When Trump 1 ordered the ATF to treat the bump stock as a machine gun, the left cheered.
When Biden’s ATF decided the Forced Reset Trigger (FRT), the left cheered.
The president of the United States and the ATF executive branch. Per my Schoolhouse Rocks education in constitutional law, the executive branch does not write our laws. The executive branch administers laws. That is why their agencies are generally armed. And yet, the left cheered when the executive branch ignored the legal definition of a machine gun. They cheered when the president of the United States ignored the law as written by the legislative branch. They cheered when checks and balances became unbalanced.
What they did not know is a thing established in 1984 called ‘chevron deference’. A little thing that has recently sent a Youtuber to prison for promoting the sale of a picture of a machine gun. Matt Hoover was a popular youtuber in the genre of guns. Like many Youtubers, Hoover offered paid advertisements for products in his niche. He promoted the auto key card.
Created by Kristopher Ervin, the auto keycard was essentially a drawing of a machine gun on a metal business card. If you cut it out just right, following the lines, it looked like a part that can convert some AR-15 rifles to fire full auto. I say ‘looked like’ because the thing was not drawn to scale. The metal was not even the right thickness. The thing could not do it’s job. If anything, Kristopher Ervin should be charged with fraud for promoting the thing as if it could work.
Chevron deference instructs courts judicial courts to defer to various executive agencies to reasonable interpret laws written by legislative. When it comes to checks and balances, chevron deference allows the executive branch to place a finger on the scale. As long as they don’t go too far nobody cares. So an off scale drawing of a machine gun becomes a machine gun and people go to prison.
Tate Adamiak’s conviction is another example of chevron deference gone amuck. Adamiak was found to have an inert zink replica of a WWII machine gun with no real parts. The ATF took his non-firing prop, cut it up, forced real parts into it, and wrapped electrical tape around the barrel. They could only manage one shot because was intentionally designed to prevent conversion. The magazine did not align with the chamber. So what the ATF built was a perfectly legal but wildly dangerous single shot weapon. Ah, but Adamiak was convicted for owning a machine gun.
Ah, but I am not here to address the 2nd Amendment. I am ranting today about the 14th Amendment. It is better known as the birth right citizen amendment. Section 1 reads:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Seems simple right. If you are born in the United States you are a citizen of the United States. ah, but there is that word: jurisdiction. What does it mean? Most of us go straight to the idea of legal authority to arrest. But it turns out the word jurisdiction has a lot of other meanings. So who gets to decide what the word means.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is also an executive agency. Under the direction of the president, chevron deference seems to tell the courts to give the benefit of the doubt to ICE. But the left is not cheering this time. Instead, they beat their chests as they demand that is unconstitutional. They scream we do not want kings. But for decades they have demanded kings.
I am right there with them. I do not want a king. I’ve just been banging my chest a lot longer. I think I started when president Obama executed a US citizen with no due process, grand jury, or other constitutional nonsense. Just off with their heads like the Queen of Hearts.
Folk, a good campaign promise is to faithfully execute the will of the people as expressed by the laws of their representatives. Lets get back to some good ol’ Schoolhouse Rocks.