by Bob Barr | Dec 12, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller With President-elect Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general, and his naming of Gail Slater to head the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, the groundwork has been laid to begin unshackling America’s marketplace, which has for decades been hampered by unnecessary regulations and — during the Biden Administration — subjected to out-and-out lawfare by the very Department of Justice supposed to protect the marketplace from anti-competitive forces. The question now is, how quickly can these abusive, economic lawfare practices be struck from the Department’s agenda and an originalist interpretation of the nation’s antitrust laws restored? The mission of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is to uphold federal law. The Department, however, cannot and has never carried out this mission in a vacuum. As a component of the executive branch of the federal government, it operates necessarily — and appropriately — according to the underlying policy preferences of the elected president. It bears reminding that Democrats lost the presidential election in November. Whether the losers like it or not, President-elect Trump has every right to choose individuals to occupy top positions at the Justice Department who will respect and implement the policies that clearly and openly were at the foundation of his Nov. 5 electoral victory. Moreover, Trump is fully empowered to populate the top echelons of the Department with men and women who – unlike his soon-to-be predecessor – actually respect the rule of law and who will not employ the powers of the Justice Department to undermine legal norms and the institutions our Founders so carefully crafted. For...
by Bob Barr | Nov 13, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller As with any national election, there are winners and losers. There are celebrations and there are postmortems. There is recrimination and there are congratulations. After their shellacking at the polls Nov. 5, Democrats unsurprisingly are pointing fingers, casting blame and channeling their anger; some already scheming for 2026 and 2028. Meanwhile, the one person most responsible for what still is unfolding as a historically significant election is doing exactly what he should be doing. Donald J. Trump is laying the groundwork to begin dismantling a federal government that has been allowed to grow into a morbidly obese and regulatory oppressive behemoth under successive Democrat and Republican administrations. Not since Ronald Reagan took on Uncle Sam in his first term has the left faced such a serious threat. What makes this go ‘round far different from Reagan’s 1980 drubbing of Jimmy Carter is the magnitude and multitude of attacks leveled at Trump before the election – a barrage no presidential candidate before him had endured. Sure, Reagan was attacked by the Democrat Party throughout the 1980 campaign, even as he had to fight off efforts by the GOP establishment that never really warmed to his anti-Washington rhetoric. But the campaign against Trump, which began even before Joe Biden was sworn into office Jan. 20, 2021, is something our country never previously had witnessed. To the horror and dismay of Democrats and many moderate Republicans, and against all odds, Trump still prevailed. Also unlike Reagan’s 1980 win (with his coattails ushering in a GOP majority in the Senate) — after which politics settled down into a “normal” transition — Trump’s opponents largely have...
by Bob Barr | Oct 17, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Former “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban likes to position himself as a humanitarian. But it turns out he might be just another well-connected celebrity using his high-profile political connections to rig the marketplace in his favor. The healthcare scheme Cuban seems to have cooked up recently with Vice President Kamala Harris reveals his true motives. Cuban has aligned himself with Big Pharma in pushing for healthcare regulations that would advance his business interests. Hardly by coincidence, Harris announced Oct. 8th that she would do their bidding if elected president. The game plan concocted by Cuban and Big Pharma looks to unleash the power of the regulatory state against pharmacy benefit managers, known as “PBMs.” These are groups that businesses’ health plans hire as a way to lower drug costs for their employees. It happens also to be a strategy used by many government agencies. PBMs are effective because, combined, they manage the health plans for just about every business in the country, with 275 million Americans benefiting from their services. Their size and scale gives them significant leverage at the negotiating table with the drugmakers, leading to lower consumer drug costs. A study by the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs found that the great majority of businesses are happy with their PBMs. This unsurprising finding is reflected in research by Casey Mulligan, who chaired former President Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2018 to 2019. Mulligan’s research found that PBMs provide more than $145 billion in value every year. Why, then, are Big Pharma, Cuban and Harris pushing to regulate these companies? For Big Pharma, the answer is simple — its otherwise...
