Regulators who do not know history are destined to repeat it. This pattern may be playing out again. In the 1980s, federal prosecutors vastly stretched the reach of the federal mail and wire fraud statutes, using a novel theory that it reached not only deprivations of property but also of the citizen's political and civil rights. Prosecutors alleged that citizens had a right to an honest government devoid of conflicts of interest. The tactic worked for a time, and some prominent politicians went to prison. But then the rubber band snapped, and in McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350 (1987), the Supreme Court rejected the theory in its entirety.