No, I was reading through the play by play of oral arguments. Obviously, the providers of said pbp offer their own slant, but it appeared the conservative justices were throwing out some pretty hyperbolic situations to try to counter the government's position, and seemed fixated on the 20 year maximum (would heckling a SCOTUS hearing be worth 20 years in prison). Meanwhile, the appellant was doing some pretty severe gumbying to differentiate the activities of 1/6 from the intent disrupt the availability of evidence versus altering/destroying the evidence re:
I don't have a doctorate in legalese, but in my mind c2 sure seems to differentiate itself from c1 by not mentioning evidence at all based on my grasp of the English language. But I admit that legalese doesn't follow the rules we regular folks in literature or technical writing do.
True, (c)(2) doesn't mention evidence, but the same time it's also not an independent clause, but rather a subsidiary follow-on to (c)(1). I don't think there would be any question that the fedgov's interpretaion would be correct if (c)(2) stood alone. But when it seems to be a catch-all to the provisions of (c)(1), the doctrine of
ejusdem generis would appear to limit its scope.
Ejusdem generis ("of the same kind") is a canon of interpretation that says that where general words or phrases follow two or more specific words or phrases, the general words must be construed as appling only to things of the same kind or class as those expressly mentioned. For example, a statute that refers to "cats, dogs, chickens, horses, cattle, and other animals" would probably include pigs but not zebras because all of the listed animals are domesticated animals, and pigs are domesticated animals, but zebras are not.
Several other canons would be at play. As mentioned at oral argument, the breadth of the fedgov's interpretaion of (c)(2) would appear to swallow and render superflous several other portions of the statute, and under the surplusage canon, a statute should not be interpreted in a way that renders part of the text either duplicative or superfluous in respect to other parts. Further, we are dealing with statute that creates criminal liability, and under the rule of lenity, ambiguity in a statute defining a crimine or imposing a penalty should be resolved in favor of defendants and not the government.
On the oral argument, hyperbolic situations are a part of oral argument and always have been, especially for law-setting (as opposed to error correcting) appellate courts like the SCOTUS. Those sorts of, "Counsel, if we adopt your view, why won't that cause the Earth crash into the sun and everyone die?" hypotheticals are totally expected.
