Count the Crimes to Cut Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. McBath for yielding, Mr. Roy for his leadership on this, and Mr. Biggs for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this bipartisan legislation. The Founders thought that Federal law would be strictly limited in two different ways: one, according to the subject matter; and two, according to number.

The subject matter of Federal criminal law requires that the conduct being proscribed be tethered to a particular Federal jurisdictional nexus, like interference with Federal interstate commerce or assault on a Federal officer in doing his or her duty, or seditious conspiracy against the Union, which is why the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the local level like assault, murder, armed robbery, theft, and so on.

Federal law would also be limited, the Founders thought, according to number because the Federal criminal laws would be organized around certain specific principles forbidding criminal conduct that is clearly harmful to everyone. As my colleagues have said, what we have seen is the endless proliferation of criminal offenses, some of them statutory, some of them regulatory, oftentimes in a kind of political reaction to a particular event that might have been criminal already under a more general category.

This legislation will allow us to get on top of the problem. It will direct the Department of Justice and other Federal agencies to compile a comprehensive report describing every Federal statutory and regulatory criminal offense carrying penalties. These have grown substantially over the last four decades, despite several previous attempts by the Office of Legal Policy at DOJ, the American Bar Association, and several scholars to determine exactly how many Federal offenses there are.

There is simply not a single comprehensive accounting of Federal criminal offenses to be found anywhere in the Federal Government, and that is a pretty remarkable statement in itself.

Through the bipartisan Count the Crimes to Cut Act of 2025, Congress and the people will finally get an inventory of all Federal statutory and regulatory criminal offenses. Thanks to this bill, we will know the specific elements of each offense, the potential criminal penalties, the mens rea requirement, and the number of prosecutions that have taken place each year for the preceding 15 years for every listed offense.

Now, what is the danger of having too many criminal offenses? Some people might just say, let's let sleeping dogs lie. What is the problem with having proliferation of offenses that may be opaque, inscrutable, obscure, and duplicative? One danger is the citizen doesn't know what kind of conduct and behavior is actually expected of him or her. That leaves the citizen in a state of confusion and potential anxiety.

The other major danger is that an unscrupulous executive will use this nearly endless arsenal of criminal offenses to target political foes or vulnerable communities. In a free society, anything that is not specifically prohibited is allowed to you. That is what it means to live in a free society. In an authoritarian society, anything that is not specifically allowed to the population is considered prohibited and a danger to the government.

Mr. Speaker, the proliferation of endless criminal offenses moves us down that spectrum from being a free society much closer to an authoritarian society. We all have a right to know exactly what the criminal law entails at the Federal level.

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