Judicial overload undermines prosecution of terrorism

So did another unhealthy trend, deplored in a Feb. 16 ABA task force report titled ''The Federalization of Criminal Law.'' The 16-member panel was headed by Meese, who is more used to being a punching bag for the liberal-leaning legal establishment than a spokesman for it. He lends bipartisan heft to the ABA report's long-overdue conclusions.      There was only perfunctory media attention to the ABA report because this is bland stuff: no charges of racism or ''sexual McCarthyism,'' no summons to yet another war on drugs, no purple prose.      Still, the message is worthwhile. Although crime rates have fallen, the ABA report explains, the proliferation of new federal criminal prohibitions deserves none of the credit: ''There is no persuasive evidence that federalization of local crime makes the streets safer for American citizens.'' This is because the properly limited (albeit rapidly expanding) number of federal law enforcement officials can conduct only about 5 percent of all prosecutions.      At the same time, federalization does subtle but pervasive damage: It gives federal prosecutors too much inherently arbitrary and unreviewable discretion to focus on a tiny percentage of all possible targets; it clogs federal courts with garden-variety criminal cases, diverting them from national problems such as international terrorism, espionage, bribery of federal officials, big antitrust cases, white-collar fraud, and multistate drug conspiracies; it disrupts the federal-state balance; it moves the nation ''rapidly toward two broadly overlapping, parallel, and essentially redundant sets of criminal prohibitions, each filled with differing consequences for the same conduct.''