U.S. Congressman LOUIE GOHMERT: Proudly Serving the First District of Texas

U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (TX-01) discussed yesterday the bipartisan report, WITHOUT INTENT: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law, a joint report from The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The report provides objective evidence that Congress regularly passes new criminal laws that do not sufficiently protect law-abiding citizens by requiring that a defendant have mens rea, or criminal intent, before they can be found guilty.  This legislative failure produces piles of new criminal laws every year that puts Americans at risk of prison time for failing to file a report on time or label a box properly before mailing – acts that no reasonable person could predict are criminal.

Rep. Gohmert stated, “There are people who never intended to be lawbreakers and who believed they were going about being good citizens that ended up having their cars run off the road, having their bodies slammed to the ground and being arrested and not understanding what in the world they could have done. One of the witnesses had never even had a speeding ticket because he tried so copiously to avoid violating any law. As we have seen this week, there are real people out there that want to destroy our way of life, and maim innocent people. Yet, we have dedicated so much of the federal government structure to pursuing people that don’t realize they violated the law, and if they did, they wouldn’t have done so.

On both sides of the aisle – Republicans and Democrats, we want to show how tough we are on some issues so we will throw in a criminal penalty. That is why we have about 5,000 laws now with criminal penalties. We have to clean up the criminal laws so that innocent people, who want to be law-abiding, productive citizens, don’t end up being the victim of a law that was voted for just because they don’t want to look weak back home. This isn’t a party issue, this is a national issue.” 

As Ranking Member of the Crime Subcommittee, Rep. Gohmert looks forward to working on solutions to the problem to ensure that Americans are not jailed for innocent acts and law enforcement can focus on arresting the true criminals among us.

To view Rep. Gohmert’s full speech, click here.

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