by Bob Barr | Mar 23, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall As the oft-described Party of “Law and Order,” criminal justice reform tends to take Republicans out of their comfort zone. The continued, politically motivated prosecutions of January 6th participants, however, illustrates clearly why criminal justice issues must serve as a prerogative for conservatives, rather than a partisan blind spot. The federal government determines what is “legal” and what is “criminal” for purposes of federal policies and jurisdiction. Its agents then enforce that legality based on the administration’s interpretation of the law, and then deprive citizens of their life and liberty for crossing that line. Our Founders understood the huge responsibility of such power, and of the consequences when abused. This is precisely why much of our Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, concerns itself with the judicial process. Notwithstanding those many constitutional limitations, the unmistakable trend over the past half century has been to expand government power to criminalize all manner of behavior. Contrary to recent rhetoric from the Right, this is not a “guilty man’s” problem exclusively. Examples abound of law-abiding citizens being swept into federal investigations for nothing more than carrying large amounts of cash through an airport checkpoint, or making bank deposits the government considers to be “suspicious.” In fact, the federal criminal code has ballooned to the degree that legal scholar Harvey Silverglate posits that the average, “law-abiding” citizen commits three felonies a day. This makes criminal prosecution not so much a matter of if, but when the government decides its interests are advanced by enforcing one or more of the several thousand criminal laws on the books already. Defending oneself against the full weight of a federal...
by Bob Barr | Mar 16, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The “Green” Kool-Aid Democrats continue to guzzle is truly making them incomprehensively detached from reality. It has sunk to the point at which one senior Democrat congressional leader, Sen. Ed Markey from Massachusetts, openly (and with a straight face) declared that energy independence achieved by producing more natural gas and oil, is “one of the biggest lies.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine presents a doomsday scenario for radical environmentalists. The war has exposed just how weak “going green” has made Europe, forcing leaders to choose between economic disaster, and subsidizing Putin’s barbaric war. On our side of the Atlantic, Democrats should be paying attention to the lessons of linking one’s national security to the cooperation of despots, but they would rather keep chugging their green Kool-Aid beverage. Europe’s fate will be America’s if Democrats continue to follow their radical environmental agenda. Decades of environmental activism, ironically funded in Europe by Russian money, destroyed Europe’s energy independence. This short-sighted policy has made the continent largely unable to absorb even minor disruptions to supply from the Russian-controlled energy spigot. The situation is so dire in Germany, one official said a boycott targeting Russia would lead to “mass poverty” for the world’s fourth-largest economy. While America is not in quite so precarious a position as Europe, it is certainly nowhere close to where our country should – and could – be. Consider how long it took the Biden Administration to finally pull the plug on our country’s imports of Russian crude following that country’s invasion of Ukraine. If it was that hard to replace just eight percent of our total oil supply,...
by Bob Barr | Mar 9, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Anyone caring to see the folly of allowing the government to decide what is “fake news” or “disinformation,” need look no further than what Russia is doing right now with information emanating from the battlefronts in Ukraine. Republicans are angry with arbitrary bans by social media giants against conservative users of their platforms, while the GOP’s Democrat colleagues still remain upset with so-called “disinformation” on COVID-19. In response, both sides have taken aim at the tech industry by suggesting, if not demanding, greater government involvement; in the name of truth and fairness, of course. What is happening in Russia today illustrates vividly that such moves would be a grave mistake. Big Tech, and in particular social media companies, certainly are not blameless for the storm that hangs over them. Bowing to pressure from Woke Scolds and do-gooders in Congress and state legislatures, they established arbitrary rules, enforced by secret algorithms, to police subjective political content. Not unexpectedly, such “soft” censorship prompted backlash that has worked its way up to Congress. All of this could have been avoided if, as Elon Musk recently tweeted about his own policies on Starlink, social media platforms had maintained a “free speech absolutist” approach to content and let users drown out bad speech with more speech. Why conservatives, who historically have been averse to government regulatory intervention, would lift the privacy tent to allow the nose of the government camel to poke through, is mystifying, but it clearly is present. What the government would do with such control is written into the pages of history – and current events. As Russia’s military blunders in Ukraine pile...
