Mike Chase is an attorney in Hartford, Conn., and the author of the new book “How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender.”
By Mike Chase, June 4, 2019
It’s amazing that members of Congress are still called lawmakers. With all the media appearances and partisan bickering, who has the time to make law? For that, Congress has subcontracted the job out to employees in the executive branch. Sure, it goes against everything “Schoolhouse Rock” taught us about how laws are made, and it dictates an astounding array of rules, all the way down to the maximum allowable diameter for spaghetti (no more than 0.11 inches, if you were wondering). But the arrangement insulates the nation’s elected representatives from the accountability they so desperately seek to avoid.
The term “regulation” doesn’t quite capture the scope of the lawmaking power that Congress has ceded to dozens of executive-branch agencies and departments such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Agriculture Department. These government offices issue thousands of pages of rules with the force of law. And while regulation is nothing new, the sheer volume of rules has grown at a shocking rate.
Originally, Congress was only to pass legislation allowing bureaucrats to “fill up the details,” as Chief Justice John Marshall described the delegation process in Wayman v. Southard in 1825. But over the past half-century, delegation has amounted to the wholesale outsourcing of substantive lawmaking.
Given the untold thousands of federal regulations on the books, and the criminal penalties often attached to violations, most Americans are probably unaware of how easily they could get in trouble.
For the past five years, I’ve been trying to shed some light by counting federal crimes, one each day, on a Twitter feed called @CrimeADay. I cover crimes such as falconers letting their falconry birds appear in movies that aren’t about falconry, egg handlers wearing jewelry to work and pretty much anyone bringing an unshucked ear of corn out of New York...........To Read More....
Given the untold thousands of federal regulations on the books, and the criminal penalties often attached to violations, most Americans are probably unaware of how easily they could get in trouble.
For the past five years, I’ve been trying to shed some light by counting federal crimes, one each day, on a Twitter feed called @CrimeADay. I cover crimes such as falconers letting their falconry birds appear in movies that aren’t about falconry, egg handlers wearing jewelry to work and pretty much anyone bringing an unshucked ear of corn out of New York...........To Read More....
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