White House Quiet On Investigation Into Justice Department Gun Sales to Mexican Drug Cartels

A U.S. government gun-trafficking investigation gone horribly wrong has resulted in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol officer, some 2,000 firearms in the hands of criminals, and the dismissal of a 24-year veteran law enforcement official. This is the story of Fast and Furious, and yesterday the latest chapter unfolded when two top officials associated with the operation were removed from their positions, while a third individual resigned.

The story begins in the fall of 2009, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona, began selling weapons to small-time gun buyers in the hopes of tracing them to major weapons traffickers along the southwestern border and into Mexico. Their efforts failed, the number of arms unaccounted for numbers around 1,500 as of late July, and about two-thirds of those guns ended up in Mexico, according to congressional testimony.

Tragically, the botched operation has had serious consequences. On the night of December 15, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed during an effort to catch several bandits targeting illegal immigrants in Arizona near the border. When law enforcement rushed to the scene, they discovered two of the killers' assault rifles that were among those sold as part of Operation Fast and Furious. Additionally, 57 Fast and Furious weapons have been connected to at least an additional 11 violent crimes in the U.S.

In December 2010, ATF agent Vince Cefalu spoke out about the operation before the first reports on the story appeared in February. FoxNews.com reports that Cefalu said at the time, "Simply put, we knowingly let hundreds of guns and dozens of identified bad guys go across the border." Other agents later came forward, congressional hearings have been held, and President Barack Obama called the operation "a serious mistake." Cefalu, though, was forced to resign.

Yesterday, more Fast and Furious–related personnel changes came about when the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the ATF who presided over the operation, is being replaced and transferred to the Office of Legal Policy where he will serve as a senior advisor on forensic science. Heritage's Lachlan Markay reports that "Melson bucked his superiors at DOJ in July by revealing details about the operation to congressional investigators in a closed door meeting with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who have been investigating the operation in their respective roles."

Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, announced his resignation. The Hill reports that "Burke oversaw the legal aspects of the Fast and Furious operation, providing advice to agents involved." And The Arizona Republic reports that the lead prosecutor for Operation Fast and Furious cases in Burke's office was also reassigned Tuesday. Issa, who has led the congressional investigation into the case, said that even with yesterday's news, he will continue looking for answers:

While the reckless disregard for safety that took place in Operation Fast and Furious certainly merits changes within the Department of Justice, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee will continue its investigation to ensure that blame isn’t offloaded on just a few individuals for a matter that involved much higher levels of the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, the White House has said little about Fast and Furious. In June, President Obama said in a press conference: "My Attorney General has made clear that he wouldn’t have ordered gun running into Mexico. . . That would not be an appropriate step by the ATF." He then deflected further questions by citing an "ongoing investigation." And press secretary Jay Carney previously said that the President "did not know about or authorize this operation." But as Heritage's Rory Cooper wrote, "If that’s the case, how could neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder not know about an operation that everyone else at the Department of Justice seemed to be actively involved in, including the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Attorney and head of the ATF?"

And if the White House has been silent, so has the media. It has been 57 days since the press has questioned the White House on the matter, when ABC's Jake Tapper peppered press secretary Jay Carney on the issue, asking why the public knows so little about the story, what the Administration is doing to get to the bottom of it, whether the acting head of ATF would go to Capitol Hill to testify on the subject, whether it is something the White House is worried about, and if the President upset about it. Carney's reply: He referred Tapper to the Department of Justice and remarked, "I think you could assume that the President takes this very seriously."

The President should take it seriously. And so should the American people. The ATF sold guns to criminals in Mexico, a life has been taken, and crimes have been committed with the weapons that were trafficked by the federal government. And yet, shockingly, questions remain under the Administration that called itself "the most transparent in history." It's time for more answers.

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This article originally published on August 31, 2011, morningbell@heritage.org., as
The Fast and Furious Scandal Continues.

English Mobs Run Wild

By Chris W. Cox


If you want to see what a disarmed society looks like, look no further than England.

Thousands of angry, drunk, violent thugs running wild and stealing anything they can carry. Shopkeepers and homeowners crippled with fear, unable to defend their loved ones or their property. Innocent citizens forced to watch helplessly while their life’s dreams — everything they worked so hard to build and acquire — are carried out the door, or smashed to pieces, or burned to the ground.

Men, women and children forced to strip naked in the streets, while packs of criminals laugh and ridicule them before making off with their clothing.
The fact is, when British politicians stripped their citizens of their God-given right to self-defense, they robbed them of their freedom and their dignity.
Sales of baseball bats are up over 5,000% on Amazon.co.uk. This isn’t to mark the beginning of little league season. These are desperate homeowners and shopkeepers purchasing the best — and in reality, only — self-defense tool that the British government will allow them to own…at least for now.

