Obama to Congress: I’ll decide what’s constitutional

The Daily Caller. ^ | 01/05/2012 | Chris Cox

[neverdem]

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.

[OneWingedShark]

Face it, both parties are enemies of the people.

Agreed.
I remember NY-23; that alone should be proof that the party is NOT on the side of the people.

We have nowhere to go.

[...] Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

[Mariner]

Congress can whine or impeach and remove.

It's obvious they have opted to whine via proxy.

The Imperial Presidency is back because there is a power vacuum in DC.

Congress is unable to act decisively on anything. Anything.

[neverdem]

The impeachment of BJ Bill Clinton, probably saved him from defeat in his second election to The Presidency.

Clinton was impeached two years into his second term in late 1998, but the Senate failed to remove him.

As far as gun running to Mexico, Holder better resign, or he'll be impeached, IMHO. That will put the Senate in a bit of a bind, except for states with safe rat seats. They have to defend 23 seats with 7 of them open next November.

[MosesKnows]

we are doomed

We are only "doomed" if we accept that we are doomed. Many Americans do not accept that we are doomed; please count me among them.

[El Gato]

The President can spend the White House budget on advocating to Congress whatever he wishes, but the NIH cannot spend any of it’s budget for that purpose.

Art. I sec. 9

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”

Since Congress has explicitly prohibited any money from being drawn from the treasury and spent by the NIH on advocating gun control, then they can’t spend that money as it would be drawing money in opposition to appropriations made by law. Thus Unconstitutional.