In a New Republic piece titled “The Latest Challenge to Obamacare Should Embarrass Conservative Judges,” Brian Beutler makes an argument that ought to embarrass him. His central claim is that a statutory provision is ambiguous—and thus invites so-called Chevron deference to an agency’s reasonable interpretation—if “judges and scholars” who aren’t “daft or corrupted or engaging in some kind of conspiracy” have come up with a meaning that differs from the one that challengers to the agency’s interpretation are advancing. He cites no authority for his claim.

But a judge will find a statutory provision to be ambiguous only if he concludes that the sound application of the correct tools of statutory interpretation yields, at the end of the analysis, more than one reasonable meaning of the provision. (The Chevron ruling itself states that a judge must “employ[] traditional tools of statutory construction.”) The fact that other judges have come up with other meanings might suggest that the provision is ambiguous, but it might instead mean that those judges, in the eyes of the judge now deciding the issue, didn’t soundly apply the right analytical tools. (That wouldn’t mean that the other judges were “daft”; among other things, interpretive principles are contested, and not all issues are simple.) In any event, a judge can’t farm out the ambiguity inquiry to other judges (much less to “scholars”) by holding that the fact that other judges have, by whatever paths, come up with other meanings somehow establishes or indicates that a provision is ambiguous.