162
Opinion of the Court
ments could properly have been left to the 60th day) were powerless to divulge information to the SSA after the 60-day period had expired.8
8 Justice Scalia concedes that his theory should not extend so far as to limit the UMWA Pension Plan's duty to transfer funds to the Combined Fund to the particular dates in § 9705(a)(1). Justice Scalia attempts to avoid such an outcome by assuming, without basis, that the "UMWA Pension Plan has the power to transfer funds" to the Combined Fund in the absence of the authorization in § 9705(a)(1). Post, at 176 (dissenting opinion). Justice Scalia's confidence is misplaced. Prior to the Coal Act's enactment, the Vice Chairman of the Secretary of Labor's Coal Commission testified before Congress that legislative authorization was needed for such a transfer to occur: "One of the things that concerned the Commission was, first of all, our understanding of the present state of law under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Under that Act it is not within the power of any of the participants or signatories to transfer a pension surplus to a benefit fund. That is one of the reasons for the recommendation that a transfer be authorized." Hearing before the Subcommittee on Medicare and Long-Term Care of the Senate Committee on Finance, 102d Cong., 1st Sess., 13 (1991) (statement of Coal Commission Vice Chairman Perritt). It appears, then, that § 9705(a)(1) provides both the UMWA Pension Plan's power to act and a time limit, which according to Justice Scalia would render action on any other date ultra vires, a result that even the dissent does not embrace.
Justice Scalia thinks it "debatable" that the power to appoint initial trustees survives the deadline in § 9702(a)(1). Post, at 177. In order to avoid the embarrassment of concluding that tardiness would remove all authority to appoint the initial trustees, which would render the Act a dead letter, he suggests that an initial trustee could be appointed under § 9702(b)(2), even though that provision applies only to appointment of a "successor trustee" to be made "in the same manner as the trustee being succeeded," whereas an initial trustee does not "succeed" anyone. The extreme implausibility of Justice Scalia's suggested reading of § 9702(b)(2) points up the unreasonableness of placing a jurisdictional gloss on the § 9706(a) time limitation. It is impossible to believe that Congress meant its Herculean effort to resolve the coal industry benefit crisis to come to absolutely nothing if trustees were designated late.
There is a basic lesson to be learned from Justice Scalia's contortions to avoid the untoward results flowing from his formalistic theory that time limits on mandatory official action are always jurisdictional when they
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