Prominent Republicans are accusing President Obama of abusing his executive power by taking 23 executive actions on gun violence at the same time that he asked Congress to pass legislation.
While Mr. Obama’s legislative proposal was sweeping — he asked lawmakers to ban the sale of military-style rifles and close a loophole that allows many gun buyers to avoid background checks — his unilateral actions were smaller. They included ordering federal agencies to share more information with the background-check system; nominating a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and directing subordinates to “launch a national dialogue” on mental health issues.
Soon after the White House news conference, Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is considered a potential contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, denounced Mr. Obama as flouting the role of Congress for taking some actions on his own.
“Making matters worse is that President Obama is again abusing his power by imposing his policies via executive fiat instead of allowing them to be debated in Congress,” Mr. Rubio said. “President Obama’s frustration with our republic and the way it works doesn’t give him license to ignore the Constitution.”
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also accused the president of exceeding the limits of his executive authority.
“Using executive action to attempt to poke holes in the Second Amendment is a power grab along the same pattern we’ve seen of contempt for the elected representatives of the American people,” he said. “Some of these directives clearly run afoul of limitations Congress has placed on federal spending bringing the president’s actions in direct conflict with federal law.”
And Reince Priebus, the chairman of the National Republican Committee, said Mr. Obama’s series of unilateral steps “amount to an executive power grab” that “disregard the Second Amendment and the legislative process,” violating principles of representative government.
Asked which of Mr. Obama’s 23 executive steps Mr. Rubio had specifically been referring to as an abuse of power that ignored the Constitution, a spokesman for the senator, said in an e-mail: “I think his point generally is that the president should be looking to work with the Congress, not around it.”
By contrast, a spokeswoman for Mr. Grassley, responding to the same question, pointed to two specific steps: Mr. Obama directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the causes and prevention of gun violence and he sent a letter to health care providers saying that a provision in his health law does not prevent doctors from asking patients about guns in their homes.
Those steps, Mr. Grassley’s office contended, ran afoul of federal statutes because a C.D.C. financing restriction “effectively keeps it from conducting any research or analysis related to gun violence” and the health care law bars wellness programs from requiring the disclosure and collection of information about firearms in homes.
Obama administration officials countered, however, that the health care law provision bars the creation of a database, not individual questions by doctors about potentially dangerous situations. And, they said, the plain text of the C.D.C. financing restriction says no funds “may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” which is different from conducting public health research.
“For a long time, some members have claimed that that prohibits them from conducting any research on the causes of gun violence,” a senior administration official said during a briefing call with reporters. “Our lawyers looked at it and thought that the definition didn’t really encompass public health research on gun violence, which really isn’t advocacy.”
Mr. Grassley’s office also flagged three other steps announced by Mr. Obama as potentially running afoul of federal statutes, saying it was difficult to know for sure without seeing their details.
They included reviewing regulations that protect the privacy of health information to ensure that they do not prevent states from submitting information about mentally ill people to the federal background-check system, improving incentives to get states to participate in the system, and sending a letter to health care providers clarifying that federal law does not prevent them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
In the days leading up to the news conference, conservative commentators and media outlets had pressed a theme that Mr. Obama was threatening to take potentially tyrannical anti-gun action by executive order.
On Jan. 9, The Drudge Report ran the large headline “WHITE HOUSE THREATENS ‘EXECUTIVE ORDERS’ ON GUNS,” illustrated with pictures of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. And on Tuesday the radio host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that the Obama administration cannot get “the gun laws that they prefer” to pass Congress, “so they’re just going to do it unilaterally with the executive order. Now I’m not lying to you when I tell you that is not what executive orders permit.”