If past is prologue, this flood of baseball bats into London will spark cries from government leaders for mandatory bat registration and a wave of new laws on how, when, and under what circumstances British citizens may carry or swing a bat. After all, this is exactly how British citizens lost their gun rights.

First came mandatory gun licensing. Next came a wave of restrictions on firearms ownership. Then came the outright gun bans.

It has been illegal to own a handgun in Britain for nearly 15 years. As a result, Britain’s violent crime rate has soared. In fact, Britain consistently clocks-in with the highest violent crime rate in all of Europe. Last week’s riots notwithstanding, you are six times more likely to be mugged in London than in New York. These are the inconvenient statistics that the gun-ban crowd likes to sweep under the rug.

As if banning handguns didn’t send a strong enough message to criminals that British citizens are ripe for the picking, the British government went even further in 1999.
Recall the tragic story of Tony Martin, the British farmer who was awakened one night to the sound of breaking glass and found two burglars in his home. Martin had been robbed six times before. This time, he went downstairs, retrieved a shotgun, and fired at the intruders.

For this, Martin received life in prison for killing one of the burglars, ten years for wounding the other thug, and one additional year for possession of an unregistered shotgun. The wounded burglar served just 18 months of a three-year sentence and was given $5,000 in legal assistance from Britain’s Legal Services Commission so he could sue Martin for violating his civil rights.

The British government goes out of its way to embolden the criminal element in society, and now British politicians look at last week’s riots in utter amazement, confused as to how such a thing could happen. As Britain’s Home Secretary recently said in an interview, “The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.”

All Americans should pay close attention to the riots in the Great Britain, because this is the criminal utopia that gun-ban extremists at the United Nations, and in our own White House, want to impose on us.

Next year, the U.N. will convene leaders from various countries around the world to finish writing an international Arms Trade Treaty that could severely restrict or even outright ban Americans’ right to sell, purchase, carry or own a firearm. Anti-gun extremists have been working on this treaty for well over a decade. Now they’re closer than ever to realizing their dream.

Ironically, the British government is one of the strongest proponents of this latest U.N. scheme to destroy our Second Amendment rights. Evidently, British politicians think America and the rest of the world should enjoy the same the criminal utopia that was on full display in London last week.

The U.N. and its anti-gun allies incessantly campaign for the United States to be more like the rest of the world — especially disarmed Great Britain. As we watched the horror unfold in the UK, it has never been clearer: The rest of the world should be more like America when it comes to freedom.

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Chris W. Cox is executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.

More Bad News From the Budget Control Act

The Spending Threat to Our National Defense

Consider it a warning from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta held a joint press event in Washington in which they cautioned that U.S. debt is jeopardizing America's ability to ensure national security and preserve its interests abroad.

Under the Budget Control Act of 2011—the debt ceiling agreement enacted earlier this month—$350 billion in cuts to defense spending must be made over 10 years. But if Congress doesn't reach an agreement on $1.5 trillion in deficit savings, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts would be made. Half of those would come from the military's budget by 2013. And Panetta said yesterday that those cuts would be disastrous:

This kind of massive cut across the board, which would literally double the number of cuts that we're confronting, that would have devastating effects on our national defense; it would have devastating effects on certainly the State Department.

Clinton agreed. "It does cast a pall over our ability to project the kind of security interests that are in America's interests," she said. "This is not about the Defense Department or the State Department . . . This is about the United States of America. And we need to have a responsible conversation about how we are going to prepare ourselves for the future."

The Heritage Foundation's Mackenzie Eaglen explains that the draconian cuts to our armed forces would result in a military ill-equipped to sustain its mission at home and around the world.

Secretary Panetta said any additional defense cuts—on top of the hundreds of billions over the past several years and hundreds of billions over the next 10 years—would result in a hollow force. The term “hollow force” describes the situation when readiness declines because the military does not have enough funding to provide trained and ready forces, support ongoing operations, and modernize simultaneously.

Like a freshly painted house with no plumbing or wiring inside, the military may appear functional, but in reality it would be too poorly trained and equipped to be reliable without incurring excessive and unnecessary risk.

The U.S. military is already woefully underfunded, and for months the Pentagon has warned that even with $400 billion in cuts—less than half of what the military could face—the United States "may have to scrap some military missions and trim troop levels." And if Members of Congress don't act to reform mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—which account for more than 60 percent of the entire federal budget—the ax will automatically fall on the military (or Congress will be forced to raise taxes to halt the automatic trigger.)

