RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

What’s more, many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, which means that you don’t need to have criminal intent to be charged with a crime.

“This status quo is absurd and unjust,” Trump says in his executive order. “It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it. That situation can lend itself to abuse and weaponization by providing government officials tools to target unwitting individuals.”

All true. And deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about civil liberties.

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.’

Trump’s order “discourages criminal enforcement of regulatory offenses, prioritizing prosecutions only for those who knowingly violate regulations and cause significant harm” and requires each agency to produce “a list of all enforceable criminal regulatory offenses, the range of potential criminal penalties, and applicable state of mind required for liability.”

Critics dismiss the Trump order as just window dressing.

“The reality,” says the National Law Journal’s Dan Novak, “is that the U.S. Department of Justice rarely brings such cases.”

But it does bring such cases, and the mere fact that it can is the problem, as Sunseri can attest.

Despite the fact that the “closed” trail is frequently used by tour guides and other runners, and there were no clear signs prohibiting him from running on it, the Biden Justice Department wanted make an example of Sunseri and said that in exchange for a guilty plea, he’d have to pay a $5,000 fine and accept a five-year ban from Grand Teton National Park.

“It has forever been a bedrock principle of the rule of law that the law be actually knowable, but our law is not,” Canaparo said. “The number of crimes in the federal law is enormous and growing and applies to so many things that no reasonable person would think are crimes.”

This invites the kinds of government abuses that everyone – left and right – should find deeply troubling.

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 two news outlets that covered this executive order: Reuters and the Daily Signal.

Who cares about civil liberties when there’s a Trump tweet to freak out about?