by Bob Barr | Feb 9, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller America’s true “Greatest Generation” won our nation’s independence only after a costly and bloody war against Great Britain. It took eight years and many thousands of lives, but when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, the United States was a nation no longer subject to the arbitrary and absolute royal decrees issued by King George III. Now, 238 years later, we are reverting to a nation governed by the modern version of royal decrees – executive orders.The painstakingly crafted Constitution that formalized our representative democracy in 1788 has continued a tripartite government of checks and balances essential to prevent any one branch from exercising unbridled power. Despite this system having withstood all manner of challenges, there now is a very real danger that the unprecedented use of executive orders by President Joe Biden to bypass the legislative branch will seriously, if not irreparably, damage our constitutional framework.George Washington, our first and in many respects our best president, truly understood the system he helped create, and was genuinely loath to overstep those constitutional checks and balances. For example, during his two terms in office, Washington issued only eight executive orders. This is an astoundingly small number, considering that his near God-like popularity and the lack of any limiting precedents gave him the practical power to have used the executive order extensively to rule as he might have wished.To one degree or another, most presidents since then have followed this tradition, using the executive order and other unilateral presidential missives for the limited purposes for which they have been recognized; that is, as a tool to administer the executive...
by Bob Barr | Feb 1, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller If there was any doubt that Jan. 20 signaled the rebirth of the nanny state, the slew of executive actions signed by President Joe Biden on his first days in the Oval Office confirmed that it has returned with a vengeance.In addition to revealing his long love affair with regulatory power, Biden made clear that virtually any actions undertaken by his predecessor were ipso facto bad to the bone and must be revoked, rescinded and condemned.Take, for example, Executive Order No. 13992, signed the afternoon of Jan. 20 and titled, “Executive Order on Revocation of Certain Executive Orders Concerning Federal Regulation.” The document is a paean to the regulatory behemoth that has grown to immense proportions in Washington, D.C., in recent decades.E.O. 13992 does not even try to disguise its preference for “regulatory tools” to undo the “harmful policies and directives” of the previous quadrennium, especially former President Donald Trump’s failure to enact “racial justice” or address “climate change.” This particular executive order, the eighth in Biden’s opening salvo, criticizes by name a series of actions undertaken by Trump that tried in some manner to lessen the regulatory burdens on American businesses and the corresponding cost to taxpayers. Trump’s Jan. 30, 2017 order, “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs,” for example, was rendered dead and buried by the stroke of Biden’s pen.Another of Biden’s Inauguration Day presidential missives, E.O. 13990, has been widely cited for elevating to existential status the “Climate Crisis.” Its nine pages of climate change hyperbole, however, also contain statements reflecting and reinforcing the new president’s disdain for anything that might hint at regulatory “reform.” Every regulatory action...
by Bob Barr | Jan 19, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn a subtle redirection of Shakespeare’s oft-quoted assertion in Henry VI, to “first . . . kill all the lawyers,” Democrats inside government and their cohorts in the private sector are moving to censure not necessarily all lawyers — just those who fail to kowtow to their liberal orthodoxy. This purge is but the latest chapter in the radical rulebook long focused on “reimagining” our society into one premised not on individual liberty protected by the rule of law, but rather one built on group identity and forced allegiance thereto. It has been a long time coming, but the Democrat Party’s capture of the Senate majority allows them to dramatically accelerate their villainy.For decades, liberals have worked tirelessly to deconstruct America’s system of education, one premised on classical pedagogy and local curriculum control – a structure that stressed objective standards of learning and which rewarded achievement. Our country’s public education now is a cartoonish, Rube Goldberg-esque system defined by federal bureaucrats and ruled over by teachers’ unions and tenured professors. In this morass, what is deemed correct and worthy of being learned is subjective, with no foundational values.This toxic recipe has spawned a generation of government and corporate leaders steeped in the liberal notion that government is the default mechanism to address every real or perceived shortcoming in society. For today’ culture warriors, using the power of their positions in government and in the business arena is a moral imperative.The so-called mainstream media has trended liberal since at least the 1960s. That this communications sector is wholly embedded with the Democrat Party is no surprise and is not going to change any...
