It’s…totally mysterious…why the GOP is suddenly turning into the stoner epistemologist of a first year philosophy survey course only for this particular item. If you were actually serious about grappling with how words are, like, irreducibly intersubjective, man there’s more or less no area of law that it would be possible to maintain(perhaps with a few scattered exceptions from the especially rigidly technical areas that are basically just “the electrical code is that you follow ANSI/NFPA 70, which is incorporated by reference”). A lawyer acting like law isn’t more or less entirely dependent on definitions that can be a bit tricky about the edges(with the judiciary constantly coming up with new ‘tests’ to try to provide cogent rules of assignment) is either acting in egregious(I’d say shocking; but it really isn’t) bad faith; or a truly intellectually stunted specimen suited only to the most routine and well characterized paperwork; not anything that goes outside very well trodden procedural box ticking.
The bad faith seems particularly evident when, in the same breath, they are appealing to the legal authority and certainty of the most recent state supreme court decision in favor of gerrymandering(which, because reasons, ignored the precedent of the previous state supreme court decision against gerrymandering) as an argument against a renewed legal challenge: because obviously the legal challenge that sought to overturn the previous supreme court decision was just and necessary; but now that we have this supreme court decision the gravity of a supreme court decision must be respected and any new challenges should know their place…
