The Constitution of the United States of America is the governing document for this nation. It specifies what the government is responsible for, how they are to handle those things they're responsible for, and what they explicitly cannot do.

In that last one, though, our elected officials are notorious for ignoring.

They figure that since they're in power, they can do what they want and damn the consequences.

I'm talking about people like President Joe Biden.

It would have been bad enough without the overreach we saw during COVID, but since then, we've had something else happen. Over at America's 1st Freedom, Charles C.W. Cooke delves into some of that.

The official party platform of the Democratic National Committee says, “[W]e believe we should treat gun violence as the deadly public health crisis it is.”

To understand what this means, consider that the Biden administration declared in June that gun-control is “a public-health issue.” Announcing this initiative, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that “when we understand that this is a public-health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health.”

Murthy then went on to say that the United States ought to pass all manner of gun-control laws, including “universal background checks,” “red-flag” laws and an “assault-weapons” ban. Taken together, this use of the phrase “public-health crisis” as an excuse to infringe on a right that is specifically protected in the U.S. Constitution ought to alarm anyone who cares about the integrity of our constitutional order.

There is no provision within our system of government that allows the executive branch to take political questions—let alone constitutional rights—“out of the realm of politics.” Neither is there such a thing, constitutionally, as “the realm of public health.”

Though Biden is no longer the nominee of the Democratic Party in this fall’s election, he is still the sitting president.

...

Repeatedly, this White House has tried to achieve via executive orders what it could not achieve via legislation. Since 2021, Biden has attempted to demand by fiat the registration of pistol braces, to rewrite the 1968 Gun Control Act to add new regulations to the manufacture of so-called “ghost guns,” to massively expand background checks without any enabling legislation and to defend a rule that redefined bump stocks as “machineguns” in violation of the terms of the 1934 National Firearms Act. Thus far, all of these endeavors have either been struck down or enjoined, but there is nothing in Biden’s rhetoric or approach that suggests this will dissuade him from further bids. Indeed, far from being ashamed of his circumvention of our constitutional order, Biden is proud of it. Rare is the speech in which he does not boast that he has “taken more executive action to reduce gun violence than any other president at this point in their presidency.” As long as Biden or someone with his politics lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that action will continue unabated.

Now, the whole piece is fairly long and I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing here for what should be obvious reasons. Go and read the whole thing for yourself, but it's good. Cooke is as pro-gun as they come and he's not interested in giving Biden any slack for his overreach.

But let's understand that last paragraph for a moment. All of that is factually correct, and it was all done without any real "public health emergency" or "crisis" rhetoric. It was just what he wanted to do and so he used what authority he figured he could muster to do just that.

If you put it with Murthy's declaration of a public health crisis, you have a terrifying prospect.

During the pandemic, many cities and states shut the entire world down. You couldn't go to school, to work, to church, or anywhere else, all on the idea that this virus was particularly dangerous to a small subset of the population, all things considered. Our rights were circumvented and people were attacked and demonized for not adhering to restrictions right up until a leftist cause popped up and cities burned. Then, all was well because supposedly racism was a much bigger issue than the global pandemic that caused us to completely destroy our lives and the economy.

Imagine if they used the public health emergency language, what would they do with your gun rights? What infringements will they justify in the name of "for your own good" or something similar?

The idea is terrifying, but understand one important thing here. Joe Biden is a one-term president, sure, but his vice president is on the ticket and will implement most, if not all of the same measures and might consider doing more.