I would think that there is a lot that both the right and the left would agree on. Gibbon is used as an example but I am sure that r administrations have abused the same powers so there is no need to go there.
"The Heritage Foundation points out that “a core principle of the American system of justice is that no one should be subjected to criminal punishment for conduct that he did not know was illegal or otherwise wrongful.” These whim laws have discarded the centuries-old requirement of mens rea, or guilty intent. From today’s perspective, the old adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse” assumes that it is possible to know all the intricacies of tens of thousands of federal statutes and regulations. Nonetheless, if we inadvertently violate one of them, we face years in prison. We are modern Gullivers, tethered to the ground by the sinews of the criminal law.
Fortunately, many are fighting against this distressing trend. Groups as diverse as the Heritage Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Prison Fellowship, the Cato Institute, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers have joined forces under the leadership of former Attorney General Ed Meese to fight the overcriminalization of America."
Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the greatest danger to a democracy was “soft despotism”:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
