With a new year come new rules and regulations across the country.  A plethora of new laws that went into effect on January 1, 2021, reflect the issues of the last year when employment, the pandemic, and criminal justice reform was top of mind for many Americans.

Here are some of the biggest changes that went into effect on January 1.

With the ushering in of a new year comes new laws.  Lucky us!  A wave of new legislation will bring in changes, both big and small.  There is “good news” for workers, consumer privacy advocates, sexual abuse victims, and many more.

We’ve been down this road many times before.

If the government is consistent about anything, it is this: it has a tendency to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of “national security.”  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain favorable to our enemies.  Limited government and constitutional accountability have been thrown aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.

History

In the United States, habitual offender laws, commonly referred to as "three-strikes laws" were first implemented on March 7, 1994, and are part of the Department of Justice Anti-Violence Strategy.  These laws require two previous convictions in order to be applicable and sometimes make life in prison mandatory.  Twenty-eight states have some form of a three-strikes law.  Its purpose is to drastically increase the punishment of those convicted of more than two felonies, but, in some instances, convictions of more than just one criminal offense, not necessarily a felony, will still result in harsher penalties as it does in Washington, D.C.

Senator Rand Paul took a lot of heat from establishment Conservatives and some in the media for his unwavering stand against the Patriot Act.  The party line that emerged said that we are now vulnerable to terrorist attack.  Even Senator Paul, himself, said he was being accused of damaging America’s defenses against such attacks.

Have you ever made an unreasonable gesture to a passing horse in a national park?  If so, you are already a federal criminal.  For the rest of us, there’s a new work of reference, humor, and legal theory from attorney Mike Chase titled How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender.

As is usual every year, 2019 will see the enactment of new laws across the country.  Once again, our beloved legislators have passed thousands of needless new laws that will be going into effect this year.  Passing more laws is not the solution, but instead, part of the problem!  We already have millions of laws in the nation—far too many.  Having ample laws is one of several causes of corruption in our legal system.  Many of the newly written laws will have an impact on the vast majority of Americans.  In California alone, more than 1,000 new laws will be added to the books.  In some states, minimum wages will go up, guns will be harder to obtain legally, plastic straws will get the boot, and hunters will get to wear pink for a change.  Here are some of the noteworthy laws going into effect this year: