by:
Chris Cox
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Election season is here, and you might think President Obama would be
going out of his way to show voters that he can be trusted with the
powers of the presidency. But you would be wrong. Just a few days before
Christmas,
Obama served notice to all Americans that he will continue to abuse
executive privilege by seeking new ways to vilify gun owners and further
his anti-gun agenda.
Congress placed a provision in the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for 2012 designed to bar the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using any of its $30.7 billion taxpayer funds to “advocate or promote
Gun Control.” However, upon signing the bill into law, President Obama issued a caveat of his own:
I have advised Congress that I will not construe these provisions as
preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility to
recommend to the Congress’s consideration such measures as I shall judge
necessary and expedient.
In other words: “Congress may pass laws, but I decide which of its
laws are constitutional and which I can simply choose to ignore.”
Of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually give the president this power, but Obama won’t allow a little thing like the
U.S. Constitution
get in his way. And in the present case, Congress is right to try to
prevent him from using a federal health agency, not to mention our tax
dollars, as a weapon in his ongoing war against the Second Amendment. As
The Washington Times reports, NIH has wasted over $5 million since 2002
producing deceptive studies aimed at furthering gun control — including
one study that tried “to prove that a home without firearms was
essential to a child’s safety and well-being.”
Even more importantly, Congress knows that there is no scheme too
radical, or dangerous, for the Obama administration when it comes to
using federal agencies to push its anti-gun agenda.
Last month, email exchanges surfaced between employees at the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) that show the
administration helped illegally transfer guns to violent Mexican drug
cartels in order to manufacture a case for gun registration. Now gun
dealers in four Southwest border states must abide by a new gun
registration requirement, courtesy of BATFE, that forces them to
register the sales of any law-abiding American who purchases more than
one semi-automatic rifle within five business days.
Congress never passed any law like this. Rather, Obama’s BATFE
orchestrated the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal to give
cause for its unconstitutional gun-control edict. Given this, how hard
is it to envision the Obama administration issuing a phony “health”
study that maligns gun owners?
Obama may not have a majority in Congress, or the will of the people,
behind his anti-gun agenda. But that isn’t stopping his administration
from finding deceitful ways to evade Congress and build public support
for gun bans, gun registration and other regulations designed to weaken
and destroy our Second Amendment rights.
Chris W. Cox is the executive director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.
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