Cite as: 536 U. S. 452 (2002)
Scalia, J., dissenting
The Court no doubt realizes that it is not even conceivable that appellants could have standing if redress of their injuries hinged on action by Congress; accordingly, it is driven to assert that the law does not mean what it says. The statute, the Court argues, "do[es] not expressly say" what is to occur when the numbers the Secretary reported to the President are flawed; accordingly, because it "makes good sense" to do so, the Court reads into the statute a third means by which the reapportionment can be altered: judicially decreed "mechanical revision" of "a clerical, a mathematical, or a calculation error" in the Secretary's report. Ante, at 462. This is an astonishing exercise of raw judicial power. The statute says very clearly what is to occur when anything (including a clerical, mathematical, or calculation error in the Secretary's report) renders the completed apportionment worthy of revision: nothing at all, unless Congress deems it worthy of revision and enacts a new law making or authorizing the revision that Congress thinks appropriate. There was no reason for the statute to list "expressly" the infinite number of circumstances in which the reapportionment could not be altered by other means, because it expressly said that the States' "entitle[ment]" to the number of Representatives shown in the presidential statement could be altered only by the two prescribed means. There is simply no other way to read the governing text: that the States "shall be entitled" to the reapportionment set forth in the President's statement "until" one of two events occurs, undeniably means that unless one of those two events occurs the States remain "entitled" to the reapportionment. What a wild principle of interpretation the Court today embraces: When a statute says that an act can be done only by means x or y, it can also be done by other means that "make good sense" under the circumstances, unless all the circumstances in which it cannot be done have been listed.
I would not subscribe to application of this deformed new canon of construction even if there were something about
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