by Bob Barr | Jan 10, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerThe dust has settled on the raucous start to the 118th Congress. Now, the slim Republican House majority under Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership must step up and show the voters it is serious about governing. The newly adopted rules, under which both sides of the aisle must operate for the next two years, will aid the GOP in its drive to shrink the federal government and increase transparency — but only if it employs those rules to accomplish substantive goals and not simply to score political points against the Biden administration. That is a big “if.” The media has focused in the past week — during which McCarthy endured numerous attacks from his own colleagues — on the rule that allows a single member of the House to call for a vote to remove him (“vacate the Chair”). This “Sword of Damocles” will be a constant reminder to McCarthy of the fate that befell one of his predecessors – John Boehner – who suffered the wrath of the same GOP right wing that forced McCarthy to lose 14 votes for the speakership before prevailing late Friday night. Regardless of how many members are required to initiate a vote to remove the Speaker, it still will take a full majority of members – 218 – to accomplish the goal. Hopefully even the most rabid “Never Kevin” Republicans would recognize the chaos such a move would unleash, and hold their fire.More important procedurally than the vacate-the-chair issue, are those rules that will enable House GOP budget hawks, of which there are many, to force transparency into the often-Byzantine congressional appropriations and budget processes – procedures...
by Bob Barr | Jan 5, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallAided by liberal Members of Congress and armed with a taxpayer-funded report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal Department of Education is set to embark on a crusade to establish a uniform, national school dress code in order to ensure “equity and safety.”Dress codes have long been targeted by the Left as violative of students’ civil rights. Recently, with the rise of “equity” as the shibboleth of the Left, groups such as Planned Parenthood consider dress codes as tools of “sexism, racism, and transphobia.” Teacher-based organizations, such as We Are Teachers, have hopped aboard the anti-dress code bandwagon, declaring, for example, that dress codes must be “gender neutral” and pass a “diversity test.”Who would have thought a generation or two ago that simply requiring students to dress appropriately was so sinister.To be fair, there are instances where teachers and school administrators misuse dress codes; abuses that should not be tolerated. However, concluding that dress codes constitute a civil rights violation and urging the Education Department to implement a national standard to ensure they do not “discriminate” in any way against anyone at any time, is a typical overreaction by the Nanny State. Yet this is precisely the direction in which the Department appears headed, as revealed in its response to the GAO study.Never shy about coming up with ways to spend taxpayer dollars, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights responded to GAO’s recommendation that it “design . . . equitable and safe dress codes” by committing to devote “resources” (i.e., taxpayer dollars) to develop such codes for K-12 public schools nationwide. In order to accomplish this goal, the Department also (of course) would...
by Bob Barr | Jan 3, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Regardless of where the vote for House Speaker winds up — with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) either winning his sought-after job as Speaker or returning to his seat as one of 435 sitting Members — the chaos a handful of conservative Republican Members have caused will do lasting damage to their party and accomplish little of long-term substance.McCarthy has already taken severe damage to his position. The “Never Kevin” members of the Republican caucus have so wounded him that he would be largely unable to control the mechanisms a speaker must wield to keep the body functioning. In his weakened state, just controlling his own side of the aisle for two years would be a Herculean task. McCarthy’s forced, eleventh-hour concessions after his months-long campaign for Speaker will simply reinforce allegations that he lacks principles on which to govern. More importantly, and beyond the wounds to McCarthy’s political persona, some of these concessions will make it harder for the slim GOP majority to achieve its priorities.For example, agreeing to establish one or more “select” committees to investigate the Biden administration’s abuses of power, will undercut the powers of standing committees and their chairmen to set and coordinate the majority party’s priorities. That agencies of the Executive Branch have been abusing their powers was not a concept undiscovered until the Freedom Caucus latched onto it. Executive Branch abuse of power has been building for decades. While it is fair to charge the current administration with forcing the pendulum further in that direction, the reality is that every recent administration has pushed the envelope – Republican and Democrat.These matters of expanding and...
