Most troubling is the high percentage of these federal crimes that duplicate state laws that have been on the books for years. This endangers the constitutional principle of decentralized law enforcement authority that has worked well in America and that has been a bulwark against the centralization of police power at the national level. For most of the nation s history, federal criminal jurisdiction was limited to offenses that involved truly national matters, such as treason, counterfeiting, bribery of federal officials, and perjury in the federal courts. But in recent years, as Senator Joseph Biden has put it, we federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves. That is not much of an exaggeration.
Today there are more than three thousand federal crimes on the books.
Hardly any crime, no matter how local in nature, is beyond the jurisdiction of federal law enforcement authorities. Federal crimes now range from serious but purely local offenses such as car jacking and church burning to trivial matters such as disrupting a rodeo or damaging a livestock facility. In 1994, one crime bill alone created two dozen new federal offenses. The ABA report, backed up by extensive statistical data, supports the position of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who deplored the expanded federalization of crime in his annual report on the federal judiciary last December, when he cited the tendency of Congress to appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime. Furthermore, as the task force found, increased federalization is rarely, if ever, likely to have any appreciable effect on the categories of violent crime that most concern Americans, because in practice federal law enforcement can only reach a small percent of such activity.