Any rules violation has two parts, the action and the consequence. The rule lays out the action, which is a violation of any other rule by your caddie, and a consequence, that the player "may" be subject to DQ or suspension.
Of you decide to be creative and use the may to simply allow for another consequence to be applied, the you are left in a position where the action has no specifically detailed consequence. You are forced to do more creative reading, saying that the rule saying that players are responsible for their caddie's somehow confers all punishment down to the player. Of course this is not supported by the text of the rules, it requires two episodes of mental gymnastics and ignoring the obvious regular English meaning of the rule in question.
Please post evidence the rules committee stating their intent.
There is no mental gymnastics required, it's the logical conclusion based on the grammatical construction of the rule.
When you're using may as a permissive, the entity being granted permission is generally in the subject, or at least somewhere in the sentence. Who is being granted permission to decide the penalty, the "action" itself, or is it possibly the "caddy"?
They could have clarified and said "Misconduct by a caddie may subject both the player and caddie to disqualification and/or suspension,
at the TD's discretion". In this case it's still not a permissive, it's a list of a possibilities with a qualifying clause describing how to choose between the possibilities.
The rule is unclear but not because of whether the "may" is permissive or not. It's unclear because you have to infer, based upon the entirety of 3.05C, that if the caddie violates a rule you are assessed the penalty. It's not explicitly stated. The second part with the "may" merely lists some possibilities without any additional language to specify who determines or how one determines what the penalty should be, and whether or not it applies to just your caddie, or both you and your caddie.
A simple fix, if it is in fact their intent, would be to do as ball golf does and simply explicitly state that the caddie is governed by the same rules as the player, and if the caddie incurs a penalty it is assessed to the player.
As far as my assessment regarding the intent of the rules committee, I'm merely going off assertions made in prior posts in the thread, so I could be wrong on this account.
