The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations. The situation has become so dire that no one — likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes.... This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it.... Agencies promulgating regulations potentially subject to criminal enforcement should explicitly describe the conduct subject to criminal enforcement, the authorizing statutes, and the mens rea standard applicable to those offenses.Mens rea is a guilty mind. Imposing a mens rea standard on federal prosecutions for regulatory offenses means that the government will be expected to stop prosecuting people who didn’t know they were doing something illegal, or people whose guilty mind — their knowledge that they were doing something illegal, and meant to — can’t be proved.
This order also cuts against the argument that the administration is in violation of the separation of powers doctrine. Putting the onus back on Congress to pass laws if laws are needed is healthy, partly because Congress just doesn't have as much time as the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats.
We don't really need any new laws in this country -- if anything, we need fewer. All the really bad stuff has been illegal all along. An additional beneficial effect might be to get us back towards self-governance by making the law knowable to ordinary citizens, such that there aren't Federal felonies you could be guilty of without even knowing of them.
So: well done, on three separate counts.
2 comments:
In concert with widespread surveillance and data collection, the purpose of the the regulatory excess is, once the target is identified, to "find the crime", and it's punishment. Ayn Rand spoke to this.
Since the Supreme Court, in a 9-0 ruling that was overshadowed by Dobbs and a few other cases, reminded the DEA that physicians cannot be required to read the minds of people who say that they suffer from chronic pain. The DEA argued that two physicians should have known somehow that some of their patients were pill-seekers and not truly in pain. The SCotUS disagreed with that argument. Physicians must act in good faith based on evidence they observe. They do not have to be Miss Clio the telephone psychic.
I wonder if the executive order draws from the spirit of that ruling.
LittleRed1
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