by Bob Barr | Aug 30, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller President Gerald Ford often was disparagingly and unfairly said to be “unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.” Recent comments by U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley responding to questions about the decision to evacuate Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan tells us that our nation’s leaders appear to have lost the will to take on more than one mission at the same time. During a news conference on Aug. 18, as the scope of the disastrous exit from Afghanistan was beginning to manifest itself, Milley was asked why the Bagram Airfield was prematurely evacuated. The four star general declared that of the two tactical missions demanding decisions by he and other top military leaders — specifically, to protect the American Embassy in Kabul and the Bagram Airfield — the United States could only do one or the other, but not both. Thus, the decision to “collapse” (not “evacuate”) Bagram. The toll in lives and resources resulting directly from this decision to close the only secure airfield in Afghanistan has been enormous. More important from a strategic national security perspective, however, is that it reveals that as a country our leaders no longer possess the will to carry out more than a single military operation at a time. America’s post-9/11 military involvement in and exit from Afghanistan will be the source of debate for years to come; as was our involvement in and exit from Vietnam a half century earlier. In many respects, the more recent conflict mirrors the manner by which military historian Andrew Bacevich described how the U.S. military fought in Vietnam — not...
by Bob Barr | Aug 23, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In the aftermath of the Taliban’s victory over the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks is close upon us, one would think that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might be more worried about Islamic extremist attacks than about COVID lockdown opponents and critics of Biden’s 2020 election victory. Not so. According to a DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin that is effective until Nov. 11, extremists who “may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks” are a significant terror threat. The department also warned of “calls for violence on multiple online platforms associated with … perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement.” According to this analysis, “racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs)” and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” extremists are some of the nation’s top terrorism threats at this time. While DHS also considers “foreign terrorist organizations” a potential threat, it appears to be lower priority than threats posed by domestic extremist groups that are ideologically motivated and prone to “conspiracy theories.” DHS reaches this conclusion despite, in its own words, there being “no credible or imminent threats identified.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley belatedly seems to have realized and spoken about the danger that “terrorist groups” will “reconstitute” in Afghanistan, but his conclusion seems not to have registered meaningfully with the head of the Homeland Security Department, Alejandro Mayorkas. A review of the DHS website’s public information releases in the days since the...
by Bob Barr | Aug 16, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Townhall Republican Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs introduced House Resolution 582 on August 10. If passed by the House of Representatives, this measure would impeach President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. The safety and security of our country requires passage of H. Res. 582. Unlike the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump by the same House Democrat majority now in control, the impeachment resolution directed against Mayorkas is based on real substance and, considering the Biden-manufactured crisis still unfolding at our southern border, is extremely timely. Over the course of our nation’s history, numerous federal judges have been impeached, as have three presidents – Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. Only a single cabinet-level official has suffered this fate; Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached in 1876 for bribery. The lack of precedent for impeaching high Executive Branch officers, however, should not deter representatives from proceeding against Mayorkas, who has presided over the Biden administration’s disastrous and dangerous open border policy since his confirmation Feb. 2. Res. 582, as authored by Biggs and co-sponsored by a dozen of his fellow Republicans, describes the clear and disturbingly factual basis for which Mayorkas should be impeached. On paper, Mayorkas’ qualifications and background should have made him an outstanding leader of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2002 to consolidate in a single executive department myriad responsibilities of the federal government relating to all aspects of border security, from customs and immigration to anti-terrorism, but most importantly, protection of our nation’s borders. The Cuban-born Mayorkas...
by Bob Barr | Aug 9, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In the most recent and clearest sign yet that the Biden administration has not the slightest regard for the Constitution or the Supreme Court of the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued another ban on the ability of landlords to evict renters who fail to meet their rental obligations. Issued on August 3, the CDC’s latest move to void rental contracts for at least two more months is fraught with constitutional error, but such problems are of little importance to this administration because, in the view of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, it “is the right thing to do.” “The right thing to do” has become the justification for many modern presidents to sweep aside the foundational constitutional principle that the powers of the federal government are, in the words of Founder James Madison, “few and defined” and do not include mass voidance of lawful private contracts. The zeal with which Biden is taking advantage of the so-called COVID “emergency” to extend the powers of the federal government into areas in which it has no proper responsiobility, puts his predecessors to shame. One of this administration’s favored tools, but certainly not its only one, is to issue orders prohibiting landlords from evicting renters. The argument put forward in support of this dictatorial power is that allowing landlords to enforce rental contracts will dramatically exacerbate the spread of COVID. The government’s argument that evictions will lead to “new spikes in [COVID] transmission” is premised on the self-proclaimed notion that evicted renters necessarily will move into “congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads.” In the further opinion of...
by Bob Barr | Aug 2, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller One-hundred-and-seventy-four years ago a not-for-profit professional organization was formed “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) is about as far removed from that lofty goal as is the contemporary Democrat Party from its avowed status as “the party of the common man.” The length by which the AMA has strayed from its original goal of promoting the science of medicine is perhaps best illustrated by its recent decision recommending that birth certificates no longer include the gender of the newborn. Such nonsensical assertion that human beings are not born with male or female physical attributes has taken hold in a number of medical schools across the country. This has led to absurd instances in which professors feel obligated to apologize to students for inadvertently intimating, even indirectly, that there are differences between men and women. As noted in an article last week by Katie Herzog, for example, a professor of endocrinology at a medical school in the massive University of California system apologized profusely to students for uttering the verboten phrase, “pregnant woman.” It is in this same Bizarro World that a medical doctor, Valinda Riggins Nwadike, MD, lent her name to an article in Healthline.com in December 2018 that declared, “Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant.” With an assertion like this enjoying the imprimatur of medical doctors, and with professors of medicine afraid to use terms “male” and “female” for fear of being labeled “transphobic,” it may not be long before the AMA declares “the end of disease as we know it.” The...
by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller You hear it all the time, from Democrats as well as Republicans: “The most important responsibility of our government is to keep us safe.” It is so axiomatic that no one ever really questions it, regardless of whether it is posited in a discussion about COVID restrictions, national security policy or law enforcement. But it is not an accurate statement. The primary responsibility of the federal government is not to keep us safe; it is to protect and guarantee our liberty and our individual rights as guaranteed by (not given by) our Constitution. This principle is clearly described in the Federalist Papers, and is every bit as relevant today as when those essays were drafted 233 years ago, regardless of the context in which it is applied. In the context of the Second Amendment, for example, debating the pros and cons of gun control, if we start with the premise that the “primary responsibility of the government is to keep us safe,” then we have ceded to the Left the basic “playing field” on which the extent to which the right to keep and bear arms is to be decided. Flowing directly from this premise is the next building block of the gun control movement — that only those gun “rights” that can be shown by their advocates to be “needed” for self-defense are to be permitted. If the government and its advocates then show that a particular firearm or firearm accessory is not “needed,” it properly can be outlawed without violating the “right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, if it is conceded that...
