The chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Justice, Representative John Culberson (R-TX), is threatening to defund the entire Justice Department to prevent it from following the new guidelines for enforcing expanded background checks.
"I have formally notified Attorney General Lynch that I will aggressively protect our Second Amendment rights using Congress' power of the purse,” he added. "I notified the attorney general that if the Department of Justice attempted to create new restrictions on our Constitutional rights that I would use every tool at my disposal to immediately restrict their access to federal funding.” [...]
“The House Appropriations Committee will not provide resources to your department for the development or implementation of unlawful limitations on the unambiguous Second Amendment rights of Americans,” Culberson wrote.
I suppose the good news is the Department of Justice is not creating new restrictions on constitutional rights. Requiring a background check for private, online gun sales is no more of a constitutional restriction than requiring a background check at a brick and mortar storefront. It's a level playing field.
I honestly don't know if Republicans are as moronic and paranoid as they appear to be or if they're simply playing for the cameras. I suspect it's a bit of both.
The idea that conducting a background check is just one step removed from mass confiscation is nonsensical bullroar. If we could all agree that words have meaning, there would be no problem here, but unfortunately they can't agree to that.
Words apparently have an entirely different meaning altogether when spoken by the president.