When a statute is ambiguous the tie should go to the citizen not the government
reason.com
reason.com
So in New Zealand (my birthplace) the legal text of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the Māori version, not the English one, and you'll be shocked to hear that through out most of history the English one was used by the English speaking government to justify decisions, and the English version gave more up than the Māori version. Similar applies to treaties with indigenous people through out the world, of course in many such cases neither language was actually honored, and in a sad number of cases the indigenous groups were literally exterminated.
> The doctrine also creates perverse incentives for the other two branches. For example, by giving deference to agencies in ambiguous cases, it gave executive branch regulators incentive to hunt for ambiguities in order to expand their own power. This led to decades of executive overreach, as administrations used convoluted readings of statutes to pursue agendas Congress never imagined.
Reaction I: Does Reason magazine consider a corporation to be a citizen?
Reaction II: Do they envision Congress feeling any inclination to write less-ambiguous laws, to preserve their own power?*
Reaction III: With the size of the Federal law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...), and the massive overhead of deciding even trivial matters via the Federal Courts - just how many hundred hours per week is Reason thinking that the average Federal Judge should be working, to keep up?
*Yes, part of me says "The only power that Congress cares about is their ability to extract political donations. And so long as the last donation check has clear the bank before the first legal challenge to the Incomprehensible Blather Act of 2024 is heard by a judge..."
Congress are already criticized for writing laws which are too long.
But there is a conflict here between writing laws which are unambiguous and laws which are easy to understand.
Also, I don't know that corporate citizenship matters in this case.
The regulators can't argue that an ambiguous statute applies just because they dislike the defendants. They are required to show that the ambiguous statute applies because it is for the public benefit that the statute was originally written for.