H.R. 589, the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2025; H.R. 3492, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act of 2025; H.R. 59, the Mens Rea Reform Act of 2025; H.R. 98, the End Endless Criminal Statutes Act; H.R. 2159, the Count the Crimes to Cut Act of 2025; and H.R. 421, the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act
2025-06-10
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Source: Congress.gov
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The committee will come to order without objection. The chair is authorized to declare recess at any time pursuant to Committee Rule 2, House Rule 11, Clause 2. The chairman may postpone further proceedings today on the question of approving any measure or matter or adopting an amendment for which a recorded vote is ordered. Now I recognize the gentleman from Kansas to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.
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Without objection, the bill will be considered as read and open for amendment at any point. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Biggs, for an opening statement. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate you bringing this bill forward today. In 2010, the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers published a report titled, Without Intent, How Congress is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law. And I would ask for unanimous consent. Not objection. Thank you. The report authors analyzed 446 nonviolent criminal offenses proposed in the 109th Congress, and they found that 50% of the analyzed offenses lacked adequate men's rape provisions. In 2021, they followed it up, same group, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Heritage Foundation, and they found that the trend continues. And only thing different being that maybe even more bills are being passed without adequate men's requirements. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a hearing, and the witness brought in by the Democrats in his opening statement advocated for the passage of this bill, H.R. 59, and also mentioned the following bill that we'll do also favorably. What I'm suggesting to you is this should be a bipartisan approach to this bill today. I'm looking for that. I believe that we should do that because there is so many issues here. So when you begin to compare John Carlo Caneparo during the hearing, who was comparing federal crimes that are morally wrong and the federal offenses that are regulatory in nature. He cited some bizarre examples, such as the prohibition on selling Swiss cheese without holes, the requirement for certain toy balls to carry specific warnings, and
The estimate is that there's more than 5,000 of those types of crimes, except for when you get into the rule process, the bureaucratic crime-making process, you'll find that there are hundreds of thousands of those. And they don't have mens rea requirements. I'll give you a couple cases. The one that really sings to me is the Gibson Guitar Corporation's factories in Nashville and Memphis. They bring in exotic woods, computers, guitars. Everything was seized under the allegation that they had violated the Lacey Act because they imported rosewood and ebony that was not harvested or exported in compliance with Indian and Malagasy law. But the Lacey Act makes it a federal crime to import a wildlife or plants taken or traded in violation of any foreign law. But the relevant foreign laws were not clear. not publicly available, not consistently enforced by their own federal governments. And indeed, the statute did not require the importer knowingly or have any culpable middle state to violate the law. So ultimately, they were imposing or seeking to impose, the feds were, criminal liability without any knowledge or intent on the part of the actor. That is against the longstanding Anglo-Saxon historic history of the jurisprudence that we have. There are other cases. We have the individual case highlighted by the Democrat's witness, Mike Fox, and this is the case of Michelino Sunceri, who is a professional trail runner, and he was charged with a federal misdemeanor by the National Park Service for running on a trail that was allegedly closed despite the fact that the trail had been used without incident for more than 50 years and did not have any signage indicating its closure. Again, there was no culpable mental state. There was no way for him to know. Nor was there, ostensibly, a requirement for a culpable mental state.
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