Obama weighs expanding background checks through executive authority ... Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, a visibly frustrated and emotional President Obama remarked on the deadly shooting at a community college in Oregon ... In response to the latest mass shooting during his presidency, President Obama is seriously considering circumventing Congress with his executive authority and imposing new background-check requirements for buyers who purchase weapons from high-volume gun dealers. – Washington Post

Dominant Social Theme: When a good guy wants action, circumventing the Constitution is surely justified!

Free-Market Analysis: This article appeared in the Washington Post in early October and we can't find an update, so perhaps overt action has not yet occurred. But the proposition, in any case, is symptomatic of this administration's increasing lawlessness.

Of course, the Bush administration was famous for tailoring its desires to legal formulations that made a case – at least on the surface – for whatever the administration desired in terms of additional powers. In this way, Bush justified numerous wars, secret rendition and even torture.

An aide to President Bush famously put it this way:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In many ways the Obama administration's actions increasingly seem to conform to this statement. The change that Obama is considering has to do with further controlling the sales of successful gun dealers.