334
Scalia, J., dissenting
today—explicit reference to habeas or to § 2241—rather than reference to "judicial review" in a statute that explicitly calls habeas corpus a form of judicial review. In Gregory v. Ash-croft, 501 U. S. 452, 467 (1991), we said:
"This [the Court's clear-statement requirement] does not mean that the [Age Discrimination in Employment] Act must mention [state] judges explicitly, though it does not. Cf. Dellmuth v. Muth, 491 U. S. 223, 233 (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring). Rather, it must be plain to anyone reading the Act that it covers judges."
In Gregory, as in United States v. Nordic Village, Inc., 503 U. S. 30, 34-35 (1992), and Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 241, 246 (1985), we held that the clear-statement requirement was not met, not because there was no explicit reference to the Eleventh Amendment, but because the statutory intent to eliminate state sovereign immunity was not clear. For the reasons discussed above, the intent to eliminate habeas jurisdiction in the present case is entirely clear, and that is all that is required.
It has happened before—too frequently, alas—that courts have distorted plain statutory text in order to produce a "more sensible" result. The unique accomplishment of today's opinion is that the result it produces is as far removed from what is sensible as its statutory construction is from the language of the text. One would have to study our statute books for a long time to come up with a more unlikely disposition. By authorizing § 2241 habeas review in the district court but foreclosing review in the court of appeals, see Calcano-Martinez, post, at 351-352, the Court's interpretation routes all legal challenges to removal orders brought by criminal aliens to the district court, to be adjudicated under that court's § 2241 habeas authority, which specifies no time limits. After review by that court, criminal aliens will presumably have an appeal as of right to the court of appeals, and can then petition this Court for a writ of cer-
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