by Bob Barr | Nov 7, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Hindsight may be 20-20, but it can be illustrative and reliable. Here are nine errors Kamala Harris should not have committed during the course of losing her admittedly truncated campaign. Above all, don’t define your campaign as one centered on “change” and then declare there was nothing at all you would change in your own record as vice president. I mean, who couldn’t see this one coming a mile away? Less than one month out from Election Day, Harris gleefully appeared on “The View” with its six uber-liberal glamour gals, and was thrown the softest of softball questions by co-hostess Sunny Hostin — “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” The whiff of her milquetoast answer that she would not have changed a thing reverberated all the way to her drubbing at Trump’s hands on Tuesday. You’re a “change agent” who wouldn’t “change” a thing? Kiddo, you deserve to lose on that one alone. But there’s more lessons to be learned here. Use celebrities sparingly and certainly don’t rely on them. Sure, voters, especially young ones, love celebrities like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, and the host of others the Harris campaign trotted out over the four months of her campaign. But any campaign manager worth their salt will tell you that celebrities are like snowflakes – beautiful to look at but quickly melt. This lesson un-learned by Harris was especially obvious when compared to Trump’s campaign which wisely avoided playing the “look-at-me” celebrity card. Trump, after all, doesn’t need celebrities to burnish his image. Trump is his own celebrity. ...
by Bob Barr | Oct 24, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall It is a time-honored tradition that high-ranking U.S. government officials are – a few easily surmountable legal limitations notwithstanding — permitted to cash in on their public service when they leave Uncle Sam and enter or reenter the private sector. Even modern-day presidents have done so; some more than others (can you say, the “Clinton Foundation?”), but all have gained significant wealth after leaving office. The circumstances involving Barack Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who apparently has signed on as a lawyer representing a Chinese drone-manufacturing corporation, however, raises concerns that go beyond post-public service profiteering and impact our national security. Not only is Lynch serving as an attorney for Shenzhen DJI Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. (“DJI”) – the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones – but she has sued the U.S. Department of Defense on behalf of her Chinese client. This is troubling in a number of ways, most importantly because the Chinese drone manufacturing company DJI has for the past few years been listed by the Pentagon as a company with which our government should not deal, because of problematic relationships with the communist Chinese military. Apparently this is of less concern to our former attorney general that what is certain to be a significant retainer her firm is receiving for representing the company. The close relationship between “private” Chinese companies and the communist-controlled government in Beijing and its military arm, the People’s Liberation Army or “PLA,” is well-established and open to no real dispute. Despite superficial steps orchestrated by President Xi in recent years to appear more benign and market-oriented, according to experts these relationships in fact are more significant...
by Bob Barr | Oct 10, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall First came the self-revelation that Vice President Kamala Harris “Owns a Handgun” as blared in a New York Times headline last month. Next, in no less a substantive forum than an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Ms. Harris startled the liberal media by declaring that she would shoot anyone daring to break into her house. Coyly claiming that she “probably should not have said” she would actually shoot an intruder, Harris then took advantage of the moment to assert that her gun ownership and her avowed willingness to use it in defense of home and family, was absolute proof that claims she is anti-firearms are nothing other than a vile, Trump-created canard. While Kamala’s “Dirty Harry” act may have pulled the wool over the liberal media’s eyes, the fact remains that both Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim — “Tiananmen Square” — Walz, have a demonstrable history of favoring anti-Second Amendment policies that belie their professed, late-night conversion to gun advocacy. The New York Times may swoon over Harris’ new platform of “Freedom” as reflected in her tough rhetoric on gun ownership and protecting her home – already tightly guarded by numerous firearms-wielding Secret Service agents – with a Glock handgun, but “freedom” is not reflected in any of the following policies advocated by the Democrat Party’s current standard-bearers: As San Francisco District Attorney, Harris signed onto a legal brief asserting that the Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual right to keep and bear arms, but only a collective right. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2008 Heller decision, correctly found otherwise – that the Second Amendment does indeed guarantee an individual’s right...
