The point I'm making about the discretion is that in the past the law would lay out a general framework, and that framework would be interpreted with some reasonable discretion assumed for its legal interpretation. And that is still the case. The only difference is that now laws are written in such a way that they're largely incomprehensible to non-lawyers, and I suspect even to most lawyers outside their domain of expertise.
Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
> [...] but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government.
OK, but now in addition to understanding the structure of US government from reading the Constitution try to understand those things you ask of the bill: the incentive for passing the Constitution, its implications, and so forth.
At the least you also need to read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, many early debates in Congress over what the heck the Constitution means, many early Supreme Court cases, and probably a fair bit of history to understand the issues the country had under the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was supposed to address.
Same for the Bill of Rights.
In modern terms things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are prompts. Bills and case law are implementations.
The implementations are complicated because (1) law concerns people and what they do and people and their endeavors are complicated, (2) we have a whole lot of people in a large interconnected and interdependent economy, and (3) a whole lot of people look for any ambiguity they can find and try to exploit it for their own gain, often to great detriment to others, so bills need to be explicit to cover the edge cases.
Look at the language in that bill, or any, and you'll see that when it all comes down to it, it no in way whatsoever, covers all edge cases. The law constantly uses broad strokes and relies on reasonable interpretations to clarify ambiguities. And this is the same for all bills. The law isn't like code, and doesn't try to be like code. The obfuscation is completely unnecessary.
Similarly when I speak of the motivation for things, I'm not speaking of some subtle and nuanced historical understanding of motivation, but simply what something does and why somebody might want it. If somebody is of average intelligence they can easily infer such from the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. But in that bill I referenced, you can't even ELI5 the law, let alone why or what it would change. It's an obfuscated mess. And none of this is necessary at all.
Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.