Subject: Re: the meaning of 'and'
There are two root problems at work...

Problem #1 is that language doesn't really have an agreed-upon set of parsing rules like the PEMDAS rules of mathematics. In math, PEMDAS tells you when evaluating an equation with ambiguous sequencing where the prioritization of multiplication and division over addition and subtraction isn't enough to resolve the ambiguity, then the equation should be evaluated in the following order:

1) Parenthesis
2) Exponents
3) Multiplication
4) Division
5) Addition
6) Substraction

Problem #2 is that the people WRITING laws likely lack the sophistication to understand any such level of sophistication that could eliminate ambiguity and eliminating ambiguity may actally interfere with their intent in crafting the language in the first place. Most legislation at the state and federal level isn't written by elected Representatives or Senators. It's written by staff after being spoon-fed to them by special interst lobbyists. A key goal of many proposed bills is to hide the fingerprints of who WROTE the law as a means to obscure who might benefit from the resulting law.

Reading most bills that are altering existing state or federal code is a maddening exercise. Rather than stating that new bill SB 1234 will strike existing State Code X section 5 part III and replace it with "THIS", many bills surgically describe in English how existing clauses in an existing law will be modified word by word or phrase by phrase. The result is that anyone READING that new bill gets no coherent summary of the new final language will say in its complete context. If you want that detail, you will have to pull out the existing code, print it out, put it next to the bill, do your own markup then see if you understand and support the result. Or you ask your staffer to tell you if you should vote for it and go to a campaign dinner with that extra time you gained back.


WTH