This past Labor Day, the local police were boasting on the news that they would have officers “stationed every 10 miles to crack down on minor infractions of the law during the busy holiday weekend.” While the Constitution guarantees immunity to unreasonable search and seizure, 11 score years later that guarantee means nothing. Thanks to politicians, nearly every behavior that a person can exhibit is either illegal or close enough to it to give probable cause. What this means is that all weekend long, as I drove to and fro from my home to Champaign, I saw someone pulled over every 10 miles. While at first I cursed the omni-asthmatic Man, I began to realize that the fault lies on us common folk for demanding that politicians make policies to begin with.

When politicians run for office, what they are really looking for is a way to make a lot of money by rubbing elbows with other people who have a lot of money. They get their kicks from politicking, not legislating. Elected officials would probably enjoy themselves a bit more and sublimate their frustration by sending dirty e-mails to aides less if they were allowed to schmooze. But instead of letting them, we demand that they pass laws.

The truth of the matter is that there is a very thin border between overlegislation and underlegislation. When the country was founded, much of the necessary legislation was laid down. While the body of legislation was not perfect, it did not need 220 years of full-time revision by hundreds of professional policymakers.

While I cannot pinpoint the moment when our country became overlegislated, it is apparent that it has. Indirect evidence of this can be seen in the types of laws that are created these days. The new drinking-related laws adopted in Illinois last week stiffen penalties on drunken driving. They – and some of their predecessors – outline strict punishments for anyone caught breaking the law, including a mandatory suspension of the perpetrator’s license to drive.

On the surface, the new drunken driving laws seem like a good idea, and, in some cases, they are. But they can also be ridiculous. For example, a case that will be going to court in Champaign this month concerns a girl who was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Due to fairly new laws, she could face minimum sentences that involve jail, fines, revocation of driving privileges and a felony record because she drove while intoxicated. The catch is that the only reason she drove while intoxicated is because she was fleeing from the scene of her attempted sexual assault.

The laws do not make provisions for this girl’s circumstances. If the laws did not mandate such extreme penalties, a judge would be able to issue a sentence that acknowledges that she broke the law tempered with consideration for the situation. Instead, the decision will have to be black-and-white; one extreme or the other.

The reason that laws with increasingly narrow scopes are passed has a lot to do with the fact that we citizens demand it. Every time that someone gets killed by a drunk driver, we want a new law governing drunk driving. Every time that someone leans too far over the edge of the Grand Canyon, we want a new law governing public parks’ safety. Politicians want to keep their jobs, so they do what we demand. The result is that, well, every 10 miles along the interstate, there is someone doing something illegal.

The solution to the legal troubles in this country is simply to demand less from elected officials. We need to learn to be content with them only making laws when there is a serious need to do so; as there was when the automobile or satellite communication came into existence. Some guidelines should be in place to help educated, impartial judges make a decision, but there is no reason that the general populace should want or expect a flurry of unending legislating. In the end, it just takes away from our rights, and adds legitimate reasons why each citizen is a criminal.