Friday, June 26, 2009 Imagine that. The Senate confirmed this week, by a vote of 62-35, a gunbanner who stays up at night thinking of ways to impose more gun controlupon American citizens. Harold Koh is that gun grabber, and he was confirmed yesterday to be theLegal Adviser at the State Department. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans attempted to kill the Koh nominationwith a filibuster -- until eight of them crossed the aisle to helpDemocrats confirm Koh. The back-stabbing Senators are: Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Susan Collins(R-ME), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Richard Lugar (R-IN), MelMartinez (R-FL), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and George Voinovich (R-OH). Once the filibuster was thwarted, Koh's nomination passed easily. Thevote on final passage can be viewed at: http://tinyurl.com/m4m2f5 Koh is eager to assume his post at the State Department, having lamentedthat there is only so much that can be done from the outside to push guncontrol treaties, and that ultimately we need people like him inpositions of power. The chief lawyer for the State Department is justthe position someone like him needs to push more gun control throughinternational treaties. GOA will continue watching for any attempt by the Obama administrationto foist an international gun control treaty upon the citizens of theU.S. Please stay tuned. Don't Let Your Senators Escape the Heat of the Spotlight! If you have been watching the news, you have no doubt seen stories onthe health care debate. This is the topic de jour on Capitol Hill, andCongress is ramping up to vote on a bill in a few weeks. Last week, GOA alerted you to the fact that the whole health care issuehas become a Trojan Horse for gun control, among other things. However, there are detractors who claim that the current health caredebate will have nothing to do with guns. For example, GOA has been"informed" that a search of the TeddyCare bill does not turn up the word"guns," and that the word "database" is seen only a few times. Hmm, if your Senator's office gives you that as a response, then tellthem not to be so lazy and naive. One needs to do more than type in a word search in order to analyzelegislation. The database was set up under section 3001(c)(3)(i) of thestimulus bill. But the Kennedy bill allows for sweeping newregulations, which make it potentially impossible for any doctor torefuse to enter your records under the current section 13112 exemption. Many things you tell your doctor in the privacy of his office couldaffect your right to own a firearm. And just because anti-gun zealot TedKennedy doesn't notify us up front of his anti-gun intentions doesn'tmean they don't exist. Frankly, we got this same garbage in connection with the VeteransDisarmament Act (officially known as the NICS Improvement Act), wherethe anti-gunners took away the guns of 150,000 veterans through languagewhich was not explicit. Before the bill was signed into law last year,some detractors even claimed that because the NICS bill did not mentionthe word "veterans," we must have been wrong to suggest that the billwould disarm vets! Well, guess what? The disarmament which was already occurring beforePresident Bush signed the legislation into law last year is nowoccurring with a vengeance under the Obama administration. (In fact,GOA members should be looking for an upcoming mailing which will giveyou postcards to send in support of an important bill -- introduced bySen. Burr of North Carolina -- which will protect veterans from thefangs of the Veterans Disarmament Act.) The point is, no Senate staffer should ever give you an opinion on abill unless he has read the entire code that the bill will be amending.Nor should they ignore the potential for an Obama administration toabuse any particular piece of legislation. Remember how the RICO Act, originally enacted to help combat the Mafia,was later used to crack down on legitimate banks and peaceful pro-lifeprotesters? The original RICO Act never used the word "abortion," butthat didn't stop overzealous prosecutors from going after thenon-violent protestors. And who would have thought, when the original Brady law was passed in1993, that it would be used to keep people with outstanding traffictickets... or couples with marriage problems... or military vets withnightmares from buying guns? After all, the Brady law never mentionedthose people groups, and yet the law has been used over the past 15-plusyears to deny gun rights to those very people. Reading legislation is not a job for the timid or the lazy. If staffersin your Senate offices aren't willing to read current bills IN THE LIGHTOF EXISTING LAWS -- and to do the research necessary to compile thisinformation -- then politely encourage them to get another line of work. ****************************