Why change the number of a clause in the constitution even if it is inactive?
What happens when an amendment amends an amendment, partly reactivating the old constitutional clause but still keeping part of the amendment to it active?
If an amendment changes the numbering system, how does that help clarity?
In a Statute Law, referred to every day by the courts, it makes sense just to delete the changed paragraph and just renumber everything.
Doing that to an important and permanent historical record of legal changes like the Constitution of the United States of America, seems, to this UK Citizen and non-lawyer, to be harmful.
No one is changing the number of a clause in the Constitution. The Constitution assigns no numbers to clauses. For legal purposes, where one wants to be specific about the passages cited, numbers are assigned. When doing that, it is not at all uncommon in legal matters to delete from the numbering clauses that are no longer in effect. As I noted previously, there is no right or wrong way to do it, per se. Leave the superseded ones in, take them out, whatever. What is important is that a convention be applied consistently for reference purposes.
“What happens when an amendment amends an amendment, partly reactivating the old constitutional clause but still keeping part of the amendment to it active?”
Typically amendments are simply negated by their replacement. If a clause is only partially modified and is still needed to make sense with the amendment, it would presumably be retained in the numbering system. Depending, of course, on the convention being used.
“If an amendment changes the numbering system, how does that help clarity?”
Again, there was no original numbering system. And once a document such as the Constitution is changed, it is actual a new document. It would be Constitution rev. 1, rev. 2 , etc. The technical question that arises is how, for purposes where specificity matters, to cite the correct passage of the current revision of the Constitution. Like I said, there is no correct answer to that. Clarity problems can arise with any convention, but as long as the convention used is understood, legal documents can be matched to the revision of the Constitution in effect when they were issued.
“In a Statute Law, referred to every day by the courts, it makes sense just to delete the changed paragraph and just renumber everything.
Doing that to an important and permanent historical record of legal changes like the Constitution of the United States of America, seems, to this UK Citizen and non-lawyer, to be harmful.”
I have no personal preference. As noted, all conventions are somewhat arbitrary.
What is simply the folly of willful idiots is to run around braying about how courts can't count when the footnotes of the ruling point out the dueling conventions and which one the court is applying.