by Bob Barr | Jul 11, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Privacy, or at least the yearning for privacy is a funny thing. When asked whether they support “privacy,” historically most individuals have said “sure.” In a recent survey, however, “security” trumped “privacy” among nearly 30% of Americans under the age of 30, who declared support for government surveillance inside households as a way to improve the security of those living within those homes. That 3 in 10 group of young American adults may be the leading edge of an anti-privacy movement that clearly has taken hold in France, where that country’s parliament just passed legislation permitting police to not only access data contained in individuals’ electronic devices, but to turn on such devices in order to record conversations and videos without the knowledge or consent of the devices’ owners. French President Macron has signaled his approval of the privacy-invasive measure. American Generation Z-ers would feel right at home visiting France. Much has changed since 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was engaged in an extensive surveillance program gathering cell phone records on American citizens without warrants. At the time, according to a CBS News poll, “nearly 6 in 10 Americans said they disapproved” of the program. What has not changed here in America, is the language of the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution, which broadly protects us from government surveillance of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” without a warrant, or at a bare minimum absent “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed. In fact, a seminal 2018 Supreme Court decision explicitly held that law enforcement could not access an individual’s cell phone records without first obtaining a search warrant. Things are...
by Bob Barr | Jul 5, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Last week the Supreme Court declared President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan repayments unconstitutional. The President’s response was to immediately announce that his Administration would find a way to circumvent the decision — thereby further undermining respect for our courts and the judges who serve in them. Indeed, the previous day the President dismissed another ruling by the Court, this one on affirmative action, by disdainfully calling the Supreme Court of the United States “not a normal court” and impliedly unworthy of respect. It was no surprise, then, that the President’s challenge to the Court’s decisions prompted calls for those who would have had their debts wiped out by his plan, to simply refuse to make further payments. Who can blame them? Long gone are the days when political leaders would respond to a court ruling with which they disagreed by stating, “we disagree with the court’s decision but will of course abide by it.” Former Vice President Al Gore’s respectful acceptance of the December 2000 Supreme Court decision awarding the presidency to his rival George W. Bush, today would earn him the sobriquet of “wimp” by his Democrat colleagues. This latest round of disparaging judges and courts generally did not start with the current administration. Former President Trump was well-known for attacking judges who issued opinions with which he disagreed during his term in office. Few, however, have gone so far as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), when he threatened Associate Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name in 2020 at a pro-abortion rally on the steps of the Supreme Court. It is noteworthy also that Biden’s most recent...
by Bob Barr | Jun 27, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In 1959, a young screenwriter named Rod Serling created what would become one of the 20th Century’s most iconic television series. “The Twilight Zone” has become so much a part of our culture that contemporary dictionaries include the term “twilight zone” as a defined noun, meaning “an area just beyond ordinary legal and ethical limits.” Considering recent cultural changes, America’s political system quite easily can fit within that very definition, insofar as “ordinary legal and ethical limits” seem no longer to apply. In one of the most recent examples of this phenomenon, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, declared something that historically, ethically, and legally would in the past have been considered laughable — erasing official actions taken previously by the Congress of the United States. More specifically, McCarthy last week publicly endorsed legislation that purports to remove from the official record of the House of Representatives the 2019 and 2021 impeachments of former President Donald Trump; expunging the record of those proceedings as if they never took place. A move such as McCarthy now supports would be in keeping with actions by Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s prescient 1984. Smith’s job in that dystopian world was to cleanse history by erasing news accounts of disfavored past events or people. As an institution, the House of Representatives was deemed so important by the drafters of our Constitution, that its description in that document precedes that of all the other components of the federal government. To now have members of that body acting as modern-day Winston Smiths is disconcerting in the extreme, even if the measures fail to...
by Bob Barr | Jun 20, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. —“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley (1932) “’Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. ‘It’s what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love.’” — Harriet de Wit, quoted in “How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist,” by Rachel Nuwer, BBC (June 14, 2023) Some things don’t change, as they say. So it is with attempts to alter human behavior. For millennia, people of various cultures and for various reasons — some good, some evil — have experimented with ways to alter human perception and behavior as a way to improve society. This was the premise of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, published in 1932 and which described a society uniformly and purposefully addicted to and controlled by the drug “soma.” Now, almost a century later, there still are those trying to accomplish what Huxley wrote about as fiction. A recent study conducted by Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Harriet de Wit at the University of Chicago used not the fictitious soma but a real drug — MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – in a study to determine its usefulness for increasing the “pleasantness of social touch.” MDMA has been around for quite some time, having been discovered early in the 20th Century by German chemists for possible pharmaceutical purposes. Decades later, the CIA conducted experiments with the drug, known commonly as “Molly” or “Ecstasy” rather than its lengthy scientific name. The experiments were part of the Agency’s notorious, top secret “MK-Ultra”...
by Bob Barr | Jun 13, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller When he is not wandering aimlessly across a stage, President Biden is leveling the most vile of curses in his vocabulary at news stories with which he disagrees – “Malarkey!” This was his retort last week to a reporter’s query about allegations that he corruptly profited to the tune of $5 million while serving as Barack Obama’s Vice President. Meanwhile, former President Trump has been relentlessly and, as always, loudly, insulting Special Counsel Jack Smith for bringing an indictment against him for unlawfully possessing and disclosing highly classified documents after his tenure as Commander in Chief expired. For good measure, the former president also has been insulting anyone, including the man he appointed as his last Attorney General, who fails to similarly discount the 37-count indictment filed against him last week in the U.S. District Court in Miami. Actually, both cases have merit, both raise extremely serious questions about the competency of each man to serve in such high office, and both matters should be pursued seriously. The case against Trump was laid bare in the 44-page indictment returned against him last Thursday. The document is resplendent with details, including photographs, demonstrating the cavalier, and certainly un-presidential manner with which the former president considered classified national security information. Trump’s supporters argue, with perhaps a degree of validity, that charging a former president with nothing more than mis-handling classified papers is, in the broad scheme of things, not among the more serious issues facing America at home and abroad right now. Trump defenders declare also — and with a degree of cogency — that charging him but not...
by Bob Barr | May 30, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Students are learning less and fighting more. The Biden Administration, which seems to view virtually every policy matter through a racial lens, however, is making it more difficult for schools to actually protect teachers and students. The dispute over how to discipline disruptive students is nothing new. Unfortunately, this Administration, like its predecessor under President Obama, has made it a cultural and legal flashpoint, with little regard for the actual safety of those involved, including teachers. The current and ongoing debate about school discipline was teed up in January 2014 when President Obama’s Education and Justice departments issued a “Dear Colleague” letter outlining how Uncle Sam wanted schools to administer “discipline” without racially discriminatory effect. Four years later, the Trump Administration rescinded the Obama “guidance” on school discipline and issued its own “Dear Colleague” letter on December 21, 2018, returning primary responsibility for disciplining students back to local schools and school boards. For the past two years, the Biden Administration’s departments of Education and Justice have been “reviewing” Trump’s 2018 guidance letter, and on May 26th, issued its own “Dear Colleague” letter, re-focusing on federally determined “racial disparities” in school discipline. Each of these “Dear Colleague” letters, although not possessed of direct legal power, carries significant weight in alerting state and local schools how the federal government will come down on them if they fail to follow the “guidance” contained therein. The Obama-Biden approach to school discipline was and now remains, one that presumes racial discrimination in any discipline policy where minority students are disciplined at a higher rate, or more harshly, than their non-minority counterparts. Thus, starting in January 2014 the Department of Justice was...
