by Bob Barr | Dec 20, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerPresident Joe Biden is 79. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 81. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 79, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, at 71 years old, is the baby of the bunch. The average age of America’s top political leadership is a whopping 77.5 years old. This is nearly 40 years older than the median age of the U.S. population, which stands currently at 38.1 years.This trend may change after Biden’s first term ends in January 2025, but only if both major political parties choose to nominate younger candidates. The problem, as we close in on the end of Biden’s first year in office, is that the two most talked-about 2024 candidates would themselves be approaching octogenarian status in three years — Hillary Clinton at 77 and Donald Trump at 78.2024 is a long way off, and Republicans might decide to break the Trump hold on the Party and opt for a younger candidate plucked from the GOP’s solid farm team. One top contender, for example, is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will turn a youthful 46 in 2024.The potential, anyone-but-Hillary 2024 Democrat nominee field remains foggy, but if Vice President Kamala Harris opts to run, she will just have celebrated her 60th birthday by election day 2024. If former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren were to vie for the office again in 2024, at 77 she would be the same age as Hillary. Sen. Bernie Sanders will be a mind-blowing 83 years old in 2024, and he shows no sign of losing his desire for higher office.There are, of course, other and somewhat younger potential Democrat...
by Bob Barr | Dec 15, 2021 | Townhall Article |
TownhallNeither California nor California-based judges miss an opportunity to display their anti-Second Amendment bias, most recently in a pair of federal court rulings upholding the state’s bans on so-called “assault weapons” and on firearms magazines able to hold more than 10 rounds.The state’s anti-firearms laws, and their support from the still-liberal Ninth Circuit panel of judges, highlight a problem that continues to bedevil Second Amendment supporters – that is, defending the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of the “right to keep and bear arms” in terms of need rather than principle.In a report I authored for the Heritage Foundation earlier this year, I argued that defending the Second Amendment by asserting individuals have a need to own a particular type of gun or accessory – which is how many conservatives frame their arguments against gun-control laws – leaves advocates of the Amendment vulnerable to precisely what the federal appellate courts have done in so many recent opinions declaring such “needs-based” restrictions to be constitutional. For example, in the 7-4 decision upholding the magazine ban, the Ninth Circuit deemed the measure constitutionally acceptable because it “interferes only minimally” with the Second Amendment, and because “there is no evidence that anyone ever has been unable to defend his or her home and family due to the lack of a large-capacity magazine.”To borrow from the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia, this is “pure applesauce.” These judges cannot possibly know whether such evidence exists, or that the lack of evidence now does not mean it will not be there in the future. The Court’s ruling is based simply on the judges’ opinion on whether there is a “need” for...
by Bob Barr | Dec 13, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIt is a metal that floats in water. It sparkles a beautiful red color when ignited. It is found in abundance in sea water and brine, as well as on lands in every continent other than Antarctica. It is lithium, and it is fast outpacing oil as the prime target of New Left environmentalists, even as it pits environmentalists against manufacturers of batteries used to power “environmentally friendly” electric vehicles so loved by the Biden administration.Major industrial countries across the globe are fighting for ever more access to quantities of this metal, known as “white gold,” but none so seriously or successfully as China.The battle being waged over lithium production is a serious one, with not only environmental issues at stake, but military and geopolitical ones as well. Despite this, it is not at all certain that the Biden administration will recognize its value and push back against those trying to limit or even halt domestic lithium production.If the administration treats lithium with the same degree of disdain with which it has targeted oil and natural gas production, however, it will have correspondingly grave consequences far beyond the problems created for the electric vehicle industry.Discovered and isolated as a unique metal early in the 19th century, lithium until recently was considered a cheap commodity in world markets. Large lithium mines and brine extraction facilities operated largely free from protests in the United States, South America, Australia, China and elsewhere.Due to its use as a component in the production of nuclear weapons, the U.S. became the world’s largest producer of the light metal in the second half of the...
by Bob Barr | Dec 8, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall“The whole aim of practical politics,” H.L. Mencken famously quipped in the 1920’s, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” How very true.Although written a century ago, Mencken’s metaphor of an endless series of imaginary hobgoblins easily describes the string of new “variants” of the COVID virus, all which send petty tyrants from New York’s Bill de Blasio to Australia’s Scott Morrison, clamoring for new lockdowns and restrictions – for our safety, of course. As I wrote last week, news about the “omicron” variant had global leaders racing to be the first to reimplement “safety” measures designed to keep the variant out of their country, even though there was no evidence omicron was any worse than previous strains, or that similar efforts made any difference in the past.These tyrants, petty as they may appear to be, are a very real danger to freedom, though in a way much different from their predecessors in Soviet-era KGB or East Germany’s Stasi. These are not innately malicious government actors in the vein of 1984. They are just…stupid. COVIDiots, if you will.In America, we have the Constitution that thankfully limits (eventually, at least) the damage COVIDiots may cause at the local, state, and federal levels; other countries are not so lucky. Rather than learning to live with COVID by taking reasonable and measured steps to limit its impact, countries like Australia persist in pursuing scorched earth policies in which economic and social freedom are viewed as impediments to be surmounted so the government can fulfill...
by Bob Barr | Dec 6, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Most Americans believe that if they have been seriously harmed by actions of the federal government, they are at least entitled to bring their claim before a court of law and have it fairly and transparently decided. They would be wrong.Thanks to a seven decades-old doctrine, called the “state secrets privilege,” all that government lawyers need to do to prevent a case against the government from proceeding is to claim that national security information would be revealed, and the case is stopped dead in its tracks regardless of the merits.As outrageous as this doctrine is, federal courts for decades have permitted Uncle Sam to escape being held accountable for misdeeds, such as unlawfully surveilling individuals, by claiming “state secrets.” There is a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, however, that might at long last and to some degree limit the government’s power to assert this blanket defense.Holding the federal government accountable in a court of law never has been easy. An aggrieved person has to overcome numerous legal hurdles, not the least of which is sovereign immunity, a principle we inherited from our former English masters, which shields government officials from many, if not most, civil legal actions. Beyond piercing the sovereign immunity shield, a person asserting a claim against a government agent or agency for violation of his constitutional rights must surmount other difficult hurdles, including standing and timeliness, among others.Notwithstanding these legal roadblocks, however, there is opportunity for an individual asserting that his constitutional rights have been injured by actions of the federal government to bring legal action and to at least make the government...
