by Bob Barr | Sep 12, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Students of theoretical physics are familiar with the principle that if matter and antimatter come into contact, both are instantly annihilated. Political discourse in 21st Century America has become so toxic and polarized that it has come to resemble the realm of quantum physics, with little — if any — room for agreement or even civil discourse. Both sides — the Republican and the Democrat — cannot coexist without destroying each other or reducing each other’s ideas and policies to shambles. As we enter the final stretch of the 2022 midterm elections and the starting gate for the 2024 presidential campaigns, it has become clear to everyone except the most diehard Pollyanna that every major public policy issue — including guns, abortion, immigration, energy, and others — is being played out on a “zero sum” game-board. Any oxygen that might otherwise sustain civil debate or compromise has been sucked out. Consider abortion. Since the Supreme Court declared this past summer that the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade was constitutionally defective, and that henceforth abortion access would be considered an issue for citizens of individual states to decide, the debate has become so white-hot, that for abortion advocates no tactic is off limits — even violence against individual Supreme Court justices. Such actions, while not explicitly endorsed by Democrat Party leaders, enjoy implicit support from many of them. The issue of Second Amendment rights, always a hotly debated issue in the political arena and the media, remains similarly devoid of compromise. Virtually every incident involving a murder, such the killing of two sheriff’s deputies attempting to serve a warrant...
by Bob Barr | Aug 29, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The name-calling, mistrust, and downright hatred with which the former president and his supporters are dealing with the execution of the warrant execution at his Mar-a-Lago home/resort three weeks ago – and the the current administration‘s less-than-productive responses – exemplify the toxic and dysfunctional state of American political discourse. The former president of the United States of America calls FBI “hacks and thugs” in the wake of the Aug. 8 search of his living quarters at the Mar-a-Lago resort pursuant to a lawfully executed warrant. The sitting president of the United States returns the insult by referring to support for his predecessor as “semi-fascism.” It is difficult to see things getting better any time soon. I am among the many Americans who find fault with the FBI and other federal agencies’ abuse of power in recent years. In fact our country has been dealing (or not dealing) with this problem for three decades, at least since the Justice Department-initiated tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s. As a sitting Member of Congress, I was a harsh critic of the FBI and the ATF during the 1995 oversight hearings into the Branch Davidian debacle. Today, nearly two decades after those hearings revealed serious abuses of power by the Attorney General, the FBI, the ATF, and our military, the leadership of the FBI exhibits greater evidence of being deeply infected with partisan politics and institutional hubris. Contrary to popular belief, however, and contrary to the views of many friends and colleagues of mine, there are ways to address these problems, even with a House of Representatives and a Senate...
by Bob Barr | Aug 23, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Uncle Sam’s irresponsible management of the massive student loan program, accelerated by the Biden administration’s loan “forgiveness” policies, will cost American taxpayers in excess of $311 billion – more than triple the annual budget for the sprawling U.S. Department of Education. The ballooning cost of the loan program, which includes previously projected income that will never materialize, plus nearly $200 billion in direct losses, has been calculated not by a Republican policy group aiming to undercut Biden’s pet student loan forgiveness policy, but by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have endorsed and funded the government’s direct student loan program, first launched 30 years ago. Since then, it has grown beyond a secondary source of funding for students’ post-secondary education into the single largest source of federal funding for such pursuits. It has also become the second-largest consumer debt category nationally after home mortgages, but with an astronomically higher default rate — projected to reach 40% by next year. It is these troubling aspects of the loan program that have fueled pressure on the Biden administration to pursue a reckless loan forgiveness policy. Biden faces significant pressure from within the Democrat Party, most vocally from its hard-left wing, to take the leap and simply “forgive” the outstanding loans — or at least a significant portion of them for certain classes of borrowers or up to certain amounts. While the president appears both philosophically and politically inclined to jump into that financial morass, his actions so far have been more tentative. For example, the administration already has written off the books more than $30 billion based on allegations...
