KATELYNN RICHARDSON
Republican Tennessee Rep. Mark Green on Wednesday took action to reverse a Biden administration rule placing new restrictions on firearm exports.
The rule, released by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) on April 30, makes a number of changes to licensing requirements that could make it more difficult for firearm manufacturers and sellers to conduct business. Green, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to overturn the rule, along with 69 other Republicans.
“Congress cannot abandon American firearm exporters to the whims of an administration hellbent on undermining their businesses, their livelihoods, and their constitutional freedoms,” Green told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Congress has the authority to rein in rogue federal agencies—it’s time we used it.”
Republican Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty is introducing the Senate’s version of the CRA.
“This rule is another Operation Choke Point—a politically motivated effort that significantly harms Tennessee manufacturers—and will consequently destroy U.S. jobs and small businesses that support the firearm and ammunition industry,” Hagerty said in an April 30 statement. “The Biden administration has made clear that its goal is to damage the firearm industry that supplies the products that allow Americans to exercise their constitutional freedom. Crushing American exports is just a means to skirt the legislative process and do damage to yet another Biden-disfavored industry.”
The CRA comes on the heels of Green’s introduction of the Stop the Bureaucratic Ineptitude Shuttering Respectable and Upstanding Lawful Exporters Act (Stop the BIS RULE Act) bill in early May, which would prevent federal funds from being used “to finalize, implement, or enforce” the rule.
Green previously told the DCNF the rule would “harm American business owners, hinder the right of people overseas to protect themselves, and will allow China and Russia to fill the void.”
The rule lowers export license validity to one year rather than four, inserts a “crime control” licensing requirement that factors in crime in other countries and applies a “presumption of denial” to export applications to 36 countries deemed high-risk.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement announcing the new rule that it was designed to protect “America’s national security by making it harder for criminals, terrorists, and cartels to get their hands on U.S.-made firearms,” which she noted “fall into the wrong hands and end up being used in ways that directly undermine U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.”
BIS, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued the rule following a 90-day pause on new export licenses for civilian firearms, which was announced in October but ultimately lasted over 180 days.
President Joe Biden has a long history of supporting gun control. As a senator in 1994, he helped pass a ten- year ban on “assault weapons” and continues to advocate for a federal ban.
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