Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“In October 2003, pistol-packing federal agents dressed in black body armor poured from three pickup trucks to place a 67-year-old Georgia man in handcuffs and leg shackles for the alleged crime of importing orchids without proper documentation. Criminal law no longer enforces, in [Supreme Court justice Neil] Gorsuch’s words, ‘a relatively small number of pretty intuitive and widely accepted norms.’ Increasingly, it expresses progressivism’s incontinent itch to boss people around, and a nasty thirst to punish deviations from ever-more-minute strictures promulgated by experts whose expertise supposedly encompasses how everyone else should live. As a result, Gorsuch says, a legal scholar estimates that ’70 percent of adult Americans today have committed an imprisonable offense — many, maybe most, without even knowing it.'” (08/30/24)