If you can’t count the laws on the books, how can you enforce them? GianCarlo Canaparo and Lucas Drill write:
In the case of the federal government, experts estimate that there are more than 300,000 regulatory offenses carrying potential criminal penalties. Americans have been sent to prison for breaking laws they didn’t even know existed and which did not involve inherently blameworthy conduct.
Taking note of this problem, North Carolina passed a law in 2018 that required state and local agencies to report to the legislature all of their rules that carried criminal penalties. Many agencies failed to comply, and so, last month, the state enacted SB 584.
Section 3 of the law sets a new compliance deadline, and Section 5 adds a penalty for noncompliance: Any agency that fails to report to the legislature in a timely manner loses its power to enforce new criminal rules for two years.
Additionally, Section 6 automatically refers all new criminal regulations proposed by state agencies to the legislature’s General Statutes Commission, which will then review them and make recommendations to the general session whether any of the regulations should have their criminal penalties removed. […]
For years, The Heritage Foundation has supported efforts to count the federal criminal laws contained both in the United States Code and in the Code of Federal Regulations. The Department of Justice and several non-governmental organizations have tried, and failed, to do so.
But who better than to count criminal regulations than the agencies that promulgated them? And what better way to encourage that effort than to forbid agencies from enforcing new crimes if they don’t comply?
After all, if an agency is unable to count the crimes it has created, it cannot be trusted to enforce more.
[GianCarlo Canaparo and Lucas Drill, “North Carolina Is Tackling Crimes Run Amok. Congress Should Take Notes.” The Daily Signal, September 13]