by Bob Barr | Feb 23, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Except in the months preceding a crucial midterm election, today’s Democrats would argue that high gas prices are a good thing. They see gas prices as a Pigouvian tax on fossil fuels that accelerate the shift to renewable “green” energy. Regulatory and legislative actions such as killing the Keystone Pipeline early last year, and closing off federal lands for oil drilling, were made by the Biden Administration and its congressional cohorts knowing full well such decisions would raise gas prices for consumers. Democrats were okay with that, until their polling numbers began dipping into the frigid zone. It appears now to have dawned on them that higher gas pump prices are a ballot box killer; this year in particular with Joe Biden’s poll numbers deeper underground than oil shale. This has left Democrats scrambling to find a way to explain to voters how paying more at the pump is a positive part of their environment masterplan, resulting in one of the dumbest proposals to come out of Congress in decades – which is saying something. Democrat Brainiacs have concluded that a “gas tax holiday” in this election year is the perfect solution! Don’t get me wrong. I love tax cuts, especially when permanent and when combined with offsetting cuts in spending. This latest goofball idea of a “gas tax holiday,” however, is neither. Not only is it temporary, but there are no concurrent spending cuts to counter the drop in revenue. In fact, Biden’s enormously expensive infrastructure plan relies heavily on federal gas tax revenue, and the drop in funding for however long Democrats consider “temporary” (the day after the midterms, perhaps?),...
by Bob Barr | Feb 16, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Donald Trump warned Americans about the Deep State. Instead of listening, Democrats (the Party of yore that actually cared about abusive government power) and their cronies in the Mainstream Media mocked him for peddling an “Alt-Right conspiracy.” Not only do we now have more than sufficient proof that the Deep State exists, but clear evidence it has grown stronger, bolder, and more dangerous. In just the past week, two shocking reports have come to light that detail the extent to which the Deep State has flourished in the shadows. The first comes from Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, who, in a just-declassified letter to the country’s top Foreign Intelligence officials, called for full disclosure of a previously classified, April 2021 report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). That report details how the CIA “secretly conducted its own bulk program…entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight…” The second example of Deep State growth comes in a public filing just last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by President Trump in 2019 to investigate FBI wrongdoing. The document details what amounts to a clear conspiracy to infiltrate the office of candidate Trump, President-elect Trump, and then President Trump; not only unlawfully gathering information on him, but feeding it back to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. One of these allegations alone is enough to make the hair on the back of one’s neck...
by Bob Barr | Feb 9, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall I love Delta Airlines. It is my true hometown airline and I fly it regularly. If any passenger were to act in a way that endangers the flight, the crew, or other passengers, that person should be held accountable by Delta and by federal law if circumstances warrant. But, please, let’s not create another “No Fly” list. Currently, the FBI maintains a classified “terror watchlist” containing the names and information for thousands of individuals the government believes pose a potential terror threat. There is the TSA’s “No-Fly List” that determines who is allowed to board a commercial airplane. The agency also maintains a Secondary Security Screening Selection (SSSS) list that assigns certain passengers for additional screening. It is no secret that the federal government already maintains a number of “lists” that serve to prevent individuals whose names appear thereon from engaging in what otherwise would be constitutionally guaranteed activities, such as purchasing a firearm or travelling interstate (yes, this has been held by the Supreme Court to be a protected right). We simply do not need another list. Not that long ago, the private sector maintained a healthy suspicion of government power, and its potential for abuse. The 9/11 terror attacks changed this dynamic significantly, with the private sector cooperating increasingly (and occasionally, unlawfully) with federal officials to achieve the shared goal of keeping America safe. Today, however, the mentality that the public and private sectors are “partners” is commonplace, and often has less to do with the original intent of preventing terror attacks, and more to do with enlisting Uncle Sam and his federal agents to help...
