The Expansion of Executive Orders

This is something that has concerned me for a long time before President Obama ever took office. That worry has grown exponentially ever since January 2009.

Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has a good article on whether this is an exercise on executive power or unconstitutional power grab over at Breitbart's Big Government.

Congressman Gosar opens with:

President Obama has, by executive order, circumvented national immigration law by ordering a halt to deportations of certain unlawful aliens, without getting the law changed.  In July of 2012, President Obama changed long standing welfare policy to allow states to change mandated work requirements.  Earlier he ordered the DOJ not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.  None of these orders were submitted to Congress for review, which the Government Accountability Office concluded he should have done in part.

He also states:

In order for the President to enact a gun ban by executive order, he would have to have such power given to him by Congress (we already established that the Constitution does not give him that power).  Any unilateral action by the President must rely on either a constitutional authority or a statutory power from Congress.  What laws exist for the President to enact gun bans by executive order?  The Attorney General is authorized under the Gun Control Act (GCA) to regulate the import of firearms if it is “generally suitable" for or readily adaptable to sporting purpose.  Thus, the Attorney General could use a “sporting purposes test” by which he can determine the types of firearms that can be imported into the United States.  But this law does not authorize a gun ban or affect domestic manufacture and sales.

And...

Nor can the President do something Congress has prohibited.  Thus, the President cannot reallocate ATF money and direct it to make a centralized database of federal firearms purchases because we prohibited that.  Last year the House passed a continuing funding resolution (I would rather vote on budgets but the Senate refuses to pass a budget resolution and has not done so since April 2009), that became Public Law 112–55 (Nov. 18, 2011), that expressly prohibits the President from using any money "to disclose part or all of the contents of the Firearms Trace System database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or any information required to be kept by licensees" except for criminal investigations.  In other words, the President is expressly prohibited from making a list of gun owners for purposes of then rounding up guns.

Be sure to read the whole thing.