Ed Morrissey covered this little nugget today. CNN reports that Sen. Harry Reid stealthily inserted a provision in ObamaCare that protects Second Amendment rights.
Reid evidently inserted the provision to keep the NRA at bay long enough to get ObamaCare passed. Reid was pro-gun at the time, but has moved to the left in the past couple of years.
Previously, the things we’ve found out are in ObamaCare after it passed all benefited the left. This one thing benefits our actual constitutional rights. ObamaCare still needs to be repealed. Maybe the congressmen and women who voted for ObamaCare, but would never have voted to uphold our Second Amendment rights if they knew it was in there, can learn a lesson from this. Read bills before you vote to make them the law of the land.
“Reid was pro-gun at the time, but has moved to the left in the past couple of years.”
ITYM, “Reid was up for election at the time, and had to act as if he cared about inalienable rights, but has revealed his true opinions since then.”
It appears that this provision is being honored in the breach; there are increasing stories coming out about people who are being asked by their doctors whether they have firearms in the house.
Thus far, of course, the doctors are not (yet) government employees, so private doctors collecting such information does not violate Obamacare. But if the still-for-the-moment private insurers are being leaned on to demand this information from doctors, and doctors are collecting the information still-privately, the government hasn’t collected it—but it might acquire it if it insists on creating a “national patient database,” as there has been some talk of doing.
In short, there is no reason to believe that this provision is anything other than a sleeping snake that is only biding its time to bite. Take a look, as a comparison, at the recently-enacted California law which declares that no religious functionary will be forced against conscience to perform a same-sex marriage. With the freedom of religion guarantees of the First Amendment, such a law should not be necessary at all; the fact that it is seen as necessary, and that a constitutional guarantee appears to need the protection of a legislative pinky-swear, shows that religious freedom in California is hanging by a thread. Likewise, a “guarantee” regarding gun databases in the vast steaming mess of Obamacare is more a cause for perturbation than relief: why is it there?
This actually started a few years ago with Pediatricians. It’s for the children, don’t ya know?
I’ll take it!
Now, as for future developments, eventually these wannabe dictators will lose control of the legislative branch. They will also eventually lose the executive branch – in spite of the republican leaderships best efforts to keep democrats in power.
That being the case, I’d suggest our side start making a list of discreet provisions to be inserted willy nilly in all kinds of nooks and crannies in every bill that comes up for a vote – and then ramrod the bill through exactly as the democrats have done for years now.
They aren’t going to let up on their side, and this gun control push may be enough to sink into even the thickest skulls that some supremely poor choices were made by the majority in last November’s election.
Too late to fire the bamster, but it would be oh so delicious to have him dealing with a republican controlled congress the last two years of his (FINAL!) administration!
I’d suggest a good start would be repealing the 1986 machine gun ban, taking a meat cleaver to the 1968 gun control act, reallign laws at the federal level to just deal with international import/export and leave everything else to the states, and piecemeal out the various responsibilities of the ATF to other agencies and eliminate what is left entirely and count it a cut in federal spending.
Oh, and on top of all this, do it in a way that will be hard as hell for future congress’ or administrations to undo.