Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/a-new-judge-in-texas-accidenta.html
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What a strange way to announce your resignation, except this time literally and automatically.
It’s a shame too. The Republican runner up is a school of Kim Davis homophobic bigot…
He also said he would perform gay marriages, an issue that Mafrige punted on by saying she would perform no marriages at all because she is Greek Orthodox and therefore believes marriages must be done in church.
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Michael Scott was a Democrat.
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
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That’s a really weird law. So by extension, the only people who can be elected to a judgeship are people who are not already at the moment judges?
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He also accidentally let on that he wasn’t actually qualified for the job of adjudicating Texas law.
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You would think knowing what the constitution says would be one of the first things in the job interview?
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Yeah although to be fair, the Texas Constitution is not so easy to understand. All the powers of the state of texas are enumerated by amendments to the constitution. So to understand the current laws in texas you have to read the constitution from start to finish and apply all the amendments in order, like a dang blockchain or something. There are around 500 amendments
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It’s because of the accent, right?
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Well bless your heart
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Hey man, I’m just a judge, what, do you expect me to, like, know the laws? Like, all of them?
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As a quirky side note, I think all future constitutions should be treated like a Git repository, and amendments are pull requests that can only be voted on if there are no merge conflicts.
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I think there have been attempts to express laws like computer languages before, with predictable (to any programmer) results. Think of the case of the woman who asked her husband to go to the grocery store with the instructions “get a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen” and he returned with 12 loaves of bread.
One of the problems with the texas constitution (and I assume many laws state and federal) is that although the lawmakers probably understood the intent at the time (we hope), we often don’t understand the intent now, and all we have left is the language. The writers of the language thought they were expressing the intent clearly (again, we hope) but essentially were wrong.
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That doesn’t invalidate the idea of keeping a single “current” version of the constitution along with a changelog, rather than requiring the reader to read the initial version and then each change sequentially to understand the final state. It seems like code (the legal kind) tends to work that way, but constitutions don’t, for some reason?
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That may be true, but they actually pay judges to do the hard work.
we get what we fucking deserve
bringing raised fists to a knife fight
you’d think developed minds could learn
not to give benefit of doubt
you wouldn’t trust a hungry animal
around your newborn, would you?
did anyone really expect
to win a race already fixed
the spoils doled out in advance
the appointed already picked
all allegations of fraud
categorically dismissed as absurd
On the other hand, once you become a judge, you’re ruling on claims brought under that constitution, so I can’t feel that much sympathy for a person who didn’t read the document they apply multiple times a week.
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He used poor judgement there. 
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You know, I did a bit of looking at how Germany does it, and it seems they already treat their constitution and their laws like this: amending the constitution means changes are made to the paragraphs themselves. Of course, Germany also does not let just anybody be a judge – as I understand it, being a judge is a profession with its own exams, so they are expected to know the most recent revision of the laws in question.
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