by Bob Barr | Aug 16, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
TownhallRepublican 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 served previously as a federal prosecutor and...
by Bob Barr | Aug 9, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn 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 the CDC director, such a...
by Bob Barr | Aug 2, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerOne-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 AMA’s conclusion that gender identity...
by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerYou 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 it is the responsibility...
by Bob Barr | Jul 19, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerTo assist in its drive to demean American culture and history, the Biden administration has turned to the United Nations. Last week Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony “Tony” Blinken, actually invited the U. N. to come to America to study how racist and violative of human rights the United States is.This study will be conducted under the leadership of former socialist Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who now serves as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She will be aided in this effort by the U. N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a 117-member subsidiary of the United Nations with a history of anti-U.S. bias such that former President Trump in 2018 rescinded our country’s membership in the organization. Biden reversed that decision on Feb. 8, shortly after deciding to rejoin both the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization.Among the nations that will now sit in judgment on our country’s human rights record are such human rights luminaries as China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.Biden always has held the U. N. in high esteem, with its massive bureaucracy headquartered on the banks of the East River in Manhattan that sits on real estate donated by the Rockefeller family seven decades ago. Despite many of the United Nations’ previous so-called “peace keeping” missions having themselves been plagued by serious human rights violations, Biden and Blinken obviously consider the international body an appropriate judge of U.S. culture and history.Now, five months after we formally rejoined the UNHRC, one of its top officials, known as “rapporteurs,” will be among those studying and passing judgment on the systemic racism and human rights...
by Bob Barr | Jul 14, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
TownhallIn a 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union the “evil empire;” perfectly capturing the moral and political danger presented by that communist regime. Reagan properly cautioned Americans not to “ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses” of an enemy that was “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Unfortunately, what was clear to Reagan about the Soviet Union in 1983 appears only as a blur to Joe Biden about China today. If the Soviet Union were the evil empire, then China is surely the evilest empire. The Soviet Union’s global ambitions for its evil empire were hampered by its own incompetence. China, however, actively spreads its insidious tentacles across the world with a shocking mastery, facilitated by the apparent unwillingness of global leaders, including Biden, to take the threat seriously.Today’s China presents for the United States and other western powers a far more complex and multi-faceted danger than that posed by the Soviet Union in the second half of the last century. While China’s military build-up, and its well-documented willingness to use that power (especially as it relates to Taiwan) is a real concern, it is but one dimension of the broader threat, and in some ways not the most serious.Take, for instance, China’s push for greater influence in American academic institutions by way of funding educational programs and centers, under the guise of benignly teaching Chinese language and culture. As a white paper published at the Heritage Institute earlier this year suggests, this funding is a Trojan horse for Beijing to expand its influence in American culture more broadly. Strings...
