• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • If, as you say,

    I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

    Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

    I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.



  • Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

    It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

    Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

    In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.









  • I think that much of the disparity is explained by the fact that the Apple case was decided by a judge but the Google case was decided by a jury, so the people making the decisions had very different perspectives.

    Also, because the decisions were so different despite the similarities between them, Google probably actually has a pretty good case it can make in the appeals process, so I wouldn’t consider this outcome to be the final word just yet.