by Bob Barr | Aug 15, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Many Republican office holders have been frothing at the mouth as they air claims that an FBI-initiated search of Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort and residence was “unprecedented,” “intolerable,” “un-American,” and a step toward “communism.” This raises the question – when did the GOP adopt as part of its governing philosophy the principle that a former president’s residence, including one which doubles as a ritzy resort, cannot be the subject of a lawfully executed search warrant? Sitting U.S. presidents enjoy a significant degree of insulation from civil and criminal proceedings to which virtually all other citizens are subject, and this is appropriate. Were the holder of such high office subject to civil lawsuits and resulting discovery proceedings by every possible aggrieved party, or vulnerable to prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves by indicting him, it would become utterly impossible for a president to carry out his constitutional duties. This is why the only way to remove a president is via impeachment and conviction by the Congress. It also stands as the reason for maintaining a very high bar for litigants to overcome in order to force a sitting president to respond to civil judicial proceedings. A former president, however, while perhaps allowed an elevated degree of deference in such matters, has never been considered absolutely immune. Claiming that the August 8th execution of the search warrant is an “un-American” step on the road to “communism” because it is “unprecedented” – that is, it happens to be the first time a search warrant has been executed on an ex-president’s residence – makes no sense, but has become a repetitive GOP talking...
by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Last week the White House publicly issued a “Readout” describing a July 22 meeting between “senior advisors” to President Joe Biden and several state legislators from New York, Delaware, California and Illinois; all so-called “blue states” whose political leaders are firmly committed to restricting law-abiding citizens’ ability to exercise their rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The news release was the latest example of this administration’s pattern of deliberately mischaracterizing federal laws regarding the liability of firearms retailers and manufacturers for subsequent criminal use of products they sell or manufacture. In other words, a lie designed to further its gun-control agenda. The federal law at issue is the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act” or “PLCAA,” legislation passed by the Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2005. PLCAA was deemed necessary by a majority of both houses of the Congress and the president of the United States, in the wake of a series of civil lawsuits against lawful manufacturers and retailers of firearms for the subsequent use of those products by individuals for criminal purposes. The law does not and was never intended to provide absolute protection for manufacturers or retailers of firearms. Rather, the PLCAA was designed simply to provide a legal framework according to which neither manufacturers nor retailers of lawful firearms would be treated differently from other lawful businesses, such as automobile manufacturers and dealers that never had been held liable for the subsequent use of their products (cars) by negligent or unlawful drivers. In fact, the clear language of the PLCAA provides that so long as the firearms businesses follow the many...
by Bob Barr | Jul 18, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller The Democratic Party’s appetite for gun-control legislation is constant, especially in the wake of a mass shooting. Occasionally, they are able to enlist sufficient Republican support in the Congress to actually pass legislation limiting the Second Amendment rights of citizens. This was the case last month when the requisite number of Republicans crossed over and gave Democrats a victory in sending the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” to President Biden for his eager signature. Not content with their success in passing that expansive legislation, Democrats in the House last week passed another bill to prove they are “doing something” to prevent criminals from shooting innocent victims. At least that’s the theory behind the “Active Shooter Alert Act of 2022” (H.R. 6538) that now awaits Senate action. H.R. 6538 has a price tag of “only” $2 million (at least to start) and does not itself restrict exercise of citizens’ Second Amendment rights. It is, however, pointless and unnecessary. Obviously the bill’s primary sponsors, Democratic Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline and Republican Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, concluded that existing “alert” communications between law enforcement agencies are inadequate. Thus, we need an office at the U.S. Department of Justice dedicated to monitoring such events and alerting everyone else — another bureaucracy to “coordinate” something, along with a “study” to be conducted by the Government Accountability Office to let us know how they are doing. Don’t get me wrong, the disgracefully inadequate, bordering on criminally negligent behavior by the school police agency during the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, illustrates that there are shortcomings in how some police departments and individual officers...
