Judge Napolitano: Why Obama's executive action on guns is unconstitutional

SECOND AMENDMENT

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Published January 05, 2016

FoxNews.com

Is Obama's executive action on guns unconstitutional?

President Obama announced Tuesday that he is issuing an executive order on guns and background checks. Here’s a look at what the president is doing and if it is even legal under the Constitution of the United States.

Just what is an executive order?  A presidential executive order is a written instruction to persons in the executive branch of the federal government informing them of the manner in which the president wants federal laws or regulations enforced. Executive orders do not direct private persons, or persons in the legislative or judicial branches of government. Executive orders remain in effect until abandoned or rescinded by the president who issued them or by a successor president.

President Obama has very little room to issue executive orders on guns because the congressional legislation is so extensive, detailed, and clear. The principal thrust of the president’s orders addresses the requirement for background checks in occasional sales and the requirement that occasional sellers become federal licensees and the imposition of reporting upon physicians.

Congress has expressly removed occasional sales (sales not made by full-time dealers) from the obligation of obtaining federal licenses and from conducting background checks.

The president is without authority to negate the congressional will on this, and any attempt to do so will be invalidated by the courts. Mr. Obama will now require that anyone who sells a gun, that is even an “occasional” seller will be required to perform a background check. By defining what an “occasional seller” is, the president is essentially interpreting the law, a job reserved for the courts.

The courts will ignore his interpretation, and impose their own.

As well, by requiring physicians to report conversations with their patients about guns to the Department of Homeland Security, (yes, even an innocent conversation in the examination room, “we gave Bobby a bee bee gun for Christmas, we plan to get him some instruction on how to use it”) the president will be encouraging our government to invade the patient/physician privilege.

But wait, there’s more. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental liberty. Under the Constitution, fundamental liberities (like speech, press, worship, self-defense, travel, privacy) are accorded the highest protection from governmental intrusion.

One can only lose a fundamental right by intentionally giving it up, or via due process (a jury trial resulting in the conviction of criminal behavior). President Obama --  whose support for the right to keep and bear arms is constitutionally limited to the military, police, and his own heavily-armed body guards --  is happy to begin taking America to a slippery slope down the dark hole of totalitarianism whereby a president can negate liberty.

Finally, we still have a Constitution in America. Under the Constitution, Congress writes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them.

President Obama can no more write his own laws or impose his own interpretations upon them than the Congress or the courts can command the military.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel

North Korean Prison Camp Survivor: Starving Women Cooked & Ate Their Own Children

North Korean Prison Camp Survivor:

Kim Hye Sook suffered unbearable pain and emotional suffering when she was detained for 28 years in a secretive North Korean concentration camp. Brutal executions, starvation — even mothers killing and eating their children to ensure their own survival — were regular occurrences.
Kim — who miraculously escaped from the Bukchang prison camp back in 2003 – granted CBN News with the first American television news interview to discuss these horrendous conditions. She now lives in South Korea, with the details of her escape remaining classified for security reasons. This summer, she released a memoir entitled, “A Concentration Camp Retold in Tears.”
When she was 13-year-old, her tragic tale began. The year was 1975 and in the blink of an eye the young girl was captured alongside her entire family. After years of suffering, she didn’t taste freedom until she was 41-years-old. Kim explains:

“My entire family went to prison. Some were taken to the mountains; others were put in different labor camps all because of my grandfather’s one mistake: he escaped to South Korea during the Korean War.”

Two women are watched by a North Korean guard (Photo Credit: AP)

Today, Kim wears dark glasses to ensure that her identity remains concealed. While she lost seven family members in the re-education camp, she currently has two sisters and a brother who are still imprisoned. She described a typical day at the camp:

“I attended indoctrination classes in the morning. In the afternoon the children were sent to push trolleys in the coal mines, often without any safety gear.

People were dying in the mines. There were numerous mine collapses, so many injuries, people who lost their legs, many who were buried alive. It was horrible.

I was treated like a slave and worse. I hardly slept. It was inhuman. But I never complained. I just followed all the rules. I had to find a way to survive.”

Kim claims that the conditions were so terrible that she thought about committing suicide “hundreds of thousands of times” during her 28-year detention. But because there was always someone watching her, this simply wasn’t an option:

“Each prisoner is assigned to watch four or five other prisoners. So if anything happens, the other prisoners would alert the guards because they didn’t want to get into trouble themselves.”

While her descriptions of executions are absolutely horrendous, nothing is more disturbing than her memories about those individuals who she saw kill their children in an effort to stave off hunger. In one instance, she recalls a mother boiling her 9-year-old daughter. In another fit of desperation, a woman killed her 16-year-old son, chopped him up and took him to a butcher to obtain some corn in exchange.
Kim admits that these details are difficult to share, but she bravely proclaims, “I want the world to see these images and to hear my testimony.” In describing the conditions in the isolated and volatile nation, she says, “I am living proof that there are no human rights in North Korea.” In September, she was invited to Washington, D.C., where she testified before a congressional panel about the conditions she faced.
Watch her story, below: