BALTIMORE, Maryland January 21, 2016 - Alabama Senator Richard Shelby on Thursday helped to bring front and center a hot-button issue of personal liberty that, up to now, has been totally obscured inside the Washington D.C. world of make-believe.
Here is a very brief history of the issue, which, very soon, every American will have to decide for his or herself: President Obama, realizing that the political make-up of Congress will deprive him of any further uber left statutory enactments, has taken to passing so-called 'executive orders' which many see as his way of taking Congress out of the process of making new American Laws. Most Americans still understand that for law to be enacted, it has to be introduced into and debated by the Congress, and then passed by both houses of the Congress. If a statute is passed by the Congress, it is sent to the President, who either signs it into law or, instead, signs a veto of the bill. A veto is, in fact, a rejection of the law. If a law passed by Congress is vetoed by the president, it goes back to Congress, which can override the veto and enact the law without the president's signature if two-thirds of each house vote to do so. Currently, the GOP has a veto-proof majority in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate. Thus, for a presidential veto to be over-ridden by the Congress, some Senate Democrats must join with the GOP to vote to do so. That rarely happens.
President Obama's problem, however, is in getting anything to the stage where he can sign it. With the GOP in control of both houses, rare is the law that he favors coming to him for an enacting signature. He has resorted to 'executive orders' in an effort to circumvent the will of the American people, who put majorities in both Houses of Congress for the express purpose of stopping the far left legislation that the Democrats had been passing and sending to him. The only time an executive order is a legitimate way of making enforceable laws is when the President has been granted the express power to sign such orders by either the United States Constitution or by the Congress itself. In the current fight that was before the committee on which Senator Shelby sits, not too many legal experts believe the President has the right to act without submitting his ideas to the Congress in the form of a bill. That is because the area in debate is the precepts contained in the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. The Second Amendment, in case you didn't know, expressly allows American Citizens to keep and bear arms; i.e., guns. Obama wants to pass executive orders that make it more difficult for Americans to purchase, own and use guns. The Attorney General says Obama's proposed orders are within his power to sign. Shelby says they aren't. I agree with Shelby.
The most important reason I agree with Shelby is that we live in a democracy. We do not live in a dictatorship or a monarchy, where one man or woman gets to decide what the laws are or what rules we have to obey. Maybe you want laws preventing people from owning guns. Ask yourself this: are you willing, going forward, to allow the president, whomever he or she is, to decide what other laws or rules should be enforced regardless of what your elected representatives believe. For 200 years we have answered that question in one way: no. Sometimes it takes years for a law to be enacted. Sometimes good ideas are never enacted. But if enough Americans want an idea to be law, it eventually becomes law unless it violates our Constitution. For instance, it doesn't matter if the Congress votes unanimously to pass a law saying every woman must be killed at age 30, it never will be allowed to become law because it violates almost every precept in the Constitution.
Obama has said, repeatedly, that he was forced to move by executive orders because the Congress didn't act. That is pure hogwash and bunk. By not enacting a law Obama wants, the Congress is acting. If they didn't pass a law for him to sign, they are saying, under our system, that there is not enough of a will to have that law right now. If Obama and his functionaries want a law this Congress won't pass, he needs to appeal to the American people to elect Congressmen or Congress Women that will pass such a law. Obama knows he won't get the people to do that while he is president, and part of the reason for that is that he rammed too many really bad laws through the Congress that the American people did not want. Like Obamacare or Obamashame, whatever you decide to call it. He and his confederates - Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi - literally changed the voting rules in the Congress to get Obamashame enacted. The American people, by a large majority, hate that law. They started to elect people to the Congress who promised not only to never pass a law like that again, but to do whatever they could to repeal the law.
When President George W. Bush was re-elected, you might remember him saying that he intended to use some of his political capital in his second term. That was his way of saying that the American people wanted him to propose laws that he said he favored during the campaign. Since he won by fairly large majorities in many states, he believed he had what some call a 'mandate' to make changes. You might say, well, Obama won by large majorities in 2008, and you'd be correct. But he never said he intended to introduce a law like Obamashame in the Congress. All of the Opinion Polls taken as the bill quickly passed through the Congress indicated a large majority of Americans didn't want this law. But he rammed it through. In doing so, he incinerated almost all of his political capital.
Let's now return to Senator Shelby. What he was telling Ms. Lynch and, at the same time, Obama, was that no executive order was going to take away the Second Amendment rights of Americans. As I understand Obama's ideas, he wants to say in his orders that anyone who sells a gun, even one single gun, must go through the same background checks that large gun dealers go through. That would be tremendously expensive and would chill the right to purchase a gun. Senator Shelby was saying to Ms. Lynch that even if she tells Obama he can enact such a rule, that doesn't make it so. If someone violates the order and the government takes action against that person, a lot of organizations will quickly move to assist the person and have the law stricken. Senator Shelby was also saying that Americans do not have to abide by an executive order that violates the Constitution. He is correct, but you better hope, if you're caught, that the Court who makes the decision on your actions interprets the law and the Constitution as you do. If the judge is a true American, he or she will. But Obama has appointed a whole lot of federal judges who are prepared to ignore Constitutional Rights.
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