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U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Wednesday defended U.S. President Barack Obama's executive actions on gun control as legal amid Republicans' fierce opposition.
"I have complete confidence that the common sense steps announced by the President are lawful," Lynch said here during her congressional hearing at the Senate Appropriations Committee panel that oversees the Justice Department.
"They are consistent with the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court and the laws passed by Congress," she said.
Lynch's support for the White House came two weeks after an emotional Obama outlined new steps to curb gun violence in the country.
Those new measures are seen by many as the final-year push by Obama to fix flawed gun control policies of the country. They include expanded mandatory background checks, a new effort to clarify who should be licensed as a gun dealer, and the creation of an exemption mechanism which would allow mental health professionals to report patients who could potentially pose a threat.
Also, Lynch told U.S. lawmakers that Obama's 2017 budget would seek 80 million U.S. dollars for his gun control measures.
Obama's latest effort to curb gun violence had been met with fierce opposition from Republicans.
Speaking at Wednesday's congressional hearing, Senator Richard Shelby, chairman of the panel, said that Obama had infringed on the constitutional right of Americans to own guns and again overreached his executive branch powers.
"It's clear to me that the American people are fearful that President Obama is eager to strip them of their Second Amendment rights," Shelby said.
In the face of Republicans' condemnation, Lynch on Wednesday argued that the newest executive actions were "consistent with the Constitution."
"The actions that President Obama has described are well-reasoned measures, well within existing legal authorities, built on work that's already underway," Lynch said.
During his presidency, Obama has been confronted with more than a dozen of high-profile mass shootings, and in an interview last year, he called the failure to reform U.S. gun laws "one of the greatest frustrations" of his presidency.
"If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I' ve been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun safety laws, even in the face of repeated mass killings," Obama told BBC in an interview in July.
