We Must Vote to Preserve the Rule of Law

I cannot remember a time when so many good, hard-working Americans were asking one another such starkly foreboding questions: “What is happening to our country? Will our freedom survive? Will our children know and enjoy the America that we and our forebears built?”

All of those questions revolve around something more fundamental: “What is happening to the rule of law; to the protections and precise order for our Republican form of government as enumerated in our remarkable U.S. Constitution?”

Before the Obama era years ago, I could not have imagined that we would be facing the immediate fundamental crisis that Jonathan Turley, perhaps the most respected liberal constitutional scholar in legal academia, calls “a tipping point.”

“… You have the rise of an uber-presidency,” Turley warned. “… There could be no greater danger for individual liberty, and I really think that the framers would be horrified by that shift. …”

Uber-presidency. That’s where we are. And with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s aggressive complicity, the U.S. Senate is no longer a counter-weight to the theft and abuse of presidential power.

Arch anti-gun U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, d-Ill., the second most powerful man in President Obama’s Senate, declared that to carry out his agenda, the president must and can “borrow power” from the legislative branch—the power to enact law, to appropriate funds and to tax.

For our nation to survive this destruction of the constitutional separation of powers with three equal branches of government, Harry Reid and his acolytes must be retired from their majority. The framers never intended the Senate to “lend” or give its power to an all-powerful president. It is and must be the legislative body where minority rights are honored through a methodical, deliberative process. It is the emergency brake of our Republic.

Without that check, we have an administration that routinely ignores laws created by Congress; writes and rewrites federal statutes absent constitutional authority; violates existing criminal and civil statutes; misappropriates funds; lies to the American people; lies under oath to Congress; thwarts congressional and court oversight; destroys duly subpoenaed material; violates every sunshine law on the books to become the most opaque administration in history, and abets and encourages violation of federal law.

Obama’s White House has hijacked the rule of law and replaced it with a lawless, corrupt regime.

For gun owners, that lawlessness has come in the form of a series of executive edicts and presidential directives circumventing gun owners’ victories in the national legislature.

With regularity, Obama embraces the confiscatory gun bans in New York, Connecticut and California. He repeatedly endorses the forced “buyback” ban in Australia as the future for the U.S. I am certain he believes it can be done without Congress, a step at a time. (See Wayne LaPierre’s “Standing Guard” column.)

It was no accident that the first major gun control upheaval in this administration was Operation Fast and Furious, the Justice Department’s cross-border gun-running scheme intended to be the basis for a new ban on semi-automatic rifles. Fast and Furious was responsible for arming drug cartels, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Mexican nationals and contributing to the murder of at least two federal agents.

With the Fast and Furious investigations on Capitol Hill, administration officials lied, and Eric Holder’s Justice Department refused to answer subpoenas. All of this resulted in Holder becoming the first sitting cabinet officer in our nation’s history to be found in criminal and civil contempt of Congress.

But this lawlessness is everywhere in the Obama regime.

Obama’s abuse of power has been struck down as unconstitutional at least 20 times, including unanimous 9-0 decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court that included harsh reprimands by his own nominees.

“Transformation” by the uber-president?

Look no further than a weaponized Internal Revenue Service used to intimidate and shut down the free political speech of those who oppose Obama’s “rule”—and lying about it before Congress.

Then there is his electronic and digital spying by the National Security Agency in an unlawful net, capturing and storing the private communications of Americans and lying about it before Congress.

The latest crisis is the invasion of the U.S. by thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens, including countless criminal gang members. This is a result of Obama’s refusal to build security structures ordered and funded by Congress to physically secure the nation’s borders. And in this, the administration lied to Congress.

There is only one way to stop all of this; to reverse the course of Obama’s systemic “change” of our Republic. As NRA members—5 million strong—we must     each work to educate fellow voters and get them to the polls this November 4. It is imperative that we “transform” the ham-handed, rubber-stamp senate majority of Harry Reid and keep the pro-gun majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.