I don't think "make legal tender" means "create" but rather "accept as".
This part of the Constitution limits what states can do. It doesn't limit what the U.S. Congress can do, and the U.S. Congress has passed a law that makes U.S. coins and currency legal tender at what is currently 31 U.S. Code § 5103.
Federal law takes precedence over state law, and therefore it is the U.S. government that has decided, on Arizona's behalf, what constitutes legal tender.
The same section forbids states from making treaties with foreign powers; something that the U.S. government does all the time.
It should be "to make something legal" or it requires "legal tender" to be something lexical and precisely not a sum of its parts, in which case they are not making the thing, they are just giving it a new name, which is not new at all and it is loaded with connotation that invites equating the denotated items to a group.
Thus the problem rests on what legal tender really is. Should it be a sum of parts in origin, states have all the right to interpret what's legal. The way it's written it is nearly useless and there isn't really any precedent either unless to show that the meaning, not the word, has changed.
Blueberries, as are implied by a sibling comment, are not comparable, because, I suppose, they are perrishable. So that's only an argumentum ad absurdum.
Or in other words, you can't make a number illegal.
[1] one could quibble about flat adverbs
To "make" something "legal tender" means to add the thing to the category of "legal tender". In this case, if Arizona were to make Bitcoin legal tender (in Arizona) it would mean that any creditor subject to Arizona's laws who was offered payment of a debt in full in Bitcoin would be obligated to either accept that offer of payment or simply write off the debt. Either way, so far as the state of Arizona and its courts are concerned, the debt would be considered paid.
The problem with this bill is that U.S. states—but not the federal government, unfortunately—are specifically barred from making anything but gold or silver legal tender. This is to prevent a state with a surplus of some good (wheat, for example) from declaring that everyone must now accept that good as payment regardless of any previously agreed terms and, in effect, avoiding paying the full amount that it owes. As the federal government did going off the gold standard and making USD legal tender.
There may be reasonable precedent by now, I don't doubt it.
See ngram [1] which suffers from scanos and the remaining pieces may be coincidental
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=legal+tender&y...
The compound noun "legal tender" is a legal term of art that refers to forms of payment that must be accepted in the settlement of a debt. When we say "the law would make Bitcoin legal tender in Arizona", we mean "the law would require that Bitcoin be accepted for the settlements of debt within Arizona's jurisdiction".
There is no sensible alternate reading nor lexical nor linguistic ambiguity here.
A "legal term of art" still only means that it's interpretable, otherwise it would be without any interpretation. Except renegades that are not part of the circle of who's supposed to do the interpretin!
I doubt that the "must accept" is part of the definition, though it's an easier definition and therefore more commonly read than book length treaties. Clearly it's only the state who has to afford acceptable means of exchange, eg. by nurishing an exchange market.
Which is very likely the aim of the bill. Whatever you consider not sensible is without further ado, notwithstanding.
The slippery sloap that you want to go down is trivially infelicit
That clause does not forbid the Federal government from making other things legal tender, only the states.
The Federal government made paper dollars legal tender via the Legal Tender Act of 1862. (They could make blueberries legal tender, if they wanted, but Arizona cannot.)
> I don't think "make legal tender" means "create" but rather "accept as".
No. To make it legal tender means requiring acceptance of that item as payment for a monetary debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender). It would impact everyone in Arizona, not just the state government.
Yeah, that's what they said. Everyone in Arizona is Arizona. It's called metonymy.
Arizona, the state, may not choose to require Arizonans to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. That power is reserved for the Federal government.
The bill attempts the latter, and is flatly unconstitutional.
I have heared that Disneyland is crazy like that and EC is virtually ubiquitious, but that's not the norm. Conversely, you don't expect to pay with a 500 everywhere (if you have that, EU phased it out recently)
Whatever "make" means is so poorly defined, you could as well delete it from the sentence. What they really can't do is make SCOTUS interpret the word as needed.
The way I read it says a) a state must not [glob] legal tender b) unless they literally make gold and silver coin. Because states issue coin with heads in local custom as much as their reserves allow.
Though an etymologic fallacy, that's closer to the sense of making bread, compare to mix, etc. Grammatically, a legal tender can well be adverbial, Gold the legal tender and nothing else shall be made by the state, where the scope of the verb is pragmatically restricted to the context as per usual.
