The White House recently came to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) rescue, defending her 2013 assault weapons ban against a seething White House petition to have her tried for treason.
The petition, which was created on December 27th, 2012 and has more than 41,000 signatures, opposed Sen. Feinstein’s 2013 assault weapons ban and called for the California Senator to be tried by a federal court for treason against the Constitution.
“The Constitution was written to restrain government. No amendment is more important for this purpose than the second amendment,” the petition reads. “[It] was written so the power could be kept in the citizenry in the face of a tyrannical government.”
The petition also stated that Sen. Feinstein “has made it clear that she does not believe in the Constitution and the inalienable rights of Americans to keep and bear arms” and through her 2013 assault weapons ban, she is “actively working to destroy the second amendment.”
However the harsh words against the Democratic Senator were countered by an official response from the White House. The response appears to have been conveniently released over the Memorial Day weekend but Red Alert Politics is unable to determine the exact date of the response.
The response titled, “Where We Agree and Where We Don’t” states that the White House does not “believe that Senator Dianne Feinstein should be punished for championing legislation.” Rather, the White House is “going to continue to work with her and other likeminded Members of Congress to put in place commonsense reform to reduce violence.”
The White House response goes on to explain that like many of the petitioners, President Obama believes in the second amendment and that “that’s never been in question with this discussion.”
“Now generally, it’s up to our courts to resolve matters of constitutionality,” the response stated. “But no less an authority than Justice Antonin Scalia has written, ‘Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose’ – so we’re pretty confident we’re on solid ground when we say we support Senator Feinstein’s legislation to that effect.”
The California Senator’s 2013 assault weapon ban was proposed in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown that killed twenty students and six adults last December.
The ban was removed from the bill before it reached the Senate, and even when it was introduced as an amendment, it subsequently failed when the gun control bill failed to pass the Senate.
