Sure  Harvey  Silverglate said it. I said it. You probably said it too.  And now former Attorney General under the iconic actor, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, has said it too.

There are about 4,500 criminal statutes, said Edwin Meese, attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and now with the conservative Heritage Foundation. “This is in addition to over 300,000 other regulations that don’t appear in the federal code but nevertheless carry essentially criminal penalties including prison,” he said. “So the vast array of traps for the unwary that lurks out there in federal criminal law is more extensive than most people realize.” The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts figures some 80,000 defendants are sentenced in federal court each year.

Most lawyers have never had the pleasure of a client charged with violating the regs.  There is a regulation for everything. I mean everything. And it seems as if every one carries a sentence, as the only way for the government to clobber anyone who doesn’t comply.  It’s malum prohibitum on steroids.  It’s mens rea out the window. It’s nuts.

How nice of Ed Meese to be so bold as to challenge the insanity now that he’s no longer AG.  Everybody gets smarter and tougher when they have no political capital on the line.  I don’t doubt his sincerity. I doubt his timing.  Didn’t he notice any of this when he held the reins?  At least he said something in time for Bill of Rights Day.

Nathan Burney persuasively rips the heart out of the 300,000 (and this is a guess, as nobody actually knows how many crimes actually exist) regulatory crimes.

Problem.

Crime is defined by society, not by bureaucrats. Crime is something that is so bad that society deems it worthy of punishment — of the government forcibly taking away your liberty, your property, your reputation. Crime is serious, and should only be created by the legislature. People who have no business defining new crimes are now doing it all over the place. That’s problem one.

Problem two is that these people have no clue what they’re doing. They don’t know what crime is, why it’s punished, or how it is defined by our jurisprudence. What they do know is strict liability — simply breaking the rules, regardless of knowledge or intent, is enough for sanctions.

Nathan argues that only Congress should have the authority to convert regulatory control into a crime, and this seems so overwhelmingly obvious as to defy the need to explain.  That leaves 300,000 regulatory crimes with some ‘splainin’ to do.

But what of the 3500 (again, just an estimate) crimes that Congress, in its collective wisdom and need for re-election fodder, has created? 

“We ought to get rid of the old myth that you’re presumed to know the law,” said Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), a member of the subcommittee.

Certainly the fact that our elected representative, the guys who vote for these laws, don’t have the slightest clue what they’re criminalizing would suggest such a thing.  If they don’t know what conduct is criminal, how the heck are the rest of us to know?

But that still doesn’t confront the core issue.  There is no American, short of an infant or a quadriplegic centenarian in an iron lung, who can be confident that they won’t commit a crime today.  While not every bad act is criminal, statutes criminalizing mundane, unintentional, unharmful conduct abound.  The Big Three, conspiracy, wire/mail fraud and lying to a government agent probably captures most of our population, if anyone was inclined to check.

The story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which makes it far more real than just Tim Lynch at the Cato Institute sounding the alarm.  When the words come out of Ed Meese’s mouth rather than mine (or Tim’s), they mean a whole lot more.  Whether it’s enough to get it into the hearts and minds of Americans, and elected officials who want to be re-elected, is another matter.  The only time we can sure it becomes clear is when they or a loved one is indicted. That’s when the epiphany happens.

As Ma and Pa Kettle “tsk” about some bad behavior that appears in the paper, and tell each other there ought to be a law, they need to come to grips with the fact that the farm is subject to a few thousand regulations about which they know nothing, and the violation of which will put Pa into pinstripes.  Chances are pretty good that nobody down at the United States Attorney’s office is thinking about what Pa did wrong today, and he’ll finish milking the cows and plowing the back 40, whatever it is that Pa Kettle does, without incident.

And that’s how America will go on, comfortably numb.  Until the day somebody gets a bee in his bonnet and decides that you need to learn a lesson.