I remember back when I was a kid and I did something wrong, sometimes my parents would handle it separately, and I’d get yelled at or punished by both of them for the same misdeed. It seemed so unfair.
Lawmakers do much the same thing. Only instead of doing it at the same time, they do it one after another. Not a year goes by that my state legislators don’t bump up the penalties on a few crimes. Then when someone commits one of these crimes where the legislature has been piling on like this, they get hit with years of invented penalties all at once.
As with all the items so far in my Evil Lawmaking series, I’m not complaining about what’s been made a crime (although in some cases I have objections), rather I’m complaining about how the laws are written.
To my mind, the questionable nature of these piled-on statutes is self-evident: After decades of lawmaking, is it really possible that legislators are continuing to discover never-before-seen gaps in the criminal code? Or is it just that lawmakers are putting on a show, legislative theater if you will, to try to convince their constituents that chaos would reign without them?
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