A constitutional rights foundation has fielded an ethics complaint against members of the Democratic Party who staged a sit-in on the floor of the U.S. House recently in protest or the Republican-led House’s unwillingness to consider gun-control legislation.
The sit-in was staged in the wake of the killing of 49 people at a “gay” bar in Orlando, Florida, by a Muslim who pledged loyalty to ISIS.
“I hope that these Democrat assault politicians get punished for their ethics violations,” said Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb.
“What they should really get punished for is violating their oath of office to protect our Constitution and the Second Amendment rights it protects.”
The ethics complaint came from the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust shortly after a couple dozen Democrat members of Congress took over the House floor and literally sat down for a day. It complains the Democrats were using the opportunity to send fundraising emails from the floor, and they were using official House images.
The Hill reported House ethics rules bar lawmakers from using official resources, including locations in the Capitol complex, for political activities.
But during the sit-in, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., asked supporters to join a political petition, and he included a photo of the House floor.
“Not only do these email solicitations tied directly to official acts reflect poorly on the House of Representatives, the emails are directly contrary to the purposes and prohibitions of the ethics rules,” the organization’s executive director, Matthew Whitaker, wrote in the complaint.
“This type of behavior is precisely why the public distrusts elected officials,” Whitaker added.
The Hill reported others, including Reps. Scott Peters and Eric Swalwell of California and Beto O’Rourke of Texas, live-streamed the sit-in through their smart phones.
“The House sergeant-at-arms repeatedly told lawmakers to turn off their cameras during the sit-in, but they ignored the warnings throughout the nearly 26-hour protest,” the Hill said.
Gottlieb said: “Bad enough that some House members appear to have exploited the sit-in for their own political purpose, but their antics were primarily aimed at eroding the Second Amendment. Whether they like it or not, the right to keep and bear arms is part of the Bill of Rights, and if they can’t abide by that, they should hand in their resignations immediately.”
He noted that in other countries, authorities blame such attacks on Islamic or political extremism.
“But in the United States, Democrats always seem to blame such attacks on the Second Amendment, and they try to penalize 90 million law-abiding gun owners for something they didn’t do,” he said.
“If some drunk crashed a car into a school bus,” he noted, “you wouldn’t take car keys away from every motorist or try to ban cars. But these Democrats would rather go after guns because it diverts public attention away from the fact that they have been either unwilling or unable to prevent terror attacks on American soil.”
At the American Thinker, Christopher Chantrill wrote: “In a way, I feel sorry for our Democratic friends. As Rush Limbaugh has been saying for 20 years, they are playing out of a 30-year-old playbook, just running the same old plays because that’s what Ted Kennedy did. But conducting a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives on gun control while protected by the guns of the Capitol Hill police goes beyond doing one more for the Gipper. It shows that the modern Democratic Party and its liberal movement have completely forgotten the point of representative government. It removes the need for sit-ins and street politics.”
He accused the proponents of the sit-in of resorting to “street action” and essentially saying “you believe in democracy only when your side wins.”
See the launch of the disruption:
[jwplayer 48JAhHJy-pszPfxYQ]
When the disruption ended, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who launched it, said he will continue fighting.
CNN reported he also tweeted: “We got in trouble. We got in the way. Good trouble. Necessary Trouble. By sitting-in, we were really standing up.”
Democrats continue to demand that they be allowed to vote on more gun control, even thought such measures repeatedly have been defeated.
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