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Comment by xhevahir | Hacker News Reader

The assumption of most of the comments here is that bad writing is a matter of incompetence, but in the case of public policy I think Hanlon's Razor no longer applies. Given what we know about Texas politics and American ballot measures in general, it's quite possible that the ambiguity was introduced deliberately to give big landowners (or rather their lawyers) extra wiggle room. If that's true then the only communications for which the public were the intended audience are the advertisements, which I'm sure bore no resemblance to the text of the law.

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It's not even the writing - it can be blatant misinterpretation. There's precedential opinion that states that you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's spirt. Yet there's a law that has "reasonable care" in it, but the precedential opinion on that is that it's a strict liability offense because 'applying reasonable care would frustrate enforcing the legislature's intent'...

The judges don't care. They're not impartial. They want the state to win more often than not. I mean, who pays their salary and what looks better than being part of law and order?

It can also be intentional deception. Look at the recent PA vote on retirement age of judges removing the language that provided voters info on the current age limit.

A great example is Measure A which was passed in the last election a few months back in Santa Clara county:

> Shall the measure amending the Santa Clara Valley Water District Ordinance 11-01 to limit Board members to four successive four-year terms be adopted?

Term limits? Heck yes! Voters agreed: term limits are A GOOD THING. Measure A passed!

What wasn't mentioned AT ALL, anywhere in the question put to the voters, is that Santa Clara Valley Water District board members are already limited to 2 terms in office. This was extending term limits from 2 consecutive to 4 consecutive terms. It was getting rid of/weakening term limits. A blatant misrepresentation on the ballot.

Who wrote the text of Measure A? Why the Santa Clara Valley Water District board members who wanted their terms extended, of course.

Interesting.

Here in Washington, an "easy" fix for that is that the initiatives get a column for the "Yes" side and a column for the "no" side, in our voting booklets that we get in the mail with the ballots. But IIRC CA is still in person voting, right?

Yeah the voting booklet has the same design here, and the "No" side called them out on it. But who reads that? (Other than me and you, obviously.) The ballot itself had only the text which I quoted.

It seems most people don't even research the ballot before going to the polls. People are surprised by the referendums, so how can they make an informed decision? Many seem to go to the polls with the plan of filling out the super bubble to vote party line without even looking at the candidates on the ballot (Dem or Rep).

I suppose I don’t know how in person voting works. Are there pamphlets inside the booth? Otherwise how are people supposed to refer to it?

WA has been mail-in voting for years, so I vote at home with the pamphlet on the table and a cup of coffee.

Pamphlets are allowed inside the booth, but you have to bring it. They are sent separately in the mail some weeks before the election. At the voting booth they just give you the ballot. The ballot only has the brief descriptive text.

We have vote-by-mail as well, but the number of people who actually read the pamphlet and make an informed decision (rather than just briefly scan the ballot at the last minute) is small enough to matter.

That's the exact scenario for the PA measure - judges had a mandatory retirement age of 70 and the measure was to set that age at 75. People didn't know that there was already a limit. The original wording provided that info and it failed. Then they rewrote it like this just to get it to pass (I think they also took it to court, where an interesting party, a judge, ruled on the wording).

There was another a few years back where it was reversing the measure to prevent the repeal of another measure which was to stop something else. Still not sure whether I voted for or against something.

Judges get paid whether the state wins or not.

Yes, but collecting fines can be a big revenue stream that helps keep their salary high. This is especially true at the municipal level where all the players know each other. It's also a big deal for judges that get elected to look like they're for law and order.

Hanlon's razor never applies when politics or money is involved. Best to just suspend your judgement instead of giving politicians the benefit of the doubt.

It never applies when there are benefits to be had that don’t need rocket science. The concept itself was probably introduced in bad faith.

Looking at Texas school funding laws, I expect the complexity is aimed at Charter Schools.

I didn't look into the details, but schools with poor attendance can have their "excess" local revenues claimed by the state (state law specifies what excess means). Charter schools don't have local funding (and can play games to pick their students).

