President | PROBABLE CAUSE

The U.S. House of Representative recently approved a 10-year extension of an existing federal law banning guns that can go undetected by metal detectors and X-ray machines.

The law bans the manufacture, possession and sale of firearms that can’t be detected by metal detectors and requires handguns be manufactured in the shape of a gun so they can be screened on X-ray machines.

The 1988 Undetectable Firearms Act was enacted under President Reagan and reauthorized under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is among a group of Senate Democrats that sought to amend the law to require that metal had to be permanently attached to the gun, closing a huge loophole that would allow removable metal parts.

In case anyone thinks that adding the amendment is an unnecessary burden on Second Amendment rights, think for a moment how easy it would be to avoid security and detectors at airports or government buildings by having a removable metal part such as a trigger.

Hollywood has certainly considered it.

In the 1993 Clint Eastwood movie, In The Line of Fire, John Malkovich played a mentally disturbed former Secret Service agent who uses a composite gun with removable metal parts to avoid security as he attempts to assassinate the President of the United States.

If a Hollywood scriptwriter has considered having a removable metal part on a plastic gun, we know that some nutcase has or is considering it as well.

Adding an amendment to the law seems like an intelligent and rationale thing to do. But then, Congress is neither intelligent nor rationale when it comes to the Second Amendment.

I really hope the scenario depicted in the Clint Eastwood movie remains fictional instead of a blueprint that puts us all In The Line of Fire.

As the political sideshow continues in Washington, and the country careens toward the cliff and a disaster of historic proportions on August 2nd, it’s worth looking at Section 4 of the 14th amendment––possibly the last hope of saving the country from financial suicide brought about by the inmates now controlling the asylum.

Section 4 reads:

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

A majority of constitutional scholars have argued that the President does have some reserve power in the case of an absolute emergency. Most believe Congress’s current refusal to raise the debt ceiling falls within those parameters. Scholars point directly to the case that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were concerned about: preventing Southern members of Congress from canceling the debt the Union had accrued during the war and assuming the Southern debt.

In effect, Republican members of the House do not want to pay the debt incurred by previous Congresses unless they get specific cuts in domestic spending, particularly in programs the other party holds dear.

The framers intent seems clear. Members of Congress cannot hold the full faith and credit of the U.S. government hostage to achieve other political ends, as was attempted by Southern members of Congress after the Civil War.

What we have in Washington today is an invented Constitutional crisis designed to achieve the policy goals of one particular party. The President should step up to the plate and declare that he is raising the debt ceiling and leave it to the courts to decide if he overstepped his authority.

Because even if the two parties and the President arrive at an agreement and avert a meltdown on Tuesday, there is little doubt that this threat will be used again and again to extract concessions.

The time to end this sideshow is now.