PA Bill Number: HR541
Title: Recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Description: A Resolution recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Last Action:
Last Action Date: Sep 27, 2024
Congress targets federal 'chokehold' on gun sellers :: 03/25/2015
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are taking to task the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and its involvement with Operation Choke Point, the federal program that lets banks deny business to outlets that deal in guns and ammunition.
The FDIC is the main agency in charge of regulating the nation’s 4,500 or so banks and financial institutions.
Critics of the program say it’s an underhanded way of dinging the Second Amendment without having to go through Congress because it hits at the lifeline of certain businesses perceived as unsavory by politicians in power. Specifically, opponents say the feds press financial institutions to abstain from dealing with gun companies, ammunition dealers and the like and in certain cases, cut off their funding and access to services.
Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wisconsin, in fact, calls the program “the greatest government overreach that no one is talking about,” and is among several on the Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to demand answers from FDIC chairman Martin Gruenberg, the Daily Signal reported. The panel’s holding a hearing on the program, which filters through the FDIC but is overseen by the Department of Justice.
“The FDIC should send a strong message that it will not tolerate this kind of abuse within the agency,” Duffy told the Daily Signal in an email.
The program has been criticized for seeming to target businesses that are lawfully owned and operated, but that not meet the political preferences of some in the White House administration. An investigative report from the House Oversight Committee released last year found regulatory officials at the FDIC had strategized to pressure certain banks’ financial decisions to even close the accounts of some businesses.
Operation Choke Point didn’t just target gun businesses. Others swept into the federal scrutiny included cash loan lenders, tobacco distributors and casinos.
“Our concern is you have agencies in the Obama administration that are using government as a weapon and they are going after industries and people that they don’t like,” Duffy said, Fox News reported. “This is not the old Soviet Union or Venezuela or Cuba. I think it’s important for all Americans to stand up and push back on policies that are an abuse of government.”
The hearings on Tuesday may be just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come legislatively. Lawmakers are reportedly considering scheduling more on the same issue, Fox News said.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/congress-targets-federal-chokehold-on-gun-sellers/
