You’re probably breaking the law right now.
…we may hope that prosecutorial discretion will save us: Just explain to the nice prosecutor that we meant no harm, and violated the law by accident, and he or she will drop the charges and tell us to be more careful next time. And sometimes things work that way. But other times, the prosecutors are out to get you for your politics, your ethnicity, or just in order to fulfill a quota, in which case you will hear that the law is the law, and that ignorance is no excuse. (Amusingly, government officials who break the law do get to plead ignorance and good intentions, under the doctrine of good faith “qualified immunity.” Just not us proles.)
I don’t find it all that amusing. The whole federal code needs to be overhauled, in accordance with the Constitution. And it does seem unconstitutional, and a violation of mens rea, to prosecute and convict people for laws that they can’t reasonably be expected to have knowledge of.
You’d be astonished at how many times the very people who wrote a regulation don’t know what it really means, and have to seek guidance from general counsel. I have long, first-hand experience with this.
Realistically, if a legislator hasn’t had time to read and understand a bill their vote should be against passage at that time. But that would require ethics.
The fact that regulators don’t understand their own regulations, and that legislators haven’t read their own legislation, and no one has figured out all of the ramifications of a law as gigantic as the “Affordable” “Care” Act is enough for me to dismiss any “support” the trolls on this or any other site express for Obamacare. If they purport to know enough about the law to support it, then they know more than the law’s architects — who are being continually blindsided by unintended results. And that’s just BS.
Hit Like button.
“Qualified immunity” is just another way to say that some animals are more equal than others.
Do you ever feel like you woke up one morning in the world Orwell tried to warn us about? I want to get back to America. I think it’s on the opposite side of one of these looking glasses…