by Bob Barr | Sep 12, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall “Project 2025.” It was mentioned during last night’s debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, just as it has repeatedly come up over the course of this year’s remarkably unusual presidential campaign. True to form, it was criticized by Harris and disavowed by Trump. Much has been written about Project 2025, which is detailed in a 887-page book – Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise — published last year by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based, conservative think tank, as a guide for a hoped-for conservative-oriented presidency to follow that of President Biden. The programs outlined in Project 2025 are neither new nor ground-breaking, and follow similar volumes issued by Heritage in the lead-up to presidential elections since the first edition was published in 1981. As noted by its authors, it is a “governing agenda” designed as a roadmap for a conservative president to implement where possible and advocate when necessary, for changes in an administration and in the individuals who will populate it, in order to reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government. In no other election, going back to those in the 1980s, has this election-year project become a central and recurring target by the Democrat nominee and the Party itself. Why this year? On the broadest level, one could attribute Project 2025’s prominence this cycle to the basic parameters according to which virtually everything relating to national politics and to candidates and office holders, is subject to virulent objection by whichever side or individual disagrees with all or a portion of whatever is being put forward. Thus, insofar as Project 2025 describes a conservative...
by Bob Barr | Aug 1, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall There are many reasons why President Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous, 1937 “court-packing plan” went down in flames the year after he won a landslide reelection, and even though his Democrat Party controlled both Houses of Congress. High among the reasons for FDR’s humiliating legislative defeat was the correct perception both in Congress and among the population generally that the plan was nothing other than a blatant move to politicize the Supreme Court. Now, nearly nine decades later, another Democrat President is trying the same gambit; this time by proposing to discard the lifetime tenure enjoyed by Supreme Court justices since the adoption of our Constitution in 1790, and instead limit them to a single, 18-year term on the High Court. As with FDR’s ill-fated ploy to jimmy with the nation’s highest judicial body, President Biden’s term-limiting proposal, announced on July 29th as a “Bold Plan to Reform the Supreme Court,” should never become law. Despite the Administration characterization to the contrary, Biden’s plan is nothing more than political sour apples; motivated by dislike of recent decisions by the current Supreme Court majority that are not in accord with either the President’s or his Party’s ideological views on abortion and the scope of presidential immunity for former President Donald Trump. Biden’s plan also is contrary to his vow as a candidate in 2019 to oppose “court-packing.” The handwriting for Biden’s flip-flop on this issue, however, was evidenced by an Executive Order he signed in April 2021 setting up a “presidential commission” to study “reforms” to the Supreme Court. Whether it be the mallet employed by FDR in 1937 or the lighter hammer...
by Bob Barr | May 8, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Will wonders never cease? The federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reportedly is considering moving marijuana from the most highly restricted class of “Controlled Substances” – Schedule I – where it has resided for more than half a century, to the far-less restrictive category as a Schedule III drug. This reclassification, if actually implemented, truly would represent a sea change in federal drug policy, which since 1970 has been defined by the Nixon-era Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, of which the Controlled Substances Act is found at Title II. As with much federal regulatory power, Uncle Sam’s control over drugs, including “controlled substances” and all manner of prescription medications, is implied – deriving from numerous laws passed by the Congress and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as legitimate under the so-called “commerce power” found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Despite the otherwise clear limiting language in that Section of the Constitution that congressional power to legislate extends only to “commerce” between states, ever since President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s, all three branches of the federal government have eagerly gobbled up powers clearly never dreamed of by those who wrote and ratified that document. The final bulwark against this deluge was essentially destroyed in 1942, when the High Court found constitutional under the Commerce Clause, the federal government’s power to regulate the price of wheat grown by a farmer in Ohio (Roscoe Filburn) even though none of his product was used or sold beyond the borders of the Buckeye State. The tortured reasoning that underpinned the Supreme Court’s decision in Wickard v. Filburn, provided a...
