Congress Blocks Obama-Era Gun Regulation GOP Criticized for Denying Due Process

On separation-of-powers grounds, the prospect of the Social Security Administration playing judge, jury, and executioner is flatly intolerable. On due process grounds, there was nothing to recommend the measure (as the ACLU made abundantly clear in its opposition letter). On statutory grounds, it seems clear that the SSA was acting ultra vires. And, as political matter, the vacillation of the Obama administration — which insisted simultaneously that “incidents of violence continue to highlight a crisis in America’s mental health system” and that it was “not attempting to imply a connection between mental illness and a propensity for violence, particularly gun violence” — was downright embarrassing. But one does not have to agree with me on process or in outlook to see that as a matter of positive policy, the idea was a terrible one. As Yale’s Dr. Mark Rosen observed when the rule was first adumbrated, ​the link between financial acumen and mental illness is extraordinarily weak: “‘Someone can be incapable of managing their funds but not be dangerous, violent or unsafe,’ said Dr. Marc Rosen, a Yale psychiatrist who has studied how veterans with mental health problems manage their money. ‘They are very different determinations.'”