by Bob Barr | Aug 1, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall There are many reasons why President Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous, 1937 “court-packing plan” went down in flames the year after he won a landslide reelection, and even though his Democrat Party controlled both Houses of Congress. High among the reasons for FDR’s humiliating legislative defeat was the correct perception both in Congress and among the population generally that the plan was nothing other than a blatant move to politicize the Supreme Court. Now, nearly nine decades later, another Democrat President is trying the same gambit; this time by proposing to discard the lifetime tenure enjoyed by Supreme Court justices since the adoption of our Constitution in 1790, and instead limit them to a single, 18-year term on the High Court. As with FDR’s ill-fated ploy to jimmy with the nation’s highest judicial body, President Biden’s term-limiting proposal, announced on July 29th as a “Bold Plan to Reform the Supreme Court,” should never become law. Despite the Administration characterization to the contrary, Biden’s plan is nothing more than political sour apples; motivated by dislike of recent decisions by the current Supreme Court majority that are not in accord with either the President’s or his Party’s ideological views on abortion and the scope of presidential immunity for former President Donald Trump. Biden’s plan also is contrary to his vow as a candidate in 2019 to oppose “court-packing.” The handwriting for Biden’s flip-flop on this issue, however, was evidenced by an Executive Order he signed in April 2021 setting up a “presidential commission” to study “reforms” to the Supreme Court. Whether it be the mallet employed by FDR in 1937 or the lighter hammer...
by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2024 | Uncategorized |
By Bob Barr and Jason Altmire Washington Examiner With the Supreme Court recently expressing clear disapproval of many of the Federal Trade Commission‘s operating procedures, Congress must aggressively steer this key regulatory agency back to its original mission of protecting consumers. When we served in Congress, we relied on the FTC’s challenges to artificial monopolies and predatory business activities to conduct our own legislative business. Its work and guidance helped us construct fair regulatory frameworks that worked for businesses and consumers alike, regardless of how wealthy, poor, big, or small they were and irrespective of how politically well-connected they might or might not have been. Today, however, the FTC is placing its political policy agenda above the rule of law and the interests of the consumers it is charged with protecting. It would be unfair and wasteful for people to wait years, or even decades, for challenges to further regulatory abuses by the FTC and other agencies to reach and be decided by the courts. The ball is in Congress’s court. Congress still oversees the FTC, and the federal legislative body has an obligation to step in and reform the regulatory agency it created more than a century ago. Most importantly, Congress must roll back the FTC’s new enforcement policies and operational standards — standards that the commission itself has admitted do not necessarily represent the interests of consumers. The real problem started two years ago, when the FTC rescinded its antitrust enforcement policy that properly had kept its actions “guided by the public policy underlying the antitrust laws, namely, the promotion of the consumer welfare.” Sadly, in 2022, the commission, under the leadership of Chairwoman...
by Bob Barr | Jul 24, 2024 | Uncategorized |
The Regulatory Review In Garland v. Cargill, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its statutory authority in issuing a final rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns. Assessment of this common-sense opinion must start with a review of the National Firearms Act, which defines a “machine gun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The definition also includes “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively… for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.” In contrast to a machine gun, which can fire multiple shots when its trigger is engaged once, a semiautomatic firearm can fire only one shot per trigger engagement. There are shooting techniques, however, to increase the rate at which semiautomatic firearms can be fired. One technique is “bump firing.” When bump firing, the shooter keeps his trigger finger stationary, while allowing the recoil energy from firing the gun to push the gun backward quickly and reset the trigger. Simultaneously, the shooter applies forward pressure on the gun with his non-trigger hand to “bump” the trigger into his still-stationary trigger finger, which fires a subsequent shot. When done effectively, bump firing allows semiautomatic firearms to fire at rates approaching machine guns. A bump stock is a device that makes bump firing easier. Importantly, even with a bump stock, the Court noted that “as with any semiautomatic firearm, the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot.” Moreover, bump firing—with or without a bump stock—requires significant manual input from the shooter....
