by Bob Barr | Dec 30, 2020 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Callerby Bob Barr and Amy SwearerIn an unusual twist of electoral fate, not one but both of Georgia’s sitting Republican United States senators face Democrat challengers in a runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5, 2021, just two days after the 117th Congress will have been seated. The Second Amendment does not by name appear on the Georgia ballot, but it might as well.If both incumbent senators – David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler – are defeated next month, the new Senate will be evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, which means that two weeks later, on Jan. 20 when Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, his newly installed vice president, Kamala Harris, becomes the tie-breaking, de facto 101st senator.Neither Biden nor Harris is friend to the Second Amendment, and neither are the two Democrats – Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – running against Perdue and Loeffler. Their election would be a toxic mixture for the majority of Georgians who are now and historically have been strong backers of the right to keep and bear arms, both philosophically and in practice.An evenly split Senate resulting from a twin Republican defeat in Georgia next month will have profound impact on Second Amendment issues coming before the Senate, in terms of both legislation and confirmations. In this regard, it is important to understand where Georgia’s pair of Democrat challengers now fighting to join the Senate, stand on such issues.Even a cursory look at where Ossoff (who is challenging Perdue) and Warnock (Loeffler’s adversary) stand on matters relating to firearms reveals they are bitter enemies of gun rights, especially as those...
by Bob Barr | Dec 30, 2020 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The recent revelation of a historic hacking attack on U.S. businesses and government targets has put America’s national security apparatus in a conundrum. On one hand, the scale of the likely Russian sponsored attack is an excellent cudgel with which to press Congress for more power and money to fund secretive — and constitutionally problematic — national security programs. On the other, it proves that privacy hawks have been rightfully concerned about the state of America’s data security.Earlier this month, reports surfaced that a major IT security company, SolarWinds, was hacked and its software corrupted to include a “back door” easily exploited by other hackers. This corrupt software was then unknowingly pushed by way of an “update” to an estimated 18,000 customers – including numerous Fortune 500 companies and several government agencies – which left the back door wide open to hackers for months prior to being discovered. Experts suggest we may never know the full scale of this attack, or the degree to which it imperils America’s national security. That the hack involved a malicious back door is an irony not lost on privacy hawks, who have for years warned against federal agencies (especially the ultra-secret National Security Agency) having the power to force private software providers, smart phone manufacturers, and social media giants to build back doors that allow for surreptitious government access to users of their products and to their companies’ databases. The resulting compromised security has been as regrettable as it was predictable. In 2015, for example, the Chinese government is suspected of hacking into the NSA itself, via an encryption back door the agency demanded of a...
by Bob Barr | Dec 23, 2020 | Townhall Article |
TownhallThe country is now four costly COVID stimulus packages deep. By now there is ample evidence that “stimulus” money is fleeting and can only take us so far. What the country really needs from Congress are not repetitive shots in the arm, but substantive legislative reforms to help our economy re-open and stay open. Unfortunately, this requires hard work by both Houses, at a time when it is far easier to just keep piling hundreds of billions of dollars onto the already unimaginably huge national debt.To be sure, unemployed citizens and small business owners struggling because of government-mandated shutdowns deserve monetary relief, but direct payments are at best a stop gap measure. Also, such funding represents only a fraction of overall spending included in the most recent omnibus bill. This massive spending bill once again fails to include any reforms to address the myriad underlying conditions related to the pandemic — most importantly, COVID-related liability reform.With the country still a long way away from the level of vaccination required even to hope to return to pre-COVID normalcy, it is a virtual certainty that Congress will find itself in this same predicament a few months from now, as its members continue to delay passing COVID-related liability reforms that stymie both short- and long-term economic recovery.The Washington Post recently highlighted a wave of COVID-related lawsuits already being filed in courthouses across the country, by trial lawyers eager to target business owners, many of whom do not have the means to defend themselves vigorously. Already, ads are popping up on TV, radio, and online encouraging the public to get rich quick by signing up for frivolous lawsuits.It...
