Jamie Raskin on the 'Endless Proliferation of Criminal Offenses' and the Count the Crimes to Cut Act

The Founders' Vision for Federal Law

• 🏛️ The founders envisioned federal law being limited by both subject matter and number.
• 🎯 Subject matter limitations required conduct to be tethered to a federal jurisdictional nexus, like interference with interstate commerce.
• ⚖️ The founders also believed federal criminal laws should be organized around specific principles, forbidding conduct clearly harmful to everyone.

The Problem of Endless Criminal Offenses

• 📈 There has been an "endless proliferation of criminal offenses," some statutory and some regulatory, often in reaction to specific events.
• ❓ This growth has occurred despite previous attempts to quantify federal offenses by the DOJ, ABA, and scholars.
• 📚 Currently, there is no single comprehensive accounting of federal criminal offenses within the government.

The Count the Crimes to Cut Act

• 📝 This bipartisan legislation directs the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to compile a comprehensive report of every federal statutory and regulatory criminal offense.
• 📋 The report will detail the specific elements of each offense, potential penalties, mens rea requirements, and prosecution numbers for the preceding 15 years.
• 💡 The goal is to provide Congress and the public with an inventory of all federal criminal offenses.

Dangers of Over-Criminalization

• 😟 Citizens may not know what conduct is expected of them, leading to confusion and anxiety.
• ⚠️ An unscrupulous executive could use the vast arsenal of offenses to target political foes or vulnerable communities.
• 🚶 The proliferation of offenses moves society away from a free society, where anything not prohibited is allowed, towards an authoritarian society, where anything not allowed is prohibited.
• 🗣️ Everyone has a right to know exactly what the federal criminal law entails.