Austin News

Legislators usually don't look to reduce crimes by removing them from the books altogether, but that’s exactly what a Texas Republican congressman has proposed in the Count Crimes to Cut Act.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the act June 18. It aims to make the attorney general give Congress a list of all crimes in the U.S. Code within 12 months. It also will require the attorney general to provide a list of the potential penalty, the elements of the crime, and the mens rea or “guilty mind” requirements for each crime.

According to the Daily Signal, the bill would require federal agencies to give Congress a list of all of the regulatory crimes each agency enforces and to report how many times each regulatory crime has been violated in the past 15 years. This would tell Congress how many of the 300,000 regulatory crimes currently on the books have been enforced infrequently or not at all.

A retired Louisiana State University law professor notes that crimes that aren’t enforced, or aren’t enforced often are problematic.

“There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” said LSU's John Baker.

In addition, the heads of federal agencies and the U.S. attorney general will be required to create a public database of every crime on the lists reported to Congress, and that means the public could learn more about whether or not something they want to do is a crime.  

This isn’t the first time that these reforms have been introduced to Congress. The same provisions were included in the criminal justice reform bill called the Smarter Sentencing Act, first introduced in 2014.

John Malcolm, a Heritage Foundation scholar says the provision Roy introduced is “a significant step toward making the law more fair and transparent to average citizens.”