Imagine going out to take your dog for a walk on the National Mall and ending up in handcuffs, all because your dog was not on a leash. This scenario sounds absurd in America. But it happened to Fox News commentator Dana Perino’s husband under the National Park Service’s regulations for the National Mall, which have criminal consequences.  

The National Park Service is not an outlier. Across the federal government, federal agencies have seized a broad grant of power from Congress to write whatever regulations they deem “necessary” and back them with the power of criminal enforcement. These regulations are quietly passed through rule-making, where only the very most attentive of people would notice. The result is many people are regularly violating criminal laws that they do not even know exist.  

To make matters worse, many of these regulatory crimes do not require that an individual know what they are doing is wrong. Our criminal law traditionally requires someone to have a “guilty mind.”  But with many of these criminal laws, no such “mens rea,” or mental state, is required.  

The problem is out of control. No one knows how many separate crimes there are, including the Department of Justice. Researchers have tried counting, with one 2019 effort identifying at least 5,199 statutory crimes. Regulatory crimes are orders of magnitude greater, with estimates of the number of regulatory crimes ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 separate offenses.

This is inconsistent with basic ideas of self-government and the intentions of those

It must be said that it was nice to spend a Saturday afternoon in a tightly packed movie theater full of people who are enthusiastic to see a movie. That doesn’t happen frequently anymore, shy of hyper-successful films like “Dune: Part II” and “Barbie.” It is rare nowadays to get turned away at the box office because the theater is full, as the guy behind me was; my local theater is still having trouble giving away free “Furiosa” posters.  

However, it shouldn’t be surprising that animated films would be the things that break the trend. “Kung Fu Panda 4” grossed $545 million this spring primarily because it was the only animated movie in theaters through three months, and “Despicable Me 4” is currently tracking for an $80 million opening for the July 4 weekend. April’s rerelease of “Shrek 2” grossed more than Pixar’s last three releases combined. 

Naturally, the surprise comes in the fact that this opening is for a Disney film — coming from a studio that is facing enormous amounts of burnout and controversy due to its perceived partisan slant, declining quality, and proclivity for anti-creative decision-making, and that doesn’t include this week’s Project Veritas sting. In 2019, Disney produced eight of the 10 most popular blockbusters of the year, and seven of them broke the billion-dollar mark at the box office. In 2023, seven of their eight films were box-office disasters. Disney is an unwieldy unprofitable sinking ship, and the majority of its franchises are battered and exhausted.  

An animated family picture like

Credit to Michael Barbaro of The New York Times for ever so gingerly happening upon the lesson Democrats should have taken from the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, but didn’t. Or more likely, refuse to.

On Tuesday’s edition of the Times’ “Daily” podcast, Barbaro and Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak mulled over the ruling, and at the very end of the episode, Barbaro had his epiphany. “Another way to think about this ruling if you step way back,” he said, “is that it’s kind of the Supreme Court saying that when you elect a president, you have to accept, dear American people, that the Constitution gives them a tremendous amount of power and legal latitude to kind of do what they want …”

Barbaro was cooking. You could feel it.

He continued his revelation. “And we, the Supreme Court, are going to make it pretty hard to hold that president criminally responsible for their actions,” he said, “so, voters need to think really carefully about who they want to possess this level of immunity.”

I imagine Barbaro swelled with pride at having successfully followed that pure and true train of thought to its logical end. He did it! He really did it!

I just wish the rest of his peers in the media and the Democrat Party would do the same.

Immediately after the ruling, holding that a president carrying out his constitutional responsibilities can’t be held criminally liable for it once out of office (duh), Democrats and leftist triflers