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Posted on 05/15/2025 8:21:03 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A new executive order targets hidden criminal laws and restores basic due process to federal enforcement.
On May 9, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations,” addressing one of the most insidious threats to American liberty: the unchecked expansion of criminal penalties through regulatory sprawl. For decades, this trend has eroded the separation of powers, undermined due process, and transformed the federal legal system into a maze where ordinary Americans risk criminal liability for unknowable infractions.
While largely ignored by the corporate press, civil liberties advocates should see this order as a long-overdue corrective. It tackles the explosion of hidden criminal penalties, reaffirms the necessity of criminal intent, and forces long-overdue accountability onto the administrative state.
The order accomplishes two key reforms. First, it limits criminal enforcement to cases in which a person knowingly violates a regulation, discouraging the use of “strict liability,” which bypasses the traditional requirement of criminal intent. Second, it compels federal agencies to publicly identify every regulation they enforce with criminal penalties, along with the statutory authority and mental state required for conviction. That such basic transparency has never been required is an indictment of how far the system has drifted from constitutional norms.
To appreciate how far we’ve strayed, consider the founding era. Originally, Congress held exclusive authority to define federal crimes, and those crimes were few in number, targeting only existential threats to the republic, such as treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. These laws were clear, deliberate, and rooted in the principle that punishment required both wrongful conduct and a guilty mind.
Today, by contrast, legal scholars cannot even agree on how many federal crimes exist. The Code of Federal Regulations spans more than 175,000 pages, burying countless criminal provisions deep within bureaucratic text. A 2022 algorithmic study estimated that the U.S. Code alone contains more than 5,000 federal crimes, and when regulatory offenses are included, the number may reach into the hundreds of thousands. As law professor Jonathan Turley recently testified before Congress, we may now need artificial intelligence just to identify all the crimes on the books. That is not hyperbole — it is a measure of how disconnected federal criminal law has become from the rule of law.
The result is a dystopia in which nearly every American adult is a potential felon. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” retired law professor John Baker once observed. “That is not an exaggeration.” If everything is a crime, everyone becomes a criminal, empowering prosecutors to target individuals first and search for crimes later. This selective enforcement invites abuse, especially when legal ambiguities intersect with political incentives.
The longstanding legal principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” only makes sense if the law is reasonably knowable. Everyone understands murder is wrong. But when it comes to regulatory offenses buried in obscure agency publications, fair notice disappears. As Justice Neil Gorsuch and legal scholar Janie Nitze recently wrote, the Roman emperor Caligula would post laws in tiny print and in inaccessible locations so no one could read them. “The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear — the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons.” America’s current regulatory state, with its thousands of hidden crimes, mirrors this tyranny of uncertainty.
Many of these crimes defy common sense. The A Crime a Day account on X and its companion book, How to Become a Federal Criminal, document the absurdities: It’s a federal crime to mail a mongoose or to leave the country with more than $5 in nickels or pennies. These aren’t just punchlines; real Americans have been prosecuted under similarly obscure statutes, often for conduct no reasonable person would recognize as criminal. Mislabeling imported goods, disturbing protected wildlife by accident, or violating esoteric shipping rules has led to life-altering penalties.
In principle, the criminal justice system is supposed to require mens rea, meaning “a guilty mind.” Strict liability, where no proof of intent is needed, might be defensible for minor infractions like parking tickets. But where liberty is at stake, intent matters. Prosecuting someone for conduct they didn’t know was illegal, and that no reasonable person would assume was criminal, violates our most basic notions of justice.
Trump’s executive order strikes a blow to this Kafkaesque regime. It mandates that federal agencies publish clear, accessible lists of all criminally enforceable regulations, identify the legal authority for each, and define the mental state required for conviction. This reasserts a fundamental truth: Criminal punishment should apply only to knowing wrongdoing, not bureaucratic mistakes or obscure technicalities.
Civil liberties advocate Harvey Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day, has long warned that the average American unknowingly commits multiple federal crimes daily. Though no supporter of Trump, Silverglate welcomed the order as a long-overdue corrective, quipping that “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” He speculated that Trump’s own experience as a criminal defendant may have sharpened his awareness of prosecutorial abuse and regulatory overreach.
Skeptics may question Trump’s motives, but the order should be judged on its merits. At a House subcommittee hearing on May 7, 2025, lawmakers from both parties expressed alarm about overcriminalization — a rare sign of bipartisan agreement on a pressing constitutional issue.
Overcriminalization should never have become a partisan matter. Allowing unelected regulators to impose criminal penalties through opaque rulemaking directly threatens due process, individual liberty, and democratic accountability. Criminal law is not a tool for regulatory micromanagement. It is a solemn authority that must be exercised with restraint, transparency, and fidelity to the principles of a free republic.
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Long overdue. It is likely that most people break more than one federal law every day and don’t know it.
Only if they are White - Straight White Males in particular.
Give it a couple of hours and a district court judge will issue an injunction on this executive order.