The measure above appears to be for adjusting a relief measure for the elderly and disabled downwards when their obligation is reduced (which if it only reduces the relief, could reduce it to 0 over time).

> bad writing is a matter of incompetence

Effective, clear expression needs training, practice and attention. Homo sapiens write as we do because in only 5,000 years we haven't evolved to write naturally and must labor at it.

Clear writing also needs clear thought, obviously. "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."

Our talking isn't necessarily all that much clearer, and we've been doing it for much longer than writing.

(Though to be fair, almost all talking used to be done in an interactive setting, where you can ask clarification questions.)

Oh course, but lawyers do train and practice and pay attention. That's their main job.

Hanlon's razor is a boundary condition. No one knows how to play the game at the start. Humans get better at shit.

It's just complicated, not evil. This amendment reduces some property taxes for people who are widows of service members AND elderly or disabled.

Not exactly big money interests.

I haven't researched it heavily, but wasn't that also true for the 2nd amendment? I doubt all the folks that ratified it agreed on its meaning.

That might be true of all the early amendments, given that they aren't painstakingly defined like modern laws. It might also be that they did agree (the ones who voted for it) and it's lost to history (federalist and antifederalist papers have some background, as do the similar state level constitutional provisions about arms, the press, etc).

That’s true in general. There was a lot of disagreement over the scope of things like the Commerce Clause, Necessary and Proper Clause, etc.

I don’t think that’s true of the Second Amendment specifically. It was written by a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government. I don’t think it’s a great mystery what they meant when they wrote the Second Amendment.

Insofar as the prefatory clause causes one to stumble, it was a common construct at the time tk have a “why” or explanatory clause prefacing an operative clause: https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYUL.... You read it exactly like you would read the following:

“Free political debate being necessary to the functioning of a free state, the freedom of speech shall not be abridged.”

> a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government.

That pretty seriously overstates the case: The American Revolution started out that way, but as time went on, the Continental Army acquired serious artillery and became reasonably professional — thanks largely to Henry Knox; Baron von Steuben; and the Marquis de La Fayette — and the decisive factor at Yorktown was the intervention of a French naval squadron and expeditionary force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Army

https://www.historynet.com/arming-revolution-continental-arm...

This is true, but as you say, the revolution started out the way rayiner describes it, and it seems very plausible that the 2nd. amendment was motivated by that specific circumstance.

Personally, I think we would have been better off without the 2nd amendment, and the framers of the constitution may not have foreseen the role it has come to play in politics (if so, it would be far from the only case), but I cannot find much ambiguity in it.

The framers didn’t anticipate armies becoming permanent institutions, which is why we have a “no standing army” requirement that we just kind of ignore. But even that only makes the second amendment clearer: if you don’t have a standing army, who has the guns? The answer is militias comprised of heavily armed citizenry.

I am pretty certain that the large military powers at the time (England, France certainly Prussia) had standing armies already. So I would be highly surprised that the founders did not anticipate armies as a permanent institution. That would be a pretty big blind spot, considering they already existed.

In some ways, the Founders were delightfully naive. Kings also already existed, and they'd just thrown off control of one.

Many Founders believed a standing army to be an inherently corrupting force (if you have a warrior class, sooner or later they will make you go to war) and thought America would be better without one. Whether or not that could have been true in the abstract became irrelevant because the need to perpetually defend territory meant that there was never an opportunity to disband the Continental Army.

They Constitution (and the framers) opposed the President having a standing army. It supported the country having one with biannual renewal of consent from Legislature for funding.

And the War of 1812 taught President Madison the danger of being under militarized and over-reliant on militias.

You seem to be ignoring the concept of an armory (the local Armory food hall used to hold weapons) which does not require individual ownership of the heavy arms, not a standing army.

Also there is no "no sanding Army" requirement. There is only a requirement that the army can only be funded for 2 years ahead, presumably to require ongoing consent from Legislature, to prevent a Chancellor Hitler-type situation or a President becoming King by getting a huge multi year funding and then turning against the future Legislature and the country.