by Bob Barr | Sep 30, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The year was 1917 — the Panama Canal had been opened a mere three years, the United States entered World War I in April and the Jones Act granted American citizenship to the citizens of Puerto Rico in March. 1917 was also the year that the U.S. Congress passed the little-noticed “Rum Cover-Over” as a way to help the new island Commonwealth of Puerto Rico develop much-needed infrastructure by transferring back to Puerto Rico federal excise taxes on rum produced there. We are now 117 years later, and what was designed as a temporary tax rebate to help the newly acquired and at the time largely undeveloped island of Puerto Rico get on its feet following the Spanish-American War, is still with us; illustrating the adage that “temporary” tax measures are rarely, if ever, truly temporary. In fact, the rum tax “cover over” was broadened in 1954 to include the U.S. Virgin Islands, to help fund infrastructure projects on those islands. These tax rebate projects in recent years do little, if anything, to assist either Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands build schools, roads or power plants. What the revenue measures have done, is to greatly benefit private distilleries, including Diageo and Bacardi, that produce rum in these Caribbean locales, including by subsidizing major expansion of such facilities. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good rum drink from time to time, but where is the economic justification in this year 2024, for the governments of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to be benefitting from federal excise tax refunds that can total hundreds of millions...
by Bob Barr | Aug 8, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The first ten amendments to our Constitution are known as the “Bill of Rights” for a reason — within it are denoted numerous “rights” that belong to individuals and which are guaranteed as such against government limitation. Any American elected official who fails to grasp this foundational principle, or who understands it but refuses to accept it, is undeserving of holding public office. Take, for example, Kamala Harris. Our current vice president, the Democrat Party nominee for president, is on record positing that one of those fundamental individual liberties expressly guaranteed against government intrusion, does not actually protect an individual right after all. So much for the clear language and history underpinning the Bill of Rights. Not surprising, the context in which Harris has taken such a posture openly antithetical to the very principle on which the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 is the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms. She proudly lent her name as the then-district attorney for San Francisco, to a legal brief opposing what turned out to be the seminal 2008 Heller decision that declared expressly that the Second Amendment does in fact protect an individual right to possess a firearm. Harris’ stance set forth in that legal brief tells us all we need to know about her disdain for the Second Amendment. In the years since Heller, Harris has continued to support all manner of government restrictions on possession of firearms by law-abiding citizens, including among other measures, confiscatory bans on the country’s most popular rifle the AR-15, lauding Australia’s draconian gun confiscation program and most recently, criticizing the Supreme Court’s Cargill decision in June that stopped the ATF...
by Bob Barr | Jul 24, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller On Monday, Kimberly Cheatle, the now-former Director of the U.S. Secret Service, “testified” (I use the term loosely) publicly before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Unsurprisingly (to me, at least), the lengthy session produced not a shred of evidence not previously known to the public. The only surprise at the end of the day was that some members of the committee actually appear to have expected otherwise. At least some members of the Committee on both sides of the aisle seem to be unfamiliar with one of the foundational principles on which governments (including our own) operate: bureaucracies are designed and operate in such a way as to avoid accountability. This is hardly breaking news. The National Academy of Public Service has published extensively about the “culture of unaccountability that hampers the government’s operations.” Congress has considered “reviving” the Constitution’s Appointments Clause to force presidential appointments to be more accountable. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years has tightened – not relaxed — standing requirements that must be met in order to hold government officials accountable by court action. I learned this lesson in unaccountability in 1995, during my first term in the House. Nothing I have seen since has changed my opinion about government aversion to accountability. The context in which the immutability of government un-accountability came clear to me was the series of hearings in which I participated in Spring 1995 to investigate the tragedy two years prior at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; a tragedy of horrendous proportions during which four federal law enforcement officers and more than 70 civilian...
