And how do they imagine international trade is governed, I wonder? Would they argue that within the US, each individual state’s law somehow overrides all the others when they trade with each other, or am I under a misapprehension in thinking that the phrase “interstate commerce” has some special significance in US jurisprudence?
The OP contains the example of a treaty affecting gun ownership in the U.S., so my post is directly responsive thereunto.
Ah, but you see, THAT is handled under the US Constitution, handed down to the Fouding Fathers by Jeezus himself, so it’s OK… mostly. Gotta watch out for them Big Guvmint Activist Judges, y’know…
If you’re only looking at grammar/syntax, I suppose there’s an argument that it’s ambiguous. But this is a sentence in a legal decision entirely about the restraints of the Constitution. Any U.S. Lawyer reading that would know, without needing any reflection, that Congress is not in fact generally free from the restraints of the Constitution, and would therefore immediately understand that it is the power that is being described.
An analogous sentence would be “Sam threw the ball to Fred, with a high arc.” We all know immediately, without having to think, that Fred doesn’t have a high arc, but a thrown ball can. So, while the sentence is grammatically ambiguous, one semantics comes into play, it is not, and is not difficult to understand.
Context and intended audience matter.
I’m not entirely sure. The first revised version is grammatically less ambiguous, but someone reading it actually has to pay more attention, since they have to keep the whole first part of the sentence suspended in their mind, waiting for the direct object (“can confer* what*? Hurry up, tell me!”). Whereas with the original sentence, the entire action is clear, and the reader can absorb that and move on to the qualifications and descriptions.
The second revision doesn’t have that problem, and isn’t bad, but does subtly change the emphasis of the sentence, away from Congress and more to the general idea of power.
How so? You said that the US can veto UNSC resolutions, which is true. But the UNSC deals with threats to international security, so it seems to me to be a very remote scenario in which the UNSC would ever involve itself in what is almost certainly a purely domestic matter of commercial arms sales within a country.
And when I say “very remote,” I mean just that. Treaties have signed up the US (and others) to making progress on complete nuclear disarmament, which we probably could be called out on, but if the UNSC isn’t willing to take up that issue, why would they take up the cause of, say, the importation of Beretta shotguns without proper end user certificates? There’s no way this treaty lands in the UNSC’s lap for any Second Amendment related issue.