Opinion of the Court
employees.”[1]
Unable to squeeze more from the statute’s text, New Prime is left to appeal to its policy. This Court has said that Congress adopted the Arbitration Act in an effort to counteract judicial hostility to arbitration and establish “a liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements.” Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Constr. Corp., 460 U. S. 1, 24 (1983). To abide that policy, New Prime suggests, we must order arbitration according to the terms of the parties’ agreement. But often and by design it is “hard-fought compromise[ ],” not cold logic, that supplies the solvent needed for a bill to survive the legislative process. Board of Governors, FRS v. Dimension Financial Corp., 474 U. S. 361, 374 (1986). If courts felt free to pave over bumpy statutory texts in the name of more expeditiously advancing a policy goal, we would risk failing to “tak[e]… account of” legislative compromises essential to a law’s passage and, in that way, thwart rather than honor “the effectuation of congressional intent.” Ibid. By respecting the qualifications of §1 today, we “respect the limits up to which Congress was prepared” to go when adopting the Arbitration Act. United States v. Sisson, 399 U. S. 267, 298 (1970).
Finally, and stretching in a different direction entirely, New Prime invites us to look beyond the Act. Even if the statute doesn’t supply judges with the power to compel arbitration in this case, the company says we should order it anyway because courts always enjoy the inherent au-
- ↑ The Act provided for arbitration between railroads and workers, and defined “employees” as “all persons actually engaged in any capacity in train operation or train service of any description.” Act of June 1, 1898, ch. 370, 30 Stat. 424. The Act also specified that the railroads would “be responsible for the acts and defaults of such employees in the same manner and to the same extent as if… said employees [were] directly employed by it.” Id., at 425. See Dempsey, Transportation: A Legal History, 30 Transp. L. J. 235, 273 (2003).
