Should President Barack Obama move towards enacting gun-control legislation by executive order it would be grounds for impeachment, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.
Obama has “already abused the law enough times that it’s just been staggering,” Gohmert said.
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“It’s not a president who steps up and says: ‘You know what? Previous Congresses have passed the law — and it’s been signed into law, and I disagree with it, so I’m just going to create new law — and as I speak, so shall it be,’” Gohmert, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, tells Newsmax. “That’s not a president."
“The American Revolution was all about fighting such a monarchy — and that is not what the Constitution anticipates. It’s not something a Constitutional president would do.”
“That is something to consider if the president is going to attempt to destroy the Constitution strictly with a pronouncement of his mouth or the stroke of his pen,” he said.
The president plans to announce his program to combat gun violence on Wednesday at the White House. He is expected to present 19 proposed actions — ranging from universal background checks for gun buyers to bans of high-capacity ammunition magazines to initiatives to strengthen mental-health checks — many of which he said can be implemented through executive order.
Obama also plans to seek a tougher ban on assault weapons, which are expected to draw strong resistance from House Republicans and from the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups.
Congress should cut funding to Obama proposals that impose on constitutional freedoms, Gohmert said.
“That’s what the Founders anticipated when in the Constitution they gave Congress the power of the purse. The problem is we have tried to defund things that appear to be illegal outside the scope of the current law — and we’ve passed those measures in the House, but there is a Senate, and you have a Senate that’s controlled by Democrats that are complicit with the violation and prevent the cut of funding to the White House or to the measures that overstep the president’s boundaries.
“Anytime the president overstepped his authority and usurped authority from Congress in the past, then there was a bipartisan effort on both sides of the aisle,” Gohmert added. “Both sides of the Capitol would come together and say: ‘Mr. President, privately we’re telling you, you have stepped beyond your authority. You have abused the power of the Congress, and we’re going to defund whatever you’re doing. We’ll defund the White House unless you stop this, knock it off.”
“But, now, unfortunately the Senate Democrats have been complicit with the president — and have refused to come together in a bipartisan, bicameral effort to let the president know that it’s illegal and that it is just compounding the intent of the Founders who set up these checks and balances.
“No one branch has overstepped its boundaries like this president has — and I’m hoping that, at some point, Senate Democrats will realize that protecting and saving the Constitution is more important than just petty, partisan bickering,” Gohmert said.
An assault-weapons ban will not survive in the U.S. House of Representatives, either.
“I don’t see how it would pass in the House, because we have had a so-called assault weapons ban,” Gohmert said. “Let’s face it, a knife can be an assault weapon, a machete – in Rwanda, they slaughtered 800,000 people with machetes.
“An assault-weapons ban has been tried for 10 years. It did nothing to stop gun violence. It doesn’t work. It is just an assault on the Second Amendment. It is not an assault on assault weapons.”
As for the upcoming negotiations on raising the nation’s $16.4 trillion debt ceiling, any agreement must have deep spending cuts, Gohmert said. “I would vote against any measure that doesn’t make massive spending cuts.
“The president, unfortunately, has been done such a disservice by people working for him,” he added, referring to historical references Obama has made about the role of spending cuts in previous debt-ceiling extensions. “Whoever is putting in the words in the president’s teleprompter is lying. He just said that nobody had ever used the debt ceiling for bringing down spending — and yet it just shows the absolute ignorance of the White House to reality.
“Every time in the last 30 years, if there has been a substantial measure to stop overspending, it’s been related to a debt-ceiling bill,” he said, referencing, for instance, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation from 1985. The bill, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law, was the first that sought to cut the federal deficit via automatic spending cuts.
“You can go on and on, and it’s all very clear — 1990, 1993, 1997 — every time the debt limit was increased, it was tied to spending restrictions,” Gohmert said. “This president has surrounded himself with people who are just giving him absolutely false information — and it’s an embarrassment to this president that he’s being lied to by the people on his staff.”
The United States will not default on its financial obligations, he said, because provisions have been made to pay our debtors, the military, and recipients of Social Security.
“For the president to be out there scaring senior citizens and telling them, in essence, although I’m not going to cut down on my multimillion-dollar vacations, you may have your check cut by order of the president if Congress doesn’t do what I say — that’s basically a temper tantrum,” Gohmert said. “He cannot control his own spending, so he’s being a fear-monger to senior citizens. It’s outrageous.
“It’s been done before with the military, and that’s why there is absolutely no reason for the United States government to default on spending,” he added. “It would be unconscionable — and if the U.S. government did, there would be only one reason, and that’s because the Secretary of the Treasury and the president have acted unconstitutionally, irresponsibly, and have ordered the government not to pay its debts, because we do have the money to pay our debts.”
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