Watson v. Republican National Committee · ¶110

This argument falters. In any statutory-interpretation case, a court’s goal is to determine what the statute meant at the time it became law. See A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law 78 (2012). Statutes enacted decades after the fact are seldom probative of this meaning. See West Virginia Univ. Hospitals, 499 U. S., at 100–101 (“how could an earlier Congress know what a later Congress would enact?”). The threshold for interpreting a later-enacted statute as controlling is accordingly steep: A litigant must show that such an interpretation is necessary to avoid making “nonsense out of the corpus juris.” Id., at 101. That showing is not satisfied here. It is easy to make sense of UOCAVA’s cross-references to state-law ballot-receipt deadlines without eschewing a federal election-day deadline. As the majority acknowledges, UOCAVA applies to primaries, which are not subject to the…

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