It's easy to forget that the United States of the ratification of the Constitution is a different United States than the one we live in now. Both the Civil War and the radical reinterpretations of several federal powers during the Great Depression fundamentally changed the nature of federal and state government.

The Second Amemdent's in there because without it, the states wouldn't have been willing to ratify a Constitution that allowed the federal government to take their guns away. After all, they had just won a war against a monarch an ocean away; they weren't about to give their power of defense to an executive half a continent away. Remember, there was no guarantee a Constitution was going to happen at all; quite a few compromises and curveballs in that document are there because every single state had the option of rejecting the whole thing and being their own country. Many Founding Fathers envisioned defense of the US would look like individual states generally handling their own affairs, and a national army only being mobilized in the event of a national threat (however, practically speaking, that didn't come to pass... No sooner was the Constitution ratified than Washington led the Continental Army to force the citizens of western Pennsylvania to pay federal taxes).

Gun regulation was properly recognized as a state authority for most of the country's history prior to the Civil War and varied wildly from state to state, with many being significantly more restrictive than modern law. It's only with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Due Process clause, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law") that the Second Amendment ties the hands of state governments in the same way it tied the hands of the federal government. This restriction has been re-interpreted over the decades, but broadly speaking that's how we got from a 1700s Philadelphia that banned gun ownership for some immigrants to the modern interpretation where even tracking who owns a firearm might be considered an abridgment of the right of ownership.

I think that’s actually a coherent view of the 2A. But when you pull on the 14A incorporation thread quite a lot unravels with it. The Establishment Clause, for example, was intended to prevent the federal government from interfering with state established churches, some of which still existed at the time. It actually makes no sense to incorporate that provision against the states.

Makes no sense other than we had just fought a war over the concept of states' rights overriding federal protections. Hypothetically, they could have narrowly-tailored the 13th through 15th amendments to end slavery and do little else, I think it is possible that lawmakers of the day came to a rational conclusion that the next time the states challenged federal authority so brazenly, it wouldn't be over slavery but over some other issue of fundamental rights... And if the protections laid out in the Constitution were good enough for people when exposed to law at the federal level, they should be good enough for citizens of the states as well. One certainly can't expect that anyone would have benefited if, hypothetically, Georgia were to dedicate itself to Roman Catholicism and declare all federal laws null and void, replaced by the law from the Vatican (a scenario that could have been possible prior to the 14th).

One advantage the chosen approach has is, in a sense, interpretive simplicity, even though in practice it strips much authority from the states and moves it up to the federal level.

There is no law preventing civilians from owning cannons and other artillery of any caliber so long as they are not automatic.

The Second Amendment is a bit more confusing than at first glance.

"A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed"

Seems nice and straightforwards, right? Trouble is, that's just one of many versions. Different states ratified slightly different versions of the Second Amendment, the main difference being the presence of absence of different commas. For example, see this version from the National Archives [0]

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"

[0] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc...

The (personally) funny thing about the 2nd amendment is that since I am not a native English speaker, its syntax looks broken to me. Without "since" or "because" at the beginning it reads either as a non sequitur or as a "driving by the gas station, my hat flew off" kind of sentence: the subject suddenly changes midway through and (in my native language) it's a hallmark of non-literate speech which one would really, really like to not have in an important legal document.

For the record, the extra commas after “Militia” and “Arms” would be considered incorrect by modern standards, though the sentence would otherwise be fine (aside from capitalization).

Formal grammar (and spelling!) is a recent invention in USA. Language is much more fluid than many pretend and programmers expect.

> It was written by a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government.

One of the catalysts to writing the Constitution in the first place was when a bunch of former soldiers took the guns they had lying around, tried to seize government munitions, and overthrow the Massachusetts government. The federal government couldn't raise an army to put down Shay's rebellion, and had to use local/private militia.

So it cuts both ways.

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