Thread: Obama’s Executive Orders in Defiance of the Constitution

Obama’s Executive Orders in Defiance of the Constitution

By Clash Daily / 14 January 2013 / 16 Comments
by Andrew Linn
Clash Daily Guest Contributor
In the midst of the gun control debate, as well as the arguments over the national debt, there is the chance Obama might bypass Congress and instead rely on Executive Orders to push forth his agenda.




Joe Biden is recommending that Obama issue gun control regulations via Executive Order. Biden met with pro-gun and anti-gun groups in the past few days in an attempt to work out a solution. While meeting with the pro-gun groups, I wonder if he tried to rely on the same bizarre behavior he used in the Vice Presidential debate with Paul Ryan.
Meanwhile, Harry Reid is recommending the same tactic for the debt ceiling.
Such suggestions demonstrate the Obama Administration’s (and its supporters) disregard for the Constitution.
An Executive Order is an order by the President given to departments and agencies within the Executive Department to carry out laws or policies passed by Congress. However, some Executive Orders have been contrary to Congressional intentions, or the Constitution for that matter. One example would be Clinton issuing Executive Order 12852 in 1993, establishing a Council of Sustainable Development in order to advance Agenda 21.
Now Obama wishes to implement his policies via Executive Order, since gun control legislation is unlikely to pass in Congress, and since there has been practically a standstill over the national debt.
But Obama must think he is the honey badger. One thing is certain, and that is he doesn’t care. He takes what he wants, whether it be people’s guns, money, property, or their rights.
And neither do his supporters. Harry Belafonte wanted him to act like a Third World dictator and put Republicans in jail. Woody Allen wanted Obama to be a dictator in order to get things done.
Apparently Biden and Reid feel the same way.
And to make matters worse, there is a bill in Congress to repeal the Twenty-Second Amendment, thus eliminating presidential term limits. Obama would no doubt love that idea, since it would give him a chance to be in the White House indefinitely (if not for life).
I guess since Obama was re-elected, some liberals think conservatives will just cave in to his agenda. But they are quite mistaken. The American people will not surrender their rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution, and that includes the Second Amendment. Americans will not surrender their freedom to Obama, nor to the United Nations.
Andrew Linn is a member of the Owensboro Tea Party and a former Field Representative for the Media Research Center. An ex-Democrat, he became a Republican one week after the 2008 Presidential Election. He has an M.A. in history from the University of Louisville, where he became a member of the Phi Alpha Theta historical honors society. He has also contributed to examiner.com and Right Impulse Media.



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Joe Biden: White House eying 19 executive actions on guns


Biden is leading the president's task force in response to last month's shootings. | AP Photo






By REID J. EPSTEIN | 1/14/13 6:49 PM EST Updated: 1/15/13 9:46 AM EST



The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban, universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But Biden, who has been leading Obama’s task force on the response, spent two hours briefing a small group of sympathetic House Democrats on the road ahead in the latest White House outreach to invested groups.



The focus on executive orders is the result of the White House and other Democrats acknowledging the political difficulty of enacting any new gun legislation, a topic Biden did not address in Monday’s meeting.


The executive actions could include giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to conduct national research on guns, more aggressive enforcement of existing gun laws and pushing for wider sharing of existing gun databases among federal and state agencies, members of Congress in the meeting said.


(Also on POLITICO: NRA releases shooting game for ages 4+)


“It was all focusing on enforcing existing law, administering things like improving the background database, things like that that do not involve a change in the law but enforcing and making sure that the present law is administered as well as possible,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).


The White House declined to comment on the details of what Obama will propose.
(Also on POLITICO: Poll: Gun background checks wanted)


But Biden did indicate that the remains of the Obama campaign apparatus may be activated in the effort.


“He said that this has been a real focus on the policy and that the politics of this issue, that a strategy on the politics of the issue hasn’t been undertaken yet,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) told POLITICO. “He did remind us that the campaign infrastructure is still accessible.”


Biden did not address two of the more significant issues in the gun debate: the appointment of a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the role violent images in the entertainment industry play in the nation’s gun violence.


Obama touched on his expected legislative guns agenda at his own news conference in the East Room on Monday, while stressing the power he has via executive order.


“How we are gathering data, for example, on guns that fall into the hands of criminals, and how we track that more effectively — there may be some steps that we can take administratively as opposed through legislation,” Obama said.





Even Democrats who back gun control concede that reinstating an assault weapons ban — the 1994 law expired in 2004 — will be a heavy lift for the White House. During his meeting with gun-rights groups last week, Biden mentioned only an assault weapons ban when telling the NRA and other organizations that Obama has “made up his mind” to support it.


“I think everybody acknowledges that the assault weapons ban is a challenge, but other things — like the size of the magazines, the background checks, straw purchases — are all things that have a good chance of passing,” Scott said.


Speier said she told Biden the White House should do as much as it can on its own.


