Wow, what a bizarro timeline we are on, when I find myself agreeing with Gorsuch and cursing Kagan.
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RBG had more than her fair share of bad takes, too, and sometimes Scalia was right.
Exactly. And usually, an overly vague statute is held to be unenforceable, although the Court often will drop some not at all subtle hints about how the statute could be made right. O’Connor did this years ago with an anti-loitering statute that had been intended to reduce gang activity. Now, the Court seems to think they’re experts in everything and so they’re substituting their own interpretations of vague and ambiguous statutes and agency rules instead of just declaring them unenforceable. They’re about to do the same thing in another case, which will likely scuttle the Chevron doctrine. It’s concerning, to say the least.
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Right. So if they do have one of them, they aren’t eligible. 
Thanks for posting the text. That helps. I think it is clear, for the reasons you outline, that the way the Court interpreted is the way it was intended. But I also think, the way it was written, with an ‘AND’ not an “OR” means the law is written so that all three are required, and it needs to be enforced this way until it is amended.
Of course, if the language is just that the minimums “can” be set aside, it doesn’t mean they must be set aside, right?, so all the usual structural inequities come into play.
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The answer to all of your questions is…MONEY. So many prisons are now run by for-profit corporations and they depend on full prisons and they have powerful lobbies. The government run prisons also depend on having a full population for continued funding. So when you’re trying to understand why ancient and draconian drug laws are still on the books, there’s your real answer: prisons are big business.
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“Got to keep that stream of income inmates stream to for-profit-privately-owned prisons or my kickback/stocks option going to tank,” every justices voting no on this.
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The problem is that we’re dealing with operators nested with negation.
the defendant does not have … (A) […], (B) […], and (C) […]
The form is:
~(A ∧ B ∧ C)
In formal logic, this is covered by DeMorgan’s Laws, so this becomes:
~A ∨ ~B ∨ ~C
So by formal logic the reading would be something like:
… the defendant does not have (A) or the defendant does not have (B) or the defendant does not have (C)
Unfortunately – at least as far as I have seen as not-a-lawyer – the application of formal logic to readings of the law has been, at best, inconsistent. And to tell the truth I don’t think it is necessarily reasonable to assume that formal logic applies to “natural” language, but I do think the fact that it invites ambiguity in reading, as we see here. (Obviously, legal language is not “natural” in the same sense that natural language is, but it’s also not “formal” in the sense of a formal language like propositional logic.)
I don’t have a fun conclusion here, just observing that no wonder this ended up having to get adjudicated. It’s also maybe an argument for a formal (in the “formalism” sense) language for law, but that seems… not feasible.
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… I wonder what fraction of legislators could pass a basic test on mathematical logic 
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Oops, I missed that @knappa already addressed my main point.
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Yeah, because no one ever does things because they believe in good work… everyone is just a grifter… /s
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If you call lying to children and people on their deathbeds, occasionally interspersed with giving out boring platitudinous speeches, and maybe doing a little light charity work that other people do for free “good work”, sure.
Still, your point about the differences between natural, legal-formal, and logical-formal language was well-taken.
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You weren’t talking about that… you were assuming that the person is only motivated by material goods.Not everyone is. Some do the work because they believe in it, for good or ill. And are there some who have taken advantage of their positions and hurt others, sure, but that’s also true of football coaches, doctors, scientists, professors, presidents, kings, police… anyone who is vested with any amount of authority can use that authority for ill. It makes no sense to paint a broad brush and assume that it’s all religious leaders who are so motivated by grifting and by holding power over others. 
It’s just lazy thinking, frankly.
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