The media’s focus may have been on the president’s tears during his gun control speech, but it should have been on the cries of freedom-loving Americans. After seven years of watching the administration wipe its feet on the Constitution, this latest power grab epitomizes everything people have come to resent about the White House. This week, the president’s impersonation of the legislative branch got personal with the announcement of a four-point plan to curb one of the country’s most important rights: to keep and bear arms.

The same man who spoke in front of a “We Can’t Wait” banner three years ago obviously hasn’t become more patient in his second term. Instead, the president is doing what we’ve come to expect when he can’t persuade Congress to rubber-stamp his agenda — taking matters into his own hands. Although the details are still vague, the administration is expected to roll back some of the background check exemptions for sport shooters and collectors, hire more bureaucrats to run background checks, spend $500 million more on mental health care, and crackdown on gun dealers’ licensures.

As Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) told me [Tuesday] on “Washington Watch” radio, “In the case of this president, the devils are in the lack of details. From what I’ve read in the summary of his some of his executive actions are left purposefully vague. And whenever you leave these things vague, it’s up to the interpretation of the regulators and enforcers.” President Obama insists his orders are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment. And I suppose Americans are supposed to take his word for it? A man whose administration is synonymous with lawlessness? A man who’s been rebuked by the highest courts in the country for his overreach on everything from recess appointments to immigration?

Anyone with a seventh grade education knows that the executive branch isn’t supposed to legislate. But that’s never stopped the Obama administration. Remember, this is a man who built his presidency on circumventing Congress with dozens of controversial executive orders. As the president has said before, he “refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer.” Even if that “no” comes from the Constitution itself. “Congress needs to act,” he insisted. Well, as Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) pointed out, Congress did act. It just didn’t do what the White House wanted. “[The president’s] proposals to restrict gun rights were debated by the United States Senate, and they were rejected. No president should be able to reverse legislative failure by executive fiat, not even incrementally.”

What’s worse, there is absolutely no reason to believe that any of his orders will work. As the president himself admitted, these proposals wouldn’t have stopped any of the gun-related attacks he highlighted. Even people like Hollywood’s Kurt Russell can see that. “If you think gun control is going to change the terrorists’ point of view, I think you’re… out of your mind,” he told radio host Jeffrey Wells. “They can also make a bomb pretty easily. They can also get knives and stab you. What are you gonna do about that? They can also get cars and run you over. What are you gonna do about that?… Outlaw everything? That isn’t the answer.”

If the president truly wanted to do something to stop the violence, Rep. Loudermilk has some ideas. “He says it’s about securing America. Well, he wants to hire 230 more people in the FBI to be paper pushers to help run background checks. Just a few weeks ago I was sitting in a Homeland Security Committee hearing, I’m on the committee, and we had the FBI director and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and I asked them about the refugees. ‘Do you have a plan to monitor these refugees that you know ISIS is going to exploit?’ And they said, ‘No, we don’t have the manpower to do it.’ So why don’t we hire more FBI agents to track terrorists? Why don’t we put more border patrol agents on the border instead of 200 ATF agents to stop these cartels from bringing in the bad guys? These are the types of things that if [the president] were serious about security he’d be going after.”

In the meantime, it’s time for the president to start working with Congress the way the Constitution intended it. If the founders wanted a king, they’d have stayed British subjects.

Originally published here.

Bonfire of the Humanities

If abortionists don’t respect life before birth, why would they respect it after death? The clinic operators in Ohio and South Carolina certainly didn’t — illegally trashing aborted babies in local landfills. Now, in a video that the Center for Medical Progress took but left to others to release, we see that this garbage-heap mentality is just the tip of the trash bin.

Students for Life highlighted the leaked footage last week, leaving viewers to gasp at the crass inhumanity of it all. At the Conference of the National Abortion Federation, David Daleiden’s team caught one Michigan abortion facility owner on tape complaining about the backlog of tiny baby corpses, which is nothing compared to her vulgar ideas for disposing of them. “Nobody wants to talk about dead bodies, nobody but me. There was a point when Stericycle fired us that I had five months’ worth of fetal tissue in my freezers and we were renting freezers to put them in. So, all I thought about, I was so consumed with fetal tissue, I was ready to drive to upper Michigan and have a bonfire.”

Stunning. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she went on to the absolutely outrageous. “We thought we’ll give [the fetal remains] to everybody in a gift bag, they can take it home, figure out what to do with it. It’s their pregnancy — why is this our problem? And I’m saying that in all seriousness.” Speechless yet? “And the garbage disposal was an option, I mean, there was a point that I actually hired someone from another clinic to come in and take 20 bottles and put it into my garbage disposal.”

This, at its rawest and most callous core, is what the abortion industry is all about — an industry, incidentally, that your tax dollars are involuntarily funding by the hundreds of millions of dollars. But as this woman notes, in a moment of rare clarity, these facilities are “all one incinerator away or one incineration company away from being closed.”

Or perhaps, one congressional vote. By the time you read this, the House will have taken a monumental one to stop the flow of Medicaid money to groups like Planned Parenthood, who see nothing wrong with this coldblooded approach to the lives it snuffs out through abortion. If people like this Michigan woman insist on treating the unborn with inhumanity, we can at least ensure she doesn’t have taxpayer dollars to do it.

Originally published here.

NJ District Haddon Done Anything Wrong

The president says it. Major League ballparks sing it. But “God Bless America” is no longer welcome at New Jersey’s Glenview Elementary School. Despite being a short nine-mile drive from the Liberty Bell, students can no longer exercise the freedom it stands for, thanks to a frivolous lawsuit by the ACLU. Reciting the phrase had become a tradition at Glenview, dating back to 9/11 when teachers wanted to honor the first responders.

Although Principal Sam Sassano argues the phrase wasn’t religious or required, the threat of a lawsuit forced the school to end the practice. “It has been our view that the practice is fundamentally patriotic in nature and does not invoke or advance any religious message.” The ACLU disagreed and pushed the broader Haddon Heights School District to cave. “Budgets are tight,” officials said, playing right into the hands of the atheist bullies who hope a costly court battle will dissuade districts from fighting back.

Incidents like this one must have been on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s mind when he spoke to a crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School last week in my home state of Louisiana. In direct contradiction to the lies ACLU and groups like it are spreading, he explained that there’s “no place” in the Constitution that suggests the state must be neutral between religion and the lack of it. “Where did that come from?” he asked. “To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?” Also, he went on, there’s “nothing wrong” with presidents (and by extension schools like Glenview) invoking God in speeches. “God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor.”

When President George W. Bush openly asked God’s blessing, Justice Scalia made it clear: “There is nothing wrong with that, and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that.”

Originally published here.