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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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New executive order just dropped.

The United States is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. The situation has become so dire that no one -– likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes. Many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime.
[...]
The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists. [...] Criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored. [...] Strict liability offenses are 'generally disfavored.' [...] Criminal enforcement of any criminal regulatory offense not identified in the report [...] is strongly discouraged.
[...]
Within 365 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a report containing [...] a list of all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by the agency or the Department of Justice. [...] Following issuance of this order, all future notices of proposed rulemaking (NPRMs) and final rules published in the Federal Register, the violation of which may constitute criminal regulatory offenses, should include a statement identifying that the rule or proposed rule is a criminal regulatory offense and the authorizing statute.

This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.

So a couple of things

  1. Anyone want to blackpill me on why this is Bad Actually because strict liability regulatory crimes are actually a major load-bearing part of how our legal system works and without it the situation will devolve to anarchy in the streets?
  2. Did an LLM cowrite this EO? I notice a mixture of em-dashes and double-n-dashes, which is not a pattern I normally see in entirely-human-written text. Not that I can complain about the outcome, if so.

I certainly did not have "total formalist victory" on my agenda. What the hell.

This will probably end up fizzling out, but having a well defined list of all crimes is a good principle. It's what the law is supposed to be in the first place. Some seem to think that ambiguity is the necessary font of power. It's not. It's the font of a certain kind of power. One that America, a top 10 laywers per capita country, scarcely needs more of.

Down with foxes, up with the lion.

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