Oh, I see. Due process for US but not for the poor downtrodden illegals........🤔😊👍
As the Soviets said: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
That is a symptom of being under the tyranny of the Rule of Man rather than the freedom of the Rule of Law.
America is meant to be run by the Rule of Law, the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land. But for over 100 years, the feds have gone willy-nilly passing laws on a whim regardless of Constitutional limits - thus the tyranny of the Rule of Man.
No kidding.
The feds tried to shut down my kids selling arrow heads basically because they have my surname (Irish).
Mind you, my wife is 100% Apache, my kids are enrolled in the Mescalero tribe, we live in Ruidoso, NM (home of the tribe), and they make the arrow heads on the reservation from flint we scavenge out of the River Ruidoso, as their very Apache great-grandfather taught them.
Promptly resolved, but having three feds cuff and threaten 11, 12, and 14 year old kids making a buck after school by putting stuff on Etsy is absurd.
(The “crime” was “fake Native American-made goods, not made by Native Americans.” No, they were quite real.)
They did not apologize.
"Trump’s Latest Order Could Keep You Out Of Prison For Crimes You Didn’t Even Know You Committed"
Respectfully to POTUS Trump, federal laws based on stolen state powers need to be taken out of the books imo.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
As popular as Trump is, instead of taking the time to stop the deep state with a thousand razor cuts, he could be spending more of his time on the golf courses starting tomorrow if he would first lead the states to repeal ill-conceived 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments.
The 16th Amendment is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for organized crime.
We'll call the repeal amendment Trump's Boston Tea Party II Amendment.
“Did you really think we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.
“One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted-and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on guilt.”
-Atlas Shrugged
I heard decades ago that the average American at any given laws is in violation of 3-5 federal statutes.
I am paraphrasing from memory, but I recall In the famous Citizens United v. FEC in which Kagan argued the government position, I had heard that Kagan was purportedly asked by the justices if certain speech in a given time frame around an election was punishable by law, and censorship could be enforced by incarceration.
Kagan (or one of her FEC comrades) replied something like “Yes. That could happen as the law allows for it. But it isn’t something that we would pursue or actively prosecute, even though the law allows us to do it.”
Scalia stood up and leaned over the bench above her, and while looking down at her said angrily and forcefully (I have to paraphrase) “I am not going to support any law that allows government bureaucrats to prosecute or not prosecute someone based on the mood they are in on any given day!”
I remember reading that somewhere, and although I have not found it any transcripts, it has the ring of truth.
I reminds me of the anecdote about Admiral Ernest King in WWII (who was a strict disciplinarian who popular myth held was so tough he “shaved with a blowtorch”) who supposedly growled at the beginning of the war: “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches.” when asked later if he actually said this, the quick-witted King replied that he had not, but said he would have said it if he had thought of it.
I don’t know if Scalia actually said this, but...I will bet upon hearing the story, he wished he had.
I wonder if this addresses ‘process crimes’ where if one is interviewed several times but your story differs in some trivial way ...
Fed: So what time did you get out of bed on April 22,2023”
You: Really?
Fed: Yes, really.
You: OK, about 5:45
Fed: In your last interview you stated 5:30. So were you lying then or are you lying now?
You: Are you kidding?
Fed: No matter, you are under arrest for lying to a Federal Authority. You will be detained until a court date can be determined. That should be in about 5 months.
Vast over-regulation is a key pillar of commie citizen control.
“The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.” - Tacitus
Wow. I’m sorry you and your children were put through that!
I’ve only broken one federal law that I know of. While doing yard work, I found a pretty blue jay feather. I put it in my pocket and later in a small vase. I love the jays and seeing the pretty feather made me happy.
Sometime later, I read that it’s a federal crime to posses the feathers of native birds. Oops! No blue jay was harmed (I fed the things!) and that bird had simply shed that feather as it grew a new one. And I found it in my own yard.
But if the Feds had wanted to, I guess they could have fined or imprisoned me over that lone little feather.
Note to Feds: I no longer have that feather. Nor any feathers at all, except for the one legal turkey feather I use for playing my dulcimer.
I’ve got a problem with woodpeckers. My house is slowly becoming made of hardi board (cement boards).
It’s illegal to kill them and a major federal crime.
“ Promptly resolved, but having three feds cuff and threaten 11, 12, and 14 year old kids making a buck after school by putting stuff on Etsy is absurd.”
They seriously handcuffed your kids for this??!!
When I was 15, I lived in Ketchikan, Alaska. Bald Eagles everywhere. My girlfriend (a local native) and I were on a hiking trail and came across what could only be described as a massacre of Bald Eagles. Feathers were everywhere. We took a few of the best ones and halfway back to town had our bags “inspected” by a wildlife officer. He looked at me and said “give these to the girl and I won’t have to take you in.” How’s a 15-year-old supposed to know he can get jacked up for possessing Bald Eagle feathers?
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