The Constitution clearly states that one of the primary duties of the federal government is to "provide for the common defense." Yet today, because of the government's unrestrained spending, national defense is falling by the wayside. Former Senator Jim Talent (R-MO) writes, "The great irony of our time is that the bigger the federal government has become, the less well it has performed its priority function of providing for the national defense." Now, after all the stimulus spending, the bailouts, and the runaway entitlements, America is seeing the results. Congress must act now to rein in spending so that it can ensure that the government's ability to execute its primary duty remains intact.


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Originally published by the Heritage Foundation on August 17, 2011, on their website www.morningbell@heritage.org.

The Budget Control Act Of 2011 Violates Constitutional Order

August 4, 2011
By Herbert W. Titus and William J. Olson

In a Constitutional Republic of the sort that we thought we had, the process by which laws are made is at least as important as the laws that are enacted. Our Constitution prescribes that law-making process in some detail, but those who voted for the "Budget Control Act of 2011" ("BCA 2011") were wholly unconcerned about trampling upon required constitutional processes on the way to the nirvana of "bi-partisan consensus "to avert a supposed crisis. At least two titles of the bill now being rushed through Congress are unconstitutional.

First, the "Debt Ceiling Disapproval Process" in BCA 2011 Title III unconstitutionally upends the legislative process.

The Constitution's Article I, Section 8, Clause 2 vests in Congress the power "to borrow Money on the credit of the United States." As two of America's leading constitutionalists, St. George Tucker and Joseph Story, observed, the power to borrow money is "inseparably connected" with that of "raising a revenue." Thus, from the founding of the American republic through 1917, Congress -- vested with the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties and imposts," -- kept a tight rein on borrowing, and authorized each individual debt issuance separately.

To provide more flexibility to finance the United States involvement in World War I, Congress established an aggregate limit, or ceiling, on the total amount of bonds that could be issued. This gave birth to the congressional practice of setting a limit on all federal debt. While Congress no longer approved each individual debt issuance, it determined the upper limit above which borrowing was not permitted. Thus, on February 12, 2010, Congress set a debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion, which President Obama signed into law.

However, a different approach was used when BCA 2011 was signed into law on August 2, 2011. Title III of the Act reads the "Debt Ceiling Disapproval Process." Under this title Congress has transferred to the President the power to "determine" that the debt ceiling is too low, and that further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments," subject only to congressional "disapproval." For the first time in American history the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States has been disconnected from the power to raise revenue. What St. George Tucker and Joseph Story stated were inseparable powers have now by statute been separated.

Under the new process established by this bill, if the President determines, no later than December 31, 2011, that the nation's debt is within $100 billion of the existing debt limit and that further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments, the debt limit automatically increases. The President need only to certify to Congress that he has made the required determination. Once the President acts, the Secretary of the Treasury may borrow $900 billion "subject to the enactment of a joint resolution of disapproval enacted" by Congress.

But this is not all. Title III also provides that if Congress fails to disapprove the debt ceiling increase in the amount of $900 billion, the President may again certify to Congress that he has determined that the debt subject to the new ceiling is within $100 billion and that further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments. So the Secretary of Treasury is authorized to borrow another $1.2 trillion. Indeed, the Secretary may borrow even more -- up to $1.5 trillion if a proposed balanced budget amendment has been submitted to the states for ratification. As was true of the first round of ceiling raising and borrowing, the President and Secretary of the Treasury are constrained only by the possibility of a congressional resolution of disapproval which, itself, is subject to veto by the President.

By giving the President the authority to increase the debt ceiling and to determine that borrowing is necessary to meet the nation's commitments, this bill turns the legislative process on its head. According to Article I, Section 7, before an act can become a law, it must first be passed as a bill by the House of Representatives and the Senate. Thus, any action taken to authorize the borrowing of money on the credit of the United States - whether such action is a formal bill or a vote or resolution -- must be initiated by Congress and, then, presented to the President for his veto or signature. This bill creates what it calls a "Debt Ceiling Disapproval Process" whereby the constitutional process is reversed. Instead of Congress's initiating the decision to borrow money, the President has the initiative. Congress is relegated to the role of having to disapprove the President's decision to lift the debt ceiling and authorize the Secretary of Treasury to do what the Constitution says only Congress may do -- borrow money on the credit of the United States.

