Antonin Scalia

“ The only class that remains as a possible recipient of lump-sum payments so obscurely validated by the otherwise pointless "salary" language consists of Government officers and employees who are not special employees and who are compensated in some manner other than by payment of salary. ”

“ Apart from the fact that Congress often acts only "one step at a time" to eliminate one abuse that has become the focus of its attention but not all allied abuses, there are good practical reasons why the payment or supplementation of salary would have been singled out. ”

“ Even if one does not think that a meaning trumps an implication, at most we have an ambiguity-and since this is a criminal statute the rule of lenity demands that it be resolved in favor of the more narrow criminal liability.
It may seem strange nowadays that Congress should think of categorically criminalizing only periodic payments (salary or supplementation of salary) , rather than all payments, to Government employees. ”

“ To follow their logic is to glimpse behind the looking glass.
An example is employee receipt of cash awards from nonprofit organizations for meritorious public service. Unless one believes that the statutory term "as compensation" (or its predecessor term "in connection with") imports the commonlaw requirement of bargained-for consideration-which no one contends-it is difficult to imagine any lump-sum payments more clearly covered by § 209 (a) than cash grants conferred specifically to reward the work of Government officials. ”

“ But superfluous exceptions (to "make assurance doubly sure") are a more common phenomenon than the insertion of utterly pointless language at the very center of the substantive restriction. Moreover, since (as I shall discuss in Part III below) the Government is not so foolish as to apply literally its interpretation that all lump-sum payments as compensation are covered, subsections (d) and (e) turn out to be largely superfluous under its view of the statute as well. ”

“ But it would not have seemed strange in 1917, when the substance of subsection (a) was originally enacted. There existed at that time, in apparently more than one Government agency, a regular practice of hiring, at nominal salary, individuals whose real compensation would be paid by private organizations. ”

“ But a misplaced comma is more plausible than a gross grammatical error, plus the destruction of an apparently intended parallelism, both leading to the peculiar introduction of a condition in the second clause which one would surely have expected to find in the first. ”

“ The law in question, a criminal statute, is not administered by any agency but by the courts. It is entirely reasonable and understandable that federal officials should make available to their employees legal advice regarding its interpretation ”