"...with liberty and justice... oh wait... not so much."

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > The Massive Federal Criminal Code:

"...The Constitution lays out just three federal crimes, and for 200 years, criminal justice policy was mostly left to the states. That began to change in the 1970s.

Today's federal criminal code is enormous—and growing. Baker also finds that Congress tends to add more laws during election years (surprise!), that federal judges and prosecutors exacerbate the problem by interpreting federal statutes as broadly as possible (sometimes retroactively), and that new federal laws are increasingly lacking a mens rea requirement.

So we have a bewildering federal criminal code that no one person could possibly completely comprehend, the fact that you can be charged for breaking one of those laws even if you weren't aware that what you were doing was illegal, and increasingly leeway and discretion afforded to prosecutors to interpret all of these laws as broadly as possible. Throw in the problem of selective enforcement (there aren't nearly enough resources to prosecute all the crimes on the books), and you have a system where everyone's a potential criminal, but prosecutors can pick and choose whom to target..."