by Bob Barr | Jan 11, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller As tragic as the violence at the U.S. Capitol building last week was, the loss of the two Republican Senate seats in Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoff election is by far the more politically consequential event. What makes this twin loss so gut-wrenching for the GOP is that it could have easily been avoided, if during the eight weeks between the Nov. 3 national election and the January runoff President Trump had focused on the upcoming runoff instead of trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. The immediate consequence of the losses suffered by Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler is to hand New York Democrat Chuck Schumer the keys to the senatorial kingdom. With an evenly divided Senate, this situation makes Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the de facto 101st senator and, at least for the next two years, one of the most powerful individuals in the U.S. government.Unlike vice presidents before her, whose job description once was derided by FDR’s two-term vice president, John Nance Garner, as “not worth a pail of warm spit,” Harris will hold very real, significant power whenever called on by Schumer to break a tie in Democrats’ favor. In fact, simply the threat of exercising such a vote constitutes real power that can be – and will be — employed by Schumer as well as by President Biden to implement their agenda.It did not have to turn out this way, as both Georgia Senate seats were very winnable. In order to have won them, however, the GOP and particularly President Trump needed to do one thing — turn out Republican...
by Bob Barr | Jan 4, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Successful political leaders and military commanders understand the value of focus when a strategic goal is at stake. As U.S. Army Gen. Colin Powell put it, “focus on the front windshield and not the rearview mirror.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led his country through the dark days of World War II, said with his customary wry humor, “you will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” In Georgia over the past two months, there have been many barking dogs.The Georgia barkers have piped up on both sides of the political aisle, pulling at Republicans David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler as they race toward their destination – reelection to the United States Senate in the double runoff.If the Republican incumbents lose on Tuesday, it will be in large measure the result of the GOP having spent too much time and energy throwing stones at barking dogs along the way.It was in fact quite clear from the outset that neither of these two GOP incumbents had secured a majority on November 3 as required by Georgia law. But, unlike the controversies surrounding vote counting for the presidential contest, which have continued to this day, the Senate runoff ball game is very different both in degree and resolution. The fact that the two elections – presidential and senatorial – have in many respects been lumped together, has spawned unnecessary and dangerous confusion in the lead up to the actual runoff election.The still-hotly contested presidential vote is subject to a number of arcane but constitutionally permitted procedural challenges available to state...
by Bob Barr | Dec 30, 2020 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Callerby Bob Barr and Amy SwearerIn an unusual twist of electoral fate, not one but both of Georgia’s sitting Republican United States senators face Democrat challengers in a runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5, 2021, just two days after the 117th Congress will have been seated. The Second Amendment does not by name appear on the Georgia ballot, but it might as well.If both incumbent senators – David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler – are defeated next month, the new Senate will be evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, which means that two weeks later, on Jan. 20 when Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, his newly installed vice president, Kamala Harris, becomes the tie-breaking, de facto 101st senator.Neither Biden nor Harris is friend to the Second Amendment, and neither are the two Democrats – Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – running against Perdue and Loeffler. Their election would be a toxic mixture for the majority of Georgians who are now and historically have been strong backers of the right to keep and bear arms, both philosophically and in practice.An evenly split Senate resulting from a twin Republican defeat in Georgia next month will have profound impact on Second Amendment issues coming before the Senate, in terms of both legislation and confirmations. In this regard, it is important to understand where Georgia’s pair of Democrat challengers now fighting to join the Senate, stand on such issues.Even a cursory look at where Ossoff (who is challenging Perdue) and Warnock (Loeffler’s adversary) stand on matters relating to firearms reveals they are bitter enemies of gun rights, especially as those...
