House Defunds DOJ ‘Choke Point’ Bullying Operation

The U.S. House of Representatives today passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Blane Luetkeymeyer (R-Mo.) to defund the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Operation Choke Point,” a controversial program that has been used to force banks to sever the accounts of legitimate businesses in the name of combating fraud.

After the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a May 29 reporton the DOJ program, the Community Financial Services Association of America, a national trade association, stated that legal businesses “should not be targets of clandestine government actions that circumvent the law.” After today’s decision, the same group applauded members of the House for their “major victory” in defense of “consumers, law-abiding businesses, and anyone who believes in due process and restraint of government encroachment.”

U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tx.) last week pegged the DOJ operation as a tool used by the Administration to bully its ideological adversaries.

“Under Obama’s ‘Operation Choke Point’ banks are complaining that government agents are threatening them because they service legal businesses engaged in legal commerce. Often the customer is a gun retailer or other businesses that poses no risk, but differs with Obama’s political agenda,” said the U.S. Rep. from Texas in a May 19 statement. “This is just the latest example of the Obama administration exploiting executive power to target political opponents. It would appear the only purpose of Operation Choke Point is the choke the life out of businesspeople with political views that may differ from the President.”

To date, reports have shown that thousands of businesses in firearms retail have suffered account closures at their financial institutions, despite the fact that they were not engaging in illegal actions.

In 2012, the Bank of America closed the accounts of McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, McMillan Firearms Manufacturing, and McMillan Group International after having serviced the brands for over a decade. The bank told operations director Kelly McMillan that they had made their decision after assessing “the risk of doing business with a firearms related industry.”

As John Hayward of Human Events says, “it is extremely dangerous, and strongly antithetical to the American understanding of citizenship and government, to have the ruling elite presiding over a nebulous  ‘legal but undesirable’ classification rewritten at their whim… and enforced with government power.”

Members of the United States Senate should concur with their colleagues in the lower legislative chamber and allow the language to defund the Department of Justice’s bully operation reach the President’s desk.

Link :  

http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com/2014/05/house-defunds-doj-choke-point-bullying-operation/