the immediate text that the prohibition against receipt of an interest "on account of" a prior unsecured claim or interest was meant to indicate only that there is no per se bar to such receipt by a creditor holding both a senior secured claim and a junior unsecured one, when the senior secured claim accounts for the subsequent interest. This reading would of course eliminate the phrase "on account of" as an express source of a new value exception, but would leave open the possibility of interpreting the absolute priority rule itself as stopping short of prohibiting a new value transaction.
25 Given our obligation to give meaning to the "on account of" modifier, we likewise do not rely on various statements in the House Report or by the bill's floor leaders, which, when read out of context, imply that Congress intended an emphatic, unconditional absolute priority rule. See, e. g., H. R. Rep. No. 95-595, p. 224 (1977) ("[T]he bill requires that the plan pay any dissenting class in full before any class junior to the dissenter may be paid at all"); id., at 413 ("[I]f [an impaired class is] paid less than in full, then no class junior may receive anything under the plan"); 124 Cong. Rec. 32408 (1978) (statement of Rep. Edwards) (cramdown plan con-
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