Laws and Other Rat Traps of the Legal System

Laws. They're everywhere. The darn things are all over the place. Walking down Main Street in Middle Town, Real America? Better watch your step. Turning the corner at the corner of Laws and More Laws in Washington, D.C.? Oops. Now you've done it. You've walked smack dab into a glass pane of Laws. And you've probably broken one or a dozen.

It's not your fault. These days, you can't help but break a law here or there. There are just too darn many of the things. One of the few growth industries in these recessionary/depressionary times are federal, state, and local lawmaking operations. Our legislators, councilpersons, mayors, dogcatchers, and concerned citizens are busy formulating new laws even as I write this. One of them may even be rendering my writing illegal and an affront to civilized society.

Well, I'm a concerned citizen. I'm concerned that my legislators (federal, state, and local) just don't understand that I don't think they are doing a good job based on the number of bills that they have sponsored, co-sponsored, or signed their names to. Bad law is worse than no law. Many bad laws are worse than a few good laws. Truckloads of bad laws are what keep despots in power in places like North Korea or the Soviet Union. I cringe every time I read a missive from one of my representatives touting the number of bills introduced in the current session and the number of laws passed in the current session.

Read some of the bills that are introduced by your lawmakers. That step alone will be more than many of your lawmakers will take before they vote to pass some screwball legislation that will be another assault on our Constitutional rights. The Patriot Act passed almost unanimously despite the fact that it looked like something that Uncle Joe Stalin had written back in the 1930's. When certain provisions came to light, it was almost comical to watch our congresspersons and senators backpedal, stating that they didn't really read the legislation and were therefore unaware of the offensive provisions. Almost comical.

They passed legislation that effectively rewrote a document considered a bright and shining beacon of freedom created by some of the most respected and revered intellectual giants in history and they did so without reading the odiferous legislation. And then they complained when Dick "I'm Death On Tame Pheasants, But Don't Send My Precious Butt to Viet Nam" Cheney and George W. "Bring 'Em On While I Sit Behind My Secret Service and U.S. Marine Security Screen" Bush took the legislation and built an Executive Empire on the Potomac, the likes and size of which has never been seen in the Republic even in the dark days of the War Between the States. Almost comical, indeed.

It keeps happening over and over again. Think the Rico Statutes are being used only in the manner in which the sponsors intended? Think again. The author of the legislation believes that the Rico Statutes are being used, not only in ways not foreseen, but in ways thought to be specifically prohibited by the legislation written by him. Silly rabbit. Give the government an inch and it will take Pluto. And it will not willingly give it back.

Same with almost any piece of legislation written to prosecute the War on Drugs. The powers given to the executive branch government are constantly being used in ways not foreseen, nor approved, by the original authors. And we've got a new piece of legislation (HR 875) being discussed that will overhaul the nation's food production safety inspection process. I'm sure those powers will be used only in the manner for which they were intended. Almost comical.

All of these laws are almost always passed in response to some isolated upheavel in the normal order of our daily lives that causes the citizenry to cry out that "There ought to be a law!" and "Throw the bums in jail and throw away the key". Well guess what? Building jails is now a growth industry. Running jails is now a growth industry. Crime does pay....for the government and the cronies who place pots full of money into legislative pockets to facilitate the placing of lucrative contracts to build and operate prisons.

The result? A large segment of our population receives its mail in a jail cell. And a lot of people make a lot of money keeping those jail cells full. The government that criminalizes and then profits from jailing a large segment of its citizenry no longer is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The solution? Revolutionary. Oh, not the way you're thinking. Let's take back our legal system. Let's pass only the absolute minimum number of laws necessary for civil society to function, property rights to be protected, and national infrastructure to be built and maintained. Take the profit motive out of the justice system. Jailing those who simply will not coexist peacefully with fellow citizens should be a function of the government, not a profit-making corporation. Let's stop criminalizing every little action with which we disagree, and, instead, criminalize only those actions that do real harm to innocent fellow citizens. And let's stop trying to throw away the key for every miscreant. Save the long-term jail cells for those citizens, and only those citizens, who deserve to be separated from society until the sun goes nova.

Let's write laws that follow the admonitions of my long-ago English teachers, and embarrassed professors--be clear, be concise, and be brief. Stop writing legislation that is longer than the complete works of William Shakespeare, and written with the intent to close every loophole. Lawyers specialize in finding loopholes for the more affluent of our fellow citizens, and every attempt to create a maze of wheretofores, heretofores, wherebys, and wherewiths to foil them only makes their jobs that much easier. Knock it off.

And finally, let's lighten up the current load of legislation already on the books. I propose that for every law written from this day forward, two laws must be retired from the annotated codes, U.S. codes, U.S. regulations, and Cracker Jack codes until we have streamlined our list of laws to those necessary for a functional civil society and no more. At that time, every law passed must be linked to another law taken off the books in a straight one-for-one trade.

Can we do that? Will you help me in this endeavor? Will you post bail if I end up in jail for writing this piece? Almost comical.