Many people want to reform the criminal justice system, ranging from Edwin Meese III to Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
There are at least 4,500 federal crimes and tens of thousands more associated with regulations.
How should they be reformed? A libertarian answer is this: With a chainsaw.
Only 3 federal crimes are recognized by the Constitution: Piracy, counterfeiting and treason. Eliminate all the rest. Abolish them. All these crimes have been read into the document via loose clauses like the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause. Who cares what these big government rationales are? The fact is that a horrid system has been erected such that many people want to change it.
The most direct, most effective and simplest way to reform the U.S. criminal justice system is to abolish all the federal crimes on the books except the 3 constitutional ones.
Rep. Pressley introduced H. Res. 702. It aims “to reshape the American legal system”, all 31 pages of it. This resolution contains all sorts of provisions that are objectionable and some that are not, but the big defect is that it doesn’t close down federal crimes en masse. Instead, it resolves to repeal some laws and replace others. Federal power over the states is maintained in this document. Many items involve federal money and federal micro-management.
This approach is consistent with progressivism. Progressives assume that the federal government is a beneficial power if only it’s in their hands. They will be the godsends who make beneficial changes in laws and how things operate. This never works as advertised because the progressives do not understand how things work. They do not understand, for example, the reasons for crime. This document states
“the root causes of crime and instability are typically poverty, substance use disorder, family and generational trauma, and poor access to health care and other basic social services…”
Ideas like this are easily debunked, but that doesn’t stop progressives from thinking they know how things work and how to fix them up. If you think a gas-powered lawnmower will run on diesel fuel, good luck.
11:39 am on June 6, 2020