Instead of constitutional order, in which Congress presents a law authorizing the borrowing of money to the President to sign or veto, the President presents to the Congress his determination that more money is to be borrowed, subject to the acquiescence or veto of Congress.

Second, the joint select committee on deficit reduction provision undermines the constitutionally established bicameral legislative process.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 establishes a joint select committee of 12 members, six from the House and six from the Senate. Three of the six House members are appointed by the Speaker of the House and three are appointed by the House minority leader. Three of the six Senate members are appointed by the majority leader and three by the leader of the minority.

Title IV of the Budget Control Act vests in that joint select committee the power to draft legislation to reduce the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion over the period of fiscal years 2012 to 2021.

Here, members of Congress yield their individual legislative duties and responsibilities to a "Super Congress" selected not by the people -- but by Republican and Democrat leaders.

How many of these Congressmen and Senators campaigned on the platform that they would be elected, get sworn in, and then obediently surrender the power their constituents vested in them to the very same Republican and Democrat leaders who have created the problems they were sent here to solve?

To facilitate passage of the joint committee's legislative proposals, Section 402 contains a number of procedural rules designed to expedite consideration of the joint committee recommendations. Generally, the rules require action by both houses no later than December 23, 2011, on a joint committee recommendation that must be submitted no later than December 9, 2011. Additionally, the section prohibits amendments to the proposed legislation and prescribes severe limits on the time for debate. In short the procedural rules dictate unity of action of a majority of each house to accelerate adoption of the deficit reductions recommended by the joint committee within a two-week period of time.

The Constitutional order is quite different. Article I, Section 1 vests the legislative power in a bicameral Congress composed of a House of Representatives and a Senate. The members of each body are elected in two very different manners. Each senator is elected by the vote of the people of an entire state, and each state has the same number of senators regardless of population. The members of the House are elected by the people in congressional districts divided into districts, each state being guaranteed at least one representative and the others allocated according to population.

The composition of each house then is deliberately designed by the Constitution to represent vastly different majorities. And for good reason. As the Supreme Court observed in I.N.S. v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 949 (1983), "by providing that no law could take effect without the prescribed majority of the Members of both Houses, the Framers reemphasized their belief ... that legislation should not be enacted unless it has been carefully and fully considered by the Nation's elected officials."

The Budget Control Act of 2011 departs from that commitment vesting incredible power in the joint committee, virtually guaranteeing that deficit reduction legislation will be "carefully and fully considered," if at all, only by 6 of 100 elected senators and 6 of 435 elected representatives.

These are not matters of constitutional form without meaning -- the process was considered central to the founders.

In the debates on the need for a bicameral legislature, James Wilson warned: "Is there a danger of a Legislative despotism? Theory & practice both proclaim it. If the legislative authority be not restrained, there can be neither liberty nor stability; and it can only be restrained by dividing it within itself, into distinct and independent branches."

Even the last defender of monarchy among the founders, Alexander Hamilton, warned that to "accumulate, in a single body, all the most important prerogatives of sovereignty [would] entail upon our posterity one of the most execrable forms of government that human infatuation ever contrived."

Thus, as the Supreme Court noted in Chadha, James Madison "point[ed] up the need to divide and disperse power in order to protect liberty": "In republican government, legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and the common dependence on society will admit." The Federalist, No. 51 (emphasis added).

The Budget Control Act of 2011 does just the opposite. Instead of ensuring action by two "distinctive bodies," to be "exercised only after opportunity for full debate in separate settings," the Act truncates the deliberative process by shortening debate, excluding amendments, and commanding uniformity. See Chadha, 462 U.S. at 951.

Expedition was never the principal object of the legislative process created by the founders. The object was to preserve limitations on the power of government in order to protect the liberties of the people. Liberties can be lost when bad precedents are set in the atmosphere of crisis -- and crises can, and often are, manufactured. Precedents established can be hard to overturn. Rights lost can be hard to regain.
The 74-page Budget Control Act of 2011 was not written over the weekend. Yet it was posted on the House Rules Committee website with no fanfare, only hours before it was to be voted upon, breaking the pledge of the House Republicans to provide at least 72-hours advance public notice.

Contrived crisis, appeals to fear, emergency litigation, and suspension of Constitutional order -- these are the indicia of abuse of power, leading to tyranny.

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Herb Titus taught constitutional law for 26 years, concluding his academic career as founding Dean of Regent Law School. Bill Olson served in three positions in the Reagan Administration. They now practice constitutional law together, defending against government excess, at William J. Olson, P.C. They can be reached at wjo@mindspring.com or Olsonlaw@twitter.com

Orginally published on www.americanthinker.com