by Bob Barr | Jan 10, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerThe dust has settled on the raucous start to the 118th Congress. Now, the slim Republican House majority under Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership must step up and show the voters it is serious about governing. The newly adopted rules, under which both sides of the aisle must operate for the next two years, will aid the GOP in its drive to shrink the federal government and increase transparency — but only if it employs those rules to accomplish substantive goals and not simply to score political points against the Biden administration. That is a big “if.” The media has focused in the past week — during which McCarthy endured numerous attacks from his own colleagues — on the rule that allows a single member of the House to call for a vote to remove him (“vacate the Chair”). This “Sword of Damocles” will be a constant reminder to McCarthy of the fate that befell one of his predecessors – John Boehner – who suffered the wrath of the same GOP right wing that forced McCarthy to lose 14 votes for the speakership before prevailing late Friday night. Regardless of how many members are required to initiate a vote to remove the Speaker, it still will take a full majority of members – 218 – to accomplish the goal. Hopefully even the most rabid “Never Kevin” Republicans would recognize the chaos such a move would unleash, and hold their fire.More important procedurally than the vacate-the-chair issue, are those rules that will enable House GOP budget hawks, of which there are many, to force transparency into the often-Byzantine congressional appropriations and budget processes – procedures...
by Bob Barr | Jan 3, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Regardless of where the vote for House Speaker winds up — with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) either winning his sought-after job as Speaker or returning to his seat as one of 435 sitting Members — the chaos a handful of conservative Republican Members have caused will do lasting damage to their party and accomplish little of long-term substance.McCarthy has already taken severe damage to his position. The “Never Kevin” members of the Republican caucus have so wounded him that he would be largely unable to control the mechanisms a speaker must wield to keep the body functioning. In his weakened state, just controlling his own side of the aisle for two years would be a Herculean task. McCarthy’s forced, eleventh-hour concessions after his months-long campaign for Speaker will simply reinforce allegations that he lacks principles on which to govern. More importantly, and beyond the wounds to McCarthy’s political persona, some of these concessions will make it harder for the slim GOP majority to achieve its priorities.For example, agreeing to establish one or more “select” committees to investigate the Biden administration’s abuses of power, will undercut the powers of standing committees and their chairmen to set and coordinate the majority party’s priorities. That agencies of the Executive Branch have been abusing their powers was not a concept undiscovered until the Freedom Caucus latched onto it. Executive Branch abuse of power has been building for decades. While it is fair to charge the current administration with forcing the pendulum further in that direction, the reality is that every recent administration has pushed the envelope – Republican and Democrat.These matters of expanding and...
by Bob Barr | Dec 27, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerFew things strike greater fear into the hearts of many congressional Republicans — especially senators — than the specter of a “government shutdown.” The fact – not the myth – however, is that not one of the more than a half dozen government “shutdowns” the nation has survived since the 1970s was anything close to a “shutdown.” Still, many in the GOP quake at the mere mention of one, and rush to vote “Aye” for whatever spending bill is placed before them in order to avoid being labeled by their Democrat colleagues and the corporate media as budgetary Scrooges.While these so-called “shutdowns” do result in temporary problems for the functioning of the government and its millions of workers, the occurrences are neither government-wide nor permanent. In every case, the results are both temporary and partial, affecting only certain, “non-essential” federal workers. Government shutdowns are the result of budget disputes between Democrats and Republicans in the Congress or between the Congress and the White House, but always accompanied by both parties’ failure to do their jobs and pass appropriations bills to fund all government agencies by the end of the fiscal year each September 30th. This year, 18 Republican Senators blinked in their very open dispute with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) over the massive $1.7 trillion spending package laid out before them just days before Christmas. Following that senatorial GOP capitulation, nine Republican House members jumped onto the spending spree bandwagon orchestrated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her soon-to-disappear majority in the lower chamber. Not surprisingly, departing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was one of the Republican Nine.Headlines announcing the passage...
by Bob Barr | Dec 20, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerFor more than half-a-century, Uncle Sam has been giving banks the legal tools to snoop into the otherwise-private affairs of their customers. Now, they are monitoring the exercise of their Second Amendment rights. Thanks to a recent move by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, headquartered in Switzerland), U.S. banks are starting to build databases on their customers’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. And, of course, they are ready and quite willing to share that information with federal law enforcement in the name of providing a public service to identify “mass shooters.”This invasion of privacy began in earnest with enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which mandated that banks assist federal law enforcement in uncovering, investigating, and ultimately prosecuting violations of federal law. Banks have long complained about the burdens of compliance with the 1970 law and several related laws signed since then due to the multi-faceted regulations they spawned. But the trove of data these procedures have allowed banks to gather and database has more than paid for the costs of compliance.These laws’ main focus, according to the Treasury Department, which has primary responsibility to their enforcement, has been money laundering. Over the years, however, the many-headed hydra we call the system now includes virtually any banking customer activity that a bank employee might consider to be suspicious. In fact, banks’ primary tool in this regard is a document called a “Suspicious Activity Report” or “SAR.”Then there is the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks.The vast reach of the Patriot Act has been a shot of adrenaline to bank “secrecy” laws, creating new sets of problems for banking...
by Bob Barr | Dec 13, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris appeared giddy last Thursday as they surrounded a phone in the Oval Office and announced that basketball player Brittney Griner was “on her way home” from Russia. Quite a different scenario would have presented itself had White House photographers been present as the family of former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan learned that he would not be coming home from a Russian prison.Viktor Bout’s family also celebrated as the convicted arms dealer arrived in Russia after being released from prison in the United States. He received a hero’s welcome from President Vladimir Putin, who negotiated his release for the motherland.Griner is portrayed by the Biden Administration and its friends in the media and on Capitol Hill as a heroic victim, with her release illustrating the strength and resolve of the President and his Team. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was nothing heroic about the facts surrounding Griner’s predicament, and the Biden Administration in reality was beaten like a drum in this prisoner exchange, which depicts, if anything, its abject weakness in handling matters of diplomacy and national security. The White House, of course, claims that in securing the release of the basketball player, the United States got everything it could out of the Russian government. This very well may be the case, but it is hardly cause for celebration. It is, if anything, a tacit admission that America no longer carries the weight it used to in international politics, especially when it comes to playing hardball with our adversaries, and that Washington now is forced to settle for the other side’s demands rather...
by Bob Barr | Dec 6, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerBig city mayors from across the country are again calling on Uncle Sam to address a problem they are unwilling to tackle – in this case, violent crime in cities under their control. This week, some six dozen mayors belonging to the United States Conference of Mayors sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Schumer and Senate Minority Leader McConnell, demanding that the “lame duck” session of the Senate pass two pieces of extreme gun control legislation that were adopted by the House in early 2021.The mayors, of course, do not refer to the bills – H.R. 1808 and H.R. 8 – as “gun control” legislation; that would be too honest. For them, the measures, which would dramatically restrict the type of firearms that can be lawfully owned and sold, are “gun safety” measures. In these mayors’ pinched view of the Second Amendment, such limitations do “not in any way infringe on Second Amendment rights”; in much the same way that to others, restricting what books one might read would “not in any way infringe on First Amendment rights.” Such hypocrisy aside, the two “gun safety” bills which passed the House almost completely along party lines, have nothing whatsoever to do with the “safety” of firearms, and everything to do with outlawing certain firearms and firearms accessories. The legislation also mandates that virtually every transfer of a firearm, including between private individuals, be run through the FBI database known as the National Instant Check System or “NICS.”Both H.R. 8 and H.R. 1808 are purposefully convoluted, drafted in such way so as to confuse all but the most expert firearms lawyers...