“I urged him to do as much by executive order as possible,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t have a lot of confidence that this Congress is going to do anything significant.”
And Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Democrats’ Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said the magazine ban and universal background checks would be far more effective than an assault weapons ban without the political cost.


“Probably the most recognizable thing you can say in this debate is ban assault weapons,” Thompson said. “But the other two issues” — forbidding high-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases — “those two things have more impact on making our neighborhoods safe than everything else combined. Anytime you try and prohibit what kind of gun people has it generates some concern.”


Biden’s personal gun violence outreach now includes the families of the 26 victims of the Dec. 14 school massacre in Newtown, Conn. Biden told the Monday meeting that he’s been reaching out to the families. A White House official confirmed the vice president has been in touch directly with some of the families.


“The vice president mentioned that he has called every one of the families that has lost children in Connecticut, and that the conversations have lasted no less than 45 minutes,” Speier said.


CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the gun violence reduction measures supported by Rep. Thompson.

Read more: Joe Biden on guns: White House eying 19 executive actions - POLITICO.com

Read more: Joe Biden on guns: White House eying 19 executive actions - POLITICO.com

America’s Next Bubble: The Executive Order Crisis

History has shown us that the careless misuse of legislative power will have long term—and in many cases irreversible—consequences for the United States of America. Federal legislatures that are managed without caution and respect for our governing principles always create social and economic havoc in our Republic. Now Presidential executive orders are becoming a tolerated misuse of authority and if they are not challenged by the people we will find our rights to redress will vanish in the blink of an eye.

Presidential executive orders have their place in directing the operations of our Executive Branch. In times of real crisis they allow responsible Presidents
—Presidents who take their oaths of office seriously—the authority to temporarily address emergencies when swift action is necessary to protect the American people. Today our constitutional republic is being threatened by the maniacal overuse of this Presidential privilege. Overuse by a man, Barrack Hussein Obama, who willingly ignores the crises created by past government overreach while insisting that his overreach is the only answer to our nation’s problems.

If history shows us anything, it is that government interference is the prevailing catalyst for national crisis. With our elected legislators effectively removed from the governing process and replaced by a media driven national agenda—an agenda that unabashedly supports un-American activities—our nation will, one day soon, experience a crisis of a magnitude not felt since the Civil War.

By statute, Presidential executive orders must be legally enforceable and constitutionally correct. A President that issues orders contrary to the U.S. Constitution is in violation of his oath of office and becomes a threat to the document he is sworn to protect. No authority exists to enforce an unconstitutional executive order, yet there is historical precedent confirming there toleration by our government and our citizenry. Roosevelt’s executive order which led to the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans during WWII serves as one example of such an executive order. Over 150,000 American citizens imprisoned to satisfy the national security concerns of a country at war.

In case we have forgotten, the President was not elected to fix problems that don’t exist. In part, he was elected to steward the repair of our broken economy, reform Washington and unite Americans. I think it’s fair to say that every elected representative in Washington was elected with the same rationale in mind. So why is our government focusing on the manufactured crisis of escalating gun violence instead of the real problems created by their historical overreach? Because they are afraid.

Our government knows that there is no simple solution on the horizon for our mounting debt and exploding poverty levels. By their own estimations, it will not be long before our economy deteriorates and government confiscation of wealth and property becomes the norm. In the end, the poor will be sacrificed first and the rest of us will follow.

Gun violence—much like the fictitious affordable housing shortages of the 90’s—is not at crisis levels in the United States. The real crisis in America, the next bubble that will burst one day, is the President and Legislative branch’s overstepping of their authority and the endemic betrayal of their oaths of office; betrayals that have led to our current national predicament. Americans are now anxious of what things lie in wait around the corner. Things that our government conveniently forgets to warn us about.
Today, Americans acting within the spirit of the 2^nd Amendment are depleting firearms inventories at historic levels. Real and growing fear of tyranny is forcing many Americans to consider violent defense of their person and property from a government that grows more adversarial with each careless executive order issued by an untrustworthy and radical President. Now is the time to protest our government’s intrusion on our liberty. Waiting for fate to knock at our doors will only lead to deaths and more loss of freedom.

The electorate must begin to organize and march on Washington and our states capitols with our demands for redress. Not once or twice, but as often as necessary until our government is forced to bend to our legitimate legal requests. We must demand investigations, prosecutions and convictions for the misuse of power that we have willingly and blindly endured. We do have recourse in America and it should not have to be defended by violent acts of revolution.
Americans must begin to develop the courage to say “No!” to forced participation in bad legislation and illegal Presidential proclamations. We can no longer afford to wait for our Judiciary to decide what laws should be enforced. We know better. We just need to show them that we do. And that doesn’t always require armed confrontation. In most cases it simply requires an ideological show of force. We have the right to redress. If we fail to utilize that right, here and now, future generations will be sacrificed through carnage and tyranny.

America