With a compliant Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate that consistently defends the president’s executive theft of power, Barack Obama and his allies are well on their way to carrying out his 2008 threat to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
What is being transformed first—through growing, abusive executive edicts never conceived under the U.S. Constitution—is the very form of government and strict guarantees of individual freedom in the Bill of Rights that are the bedrock of our nation’s remarkable stability.
“Change”—Obama’s election mantra—is a direct, in-your-face affront to the very vision of our Founding Fathers.
Without doubt, the most dire warnings over Obama’s daily violation of the Constitution have come from George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, an Obama supporter and self-proclaimed champion of a “socially liberal agenda.”
Nonetheless, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee in February 2014, Prof. Turley called President Obama’s usurpation of power “a constitutional crisis with sweeping implications for our system of government.” And although he didn’t use the term, he defined what I would call the high crimes of the administration thusly:
“The current threat to legislative authority in our system is comprehensive—spanning from the misappropriation of funds, to the circumvention of appointments, to negation of legislative provisions.”
Let me just name a few of Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional executive actions beginning with his refusal to enforce immigration laws and ignoring congressional mandates to close our borders to criminal aliens. Then there is Obama’s Internal Revenue Service threatening to silence ordinary Americans whom the president considers enemies, and his massive NSA domestic telephone and Internet surveillance of millions of innocent Americans.
Obama’s Justice Department overseeing gun smuggling to Mexican drug cartels makes our list, as does routinely refusing to answer congressional subpoenas, officials stonewalling Congress, routinely ignoring orders from federal courts or unilaterally rewriting his systemically flawed laws.
And then there is Obama’s order to circumvent clear congressional restrictions on spending for “research” by the Centers for Disease Control that claims gun ownership by law-abiding Americans is a public health menace.
The list goes on and on.
All of this was described by Prof. Turley as “… the usurpation of authority that’s unprecedented in this country.”
Especially for NRA members, it was obvious from the get-go that Obama believes he is above any constitutional restraints.
In the impenetrable prose of his 2006 manifesto, “Audacity of Hope,” Obama expressed his far-left, extreme view of what most Americans see as the immutable rules of American governance inherent in the Constitution:
“… the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.”
Let me translate: Obama believes that the guarantees of individual rights, the restrictions on government, and the absolute structural rules of the Republic in the U.S. Constitution are transient—ephemeral, with no concrete meaning, now or for the future.
For Obama, “rule of law” is merely his political silly-putty.
A striking counter to Obama’s view of a fluid Constitution with ever-changing meaning came with remarkable clarity from Prof. Turley in his Judiciary Committee testimony referring to the president’s behavior as “constitutional relativism” which, he said, “cuts the entire system free of its moorings; leaving the system adrift in a sea of politics where the ability to act is treated as synonymous with the authority to act. There is no license in our system to act, as President Obama has promised, ‘with or without Congress. …’” (emphasis added)
In the same breath, Turley emphatically warned that “What cannot change is the system upon which we all depend for our rights and representation.” (emphasis added)
But destroying those most fundamental principles is exactly what Obama’s pied-piper cry of “Hope and Change” was all about.
Above all, Turley warned that “We are now at the constitutional tipping point for our system. If balance is to be reestablished, it must begin before this president leaves office and that will likely require every possible means to reassert legislative authority.”
Under the current leadership of the U.S. Senate with Majority Leader Harry Reid and the likes of arch-anti-gun New York Sen. Chuck Schumer as co-conspirators in the Obama theft of power, there is only one means at hand to assure that legislative authority is reasserted.
Individual American voters must elect a pro-Second Amendment, pro-freedom Senate that respects the Constitution and vote to affirm a U.S. House of Representatives that will continue to assert its rightful constitutional role.
And NRA members—5 million of us—compounded by the many millions of our friends, families, and co-workers are the key to restoring the constitutional balance before it’s too late. We have just months left to mobilize to elect a U.S. Senate and House on November 4 that will stand up to Obama’s flagrant abuse of power.
Our fight isn’t just about the Second Amendment, it’s about preserving all our liberties—saving our constitutional heritage and protections for the future. It’s about using the ballot box on November 4 to elect true guardians of liberty who will stop Obama’s “transformation” of our Constitution and our country.
Wayne’s column appears in the NRA publications American Rifleman, American Hunter and America’s First Freedom. Click here to get a discounted NRA Annual Membership for only $25 a year complete with your choice of magazine delivered to your door.