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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "illegally"? If the government allows SpaceX to block roads, then... SpaceX blocking roads is legal. What other definition of "legal road closure" is there?

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There are limits to when and for how long you are allowed to close roads for specific purposes, just as there are limits to when and where you can launch rockets of specific sizes. SpaceX ignored the rules, and nobody enforces them despite the protests from residents of Boca Chica. Obviously the Texas government agrees with you that the law is whatever they choose to enforce, but there are still written rules.

And if the laws are on the books, it makes legal action against the state - as well as the offender - likelier and more remunerative.

One would think, but the FAA consistently failed to do much more than submit letters to SpaceX, which resulted in the FAA themselves being investigated. I don't think much ever came out of that. Only in the past year has the FAA been actively concerned about whatever SpaceX does, and coincidentally, Elon Musk demanded the FAA administrator resign, who promptly did.

What's up with the residents of Boca Chica? I know suing a company like SpaceX is expensive, but I'd be surprised if they couldn't band together to cover costs, or find some legal team at a rights org to take it on for cheap or on contingency.

They could also sue the local and state government to try to force them to enforce the laws on the books.

What SpaceX is doing is more important than Boca Chica

I'd be interested in reading about the legal limits to road closures, and reading about how they apply to the government and not just to private enterprises — since it's not in fact SpaceX closing the roads, but actually the Texas courts ordering road closures (for safety purposes around SpaceX launch sites). I haven't seen evidence that SpaceX is actually breaking any laws here.

The basic premise of your post seems to be that the government has unrestricted power and cannot do (or allow to be done by proxy) anything illegal, but that isn’t true.

There’s several hundred years of legal history of state and federal governments being taken to court and made to stop or undo actions deemed to violate the law.

I see a lot of this sentiment around from tech people, and the underlying assumption is usually "if the government does it, it must be legal" and that is a really dangerous deductive baseline to operate from, regardless of your politics.

Just because a law is unenforced (selectively or not) doesn't mean the actions that law describes are suddenly legal. Texas is not enforcing laws with respect to SpaceX and others, but the laws are still on the books, usually to enable selective enforcement against undesirable entities.

Something can be illegal but not actively enforced.

>the government

"The government" isn't a single unified entity. Texas has a long history of playing bullshit games saying "We can do this" and the feds saying "no you can't" and the courts have to solve it.

Texas insists that they have a legal right to secede. Any honest constitutional lawyer, and several founding fathers have addressed that point directly. There is no legal methodology within the context of the US system for any state anywhere to secede.

The law defines what is legal, not the enforcement of the law.

> What other definition of "legal road closure" is there?

Usually "legal" means "following the laws", not "someone high up told me it was cool".

don't know the specifics of this situation, but in general it's common for governments to simply not enforce laws making actions illegal but tolerated.

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