Your Honors,

This case is not as clear-cut as the petitioner wants the Court to believe. The history of this particular portion of the Criminal Code makes it impossible to treat it with such simplicity, particularly in light of the established legislative precedent raised by Chair Nakari in part 2 of her brief.

The Court must consider the whole picture when deciding this particular question, and that includes the political context of prohibitions and proscriptions. The preemptive banning of individuals, groups, and organizations has been one of the most contentious, if not the most contested, policies in our political history. It was the underlying motive of 2 coup attempts, the subject of perennial debate, and also the sole legal mechanism that has protected our community from dangerous and duplicitous groups like the Empire (now known as the Rahl Family). This provision of the Criminal Code only still exists, after all, because of fierce disagreement over whether or not the Proscription Act was strong enough for keeping Rahl out of the region compared to the prohibition section of the Criminal Code. There's been more than one debate on repealing the prohibition and instead invoking the Proscription Act on the group instead. Previous debates resulted in keeping the Criminal Code intact. It's been a "zombie law" that existed solely because attempts to remove it have been met with strong opposition, all surrounding the deep political divides on the question of proscriptions/prohibitions in general and the Rahl Family in particular.

Perhaps the Court may consider that debate settled, now that the Cabinet has invoked the Proscription Act on the Rahl Family, but that is not material to the case at hand. The fact that there has been such fiery debate and intractable disagreement, for years, means there was a lack of consensus on the issue. It strains credulity, then, that the Assembly intended the Legislative Procedure Act to override the consensus-demanding supermajority threshold for overturning prohibitions. The Legislative Procedure Act was written during a time of protracted political conflict centered on the ability of the government to ban security threats. Does it really make any sense at all that the subject never came up, that the Assembly introduced the possibility of proponents of removing the prohibition (or repealing the whole section) pushing that through with a bare simple majority (despite the law saying a supermajority was required)... and it was just never discussed until now? It doesn't make sense.

In this particular case, the Court's responsibility is to reconcile the wording of the Legislative Procedure Act and the Criminal Court, and to do so the Court ought to weigh heavily on the legal and political context of both. The Assembly's lack of intent in allowing a repeal of either a singular prohibition or the entirety of the law itself is rather clear. Our legal system does not run according to robotic strict textualism. The Court was created to solve disputes in a way that causes the least amount of disruption to the intent of our laws. Ruling here that this particular part of the Criminal Code, given its history and political context, and given the lack of evidence in our legislative and political history that the Assembly ever intended so, is not overruled by the Legislative Procedure Act.

That may not bring harmony to the petitioner's wishes, but it prevents setting a bad precedent that unintentional wording in an unrelated law can create a loophole that allows one side or the other of a long-contentious disagreement to ram through changes. This community is made up of hobbyists, not lawyers. Our laws will never be perfect, but reasonable people can see intentions or the lack thereof relatively clearly.