politics

"It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

This isn’t even remotely ambiguous. The DoJ’s interpretation is correct.

The question isn’t really about the meaning of “and”; it’s about the syntactic structure of the whole section.

A defendant is eligible if they do NOT have (A and B and C). In other words, having any of A, B or C will disqualify them.

The law could have been written in a more readable fashion, for example:

the defendant—

• (A) does not have more than 4 criminal history points…;
• (B) does not have a prior 3-point offense…; and
• (C) does not have a prior 2-point violent offense…

But the meaning is the same either way. Amazing that this got to the Supreme Court.

It’s also entirely plausible that this is exactly what was intended when the law was written.

This is a very misleading article. A lot of other comments are already touching on the nuance of the argument here, but I just want to break it down the way I understand it.

(Before that, though, I just want to point out that this is a 6-3 decision, but it’s not the usual 6-3, since Kagan and Gorsuch flipped sides. I think that’s telling enough that this isn’t simply a party-lines interpretation.)

It’s not that SCOTUS argued that “and” means “or”, it’s that when you have a statement “a person is eligible if not (a), (b), and (c)”, there is ambiguity in the order of operations between “not” and “and”. The statement could either mean

(1) E = !(A and B and C)

or

(2) E = (!A) and (!B) and (!C)

Demorgan’s law says we can rewrite (1) and (2) as

(1) !E = A and B and C

(2) !E = A or B or C

The court went with interpretation (2), not because one is more “correct” than the other. It seems like (2) was chosen because of the two “statutory difficulties” listed in the syllabus of Pulsifer v. United States.

(1) Pulsifer's reading would render Subparagraph A superfluous because a defendant who has a three-point offense under Subpara-graph B and a two-point offense under Subparagraph C will always have more than four criminal-history points under Subparagraph A. That reading leaves Subparagraph A with no work to do: removing it from the statute would make the exact same people eligible (and inel-igible) for relief. That kind of superfluity, in and of itself, refutes Pul-sifer's reading. When a statutory construction "render[s] an entire subparagraph meaningless," this Court has noted, the canon against surplusage applies with special force. National Assn. of Mfrs. v. Department of Defense, 583 U.S. 109, 128. That is particularly true when, as here, the subparagraph is so evidently designed to serve a concrete function. Pp. 15-20.

(2) Pulsifer's reading would also create a second problem related to Paragraph (f)(1)'s gatekeeping function. The Guidelines presume that defendants with worse criminal records exhibiting recidivism, lengthy sentences, and violence deserve greater punishment. Under the Government's reading, Paragraph (f)(1) sorts defendants accordingly. When the defendant has committed multiple non-minor of-fenses, he cannot get relief (Subparagraph A). And so too when he has committed even a single serious offense punished with a lengthy prison sentence (Subparagraph B) or one involving violence (Subpara-graph C). Pulsifer's reading, by contrast, would allow safety-valve relief to defendants with more serious records while barring relief to defendants with less serious ones. A defendant with a three-point offense and a two-point violent offense would be denied relief. But a defendant with multiple three-point violent offenses could get relief simply because he happens not to have a two-point violent offense.

Contrary to Pulsifer's view, that anomalous result cannot be ignored on the ground that a sentencing judge retains discretion to impose a lengthy sentence. If Congress thought it could always rely on sentencing discretion, it would not have created a criminal-history requirement in the first instance. Instead, it specified a requirement that allows such discretion to operate only if a defendant's record does not reach a certain level of seriousness. Pulsifer's construction of Paragraph (f)(1) makes a hash of that gatekeeping function. Pp. 20-23.

In summary, this is a ruling that could have gone either way, and the side the court chose isn’t totally ridiculous.

It is the side of giving fewer people just the eligibility for relief, which is pretty shitty. But if the court was stooping to an argument as bad as the headline made it out to be, IMO we’d have MUCH bigger problems.

This is what happens when you write a constitution with ambiguous language. People arguing about semantics rather than implementing solutions. Fuck, they even decided that the "Executive Office of the President of the United States" isn't actually an "office" even though it literally has "Office" in its title.

Why does this feel like a prelude to the A OR B AND C debate that people have been agitating with on the 14th Amendment.

Current law: A or (B and C) gives us birthright citizenship. Trump interpretation: (A or B) and C, no more birthright citizenship.

Makes Clinton questioning the meaning of the word "is" seem a bit quaint

So I looked it up, and the law appears to be worded like this:

‘‘(1) the defendant does not have—
‘‘(A) more than 4 criminal history points, excluding any criminal history points resulting from a 1-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines;
‘‘(B) a prior 3-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; and
‘‘(C) a prior 2-point violent offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines;’’

So let's simplify this into English. Because the header says that "The defendant does not have" and then has subsections, we will append that idea to the start of each subsection.

The defendant doesn't have more than four crime points

and

The defendant doesn't have a 3 point offense

and

The defendant doesn't have a violent 2 point offense.

Simplifying it down like this makes it seem like the way it is written is the more strict way the supreme court decided on. It sounds like the supreme court is correct in this case, but they don't know why they're correct, since their reason is all wrong.

This harkens back to Bill Clinton's ridiculous impeachment (looking at you, Bill Barr, Ken Starr, George Conway) and his ridiculous defense, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," in which a very young and naïve woman was the sacrificial lamb.

Replace some and with or in your code and see what happens!

Oddly, no discussion about any of the debate writers and legislature had about this bill. As a lay person, I can kind of see both sides, would prefer the defendants win, but also feel like the INTENT of this recent law would be easy to find. If the intent was to free loads of people, or only just a few relatively innocent ones..... I guess originalism only matters when people have been dead for hundreds of years.

A conservative is incapable of entering any discussion or debate in good faith. Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation.

This illegitimate "supreme" court is infested with conservatives and should be disregarded and abandoned until it is corrected.