Can you imagine being charged with breaking a law that you had no idea existed? Not knowing the law is not an excuse. Furthermore, there are some laws so obscure that most of us have broken them at one time or another. Many of these ‘laws’ are not actually laws–they are simply regulations put in place by unelected bureaucrats.
On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a crime committed in Grand Teton National Park last fall.
The article reports:
Not long after Michelino Sunseri, a professional mountain runner, finished a race across Grand Teton last fall, he found himself on the receiving end of a Justice Department criminal charge. His offense? Running on a closed trail, for which he could end up serving six months in jail.
We are not making this up.
Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to prevent such gross abuses. It is one of the most important – and underappreciated – actions he’s taken.
The “crime” Sunseri committed wasn’t a federal law passed by Congress. It was a crime invented by the National Park Service – one of some 300,000 federal crimes (although nobody knows exactly how many there are) that unelected bureaucrats have conjured up when writing regulations.
The article notes:
In testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee last week, GianCarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, listed some of the absurdist crimes on the books:
- It is a crime to sell a tufted mattress unless you have burned nine cigarettes on the tufted part of it.
- It is a crime to sell a package of bacon unless the packaging includes a transparent window that ‘shall be designed to reveal at least 70% of the length (longest dimension) of the representative slice, and this window shall be at least 11⁄2 inches wide.’
- It is a crime to submit a design to the Federal Duck Stamp contest if your design does not primarily feature ‘eligible waterfowl.’
- It is a crime to sell a toy marble across state lines unless it is marked with a warning that says ‘this toy is a marble.’
I can safely attest to the fact that I have never committed any of the above crimes.
The article concludes:
Trump points out another problem with this criminalization overload.
“Overregulation privileges large corporations, which can afford expensive legal teams to navigate complex regulatory schemes, while disadvantaging small businesses and individual Americans and stifling new market entrants.”
Incredibly, we could only find three news outlets that covered this executive order: Reuters, the Daily Signal, and Reason magazine.
Who cares about civil liberties when there’s a Trump tweet to freak out about?
We truly have a President who can identify with those of us who cannot afford a group of lawyers to defend our every move.