Making a Federal Case

Campus Report ^ | July 24, 2008 | Emily Ham

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Making a Federal Case

by: Emily Ham, July 24, 2008

In a study documenting the total number of federal crimes within United States law, researchers have found that there has been a major increase in the definition of such offenses since the founding of the nation in 1776.

“When the country started, there were basically three crimes: piracy, counterfeiting and treason,” said former Attorney General Edwin Meese, “At the time of our [1998] report, there were some 4,000 crimes.”

Meese, who now serves as chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, noted that while two centuries have passed, most federal crimes have been designated as such within the last 30 years.

Meese, along with John Baker and Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX), participated in a Heritage Foundation panel held on June 17 that focused on the growth of federal crime laws and the shifting of the balance of power between state and federal governments.

According to both Baker and Gohmert, the federal government has taken powers away time after time from state governments, thus resulting in too many federal laws dealing with state issues.

As an original member of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Federalization of Crime, Baker, like Meese, said he had been involved in federal crime counts and studies before and said the current report was based on information found in previous studies done in the 1980s.

“As of early 1983, the Justice Department put the number at 3,000 crimes and we’ve worked off that figure,” said Baker. [They] did a hand count of 27,000 pages in the US Code. No one since then has [undertaken such a tally].”...

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