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...
by Bob Barr | Apr 25, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall An adage learned early in the career of a trial attorney is, “if the law is not on your side, argue the facts, and if the facts are not on your side, argue the law, but if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, make sure you get your fee up front and in cash,” because you are almost certain to lose your case. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is paid by Big Apple taxpayers regardless of whether he wins or loses a case, but he deserves to lose the so-called “hush money” case against former President Donald Trump because neither the law nor the facts justify this prosecution. Although the trial in the case, styled “THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK against DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant,” is in its early stages, any reasonably objective analysis of the applicable facts and the law leaves one with far more doubt than could be considered “reasonable” that the 45th President of the United States committed even a single one of the 34 criminal acts alleged by Mr. Bragg. Media attention focuses on virtually every real or perceived aspect of what happens inside the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan, down to and including the thermostat setting and Trump’s posture; such irrelevancies are fodder for media pundits on both sides of today’s ever-present partisan political divide. It is, of course, not surprising that conservative media outlets believe Trump to be absolutely and unquestionably innocent, while their liberal counterparts can hardly contain their glee at the former President’s predicament and wish him a speedy trip to Riker’s Island. Much...
by Bob Barr | Apr 4, 2024 | Townhall Article |
Townhall As former New York Yankees icon Yogi Berra is said to have opined, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” So it is with the U.S. Congress repeatedly abusing its power over “interstate commerce” to play favorites and distort the free market. One of the latest targets of such regulatory overreach is fantasy sports betting. This is a swimming pool in which Members of Congress have played previously. In fact, some of the same gaming companies I sought to help escape unfair government regulations when I represented Georgia in Congress back in the late 1990s are now trying to weaponize similar regulations against their competitors. It reflects the tired story of Crony Capitalism. After I began my eight years of service on the House Judiciary Committee, I became dismayed at how federal legislation and regulations aimed at online gaming companies came at the behest of wealthy brick- and-mortar casino interests. In fact, in 1992, shortly before I began my congressional career, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which imposed a federal ban on sports betting throughout the United States. In a significant victory for consumer choice, states’ rights, and the marketplace, the Supreme Court in 2018 overturned PASPA, thereby reaffirming that sports betting deserves freedom from government overreach. Now, however, FanDuel and DraftKings, two of the largest and most successful companies that were helped most by the High Court’s lifting of that anti-free market law, are looking to use Uncle Sam’s regulatory powers to kill some of their competitors in the same way that the brick- and-mortar casinos tried to...
by Bob Barr | Dec 14, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
Townhall In the 1972 made-for-TV movie Between Time and Timbuktu, the protagonist is transported to a world in which no one person is permitted to be superior in any way to any other person – physically or mentally. Individuals who happen to be physically stronger or more agile than others are forced to carry weights on their shoulders – “handicappers” – so they are not able to out-perform their weaker fellow citizens. Now, a half century after author Kurt Vonnegut’s make-believe but prescient production, the federal government is punishing companies for hiring employees who are stronger and more athletic than others. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has become Uncle Sam’s handicapper enforcement arm. One case at hand pits the EEOC, currently chaired by Democrat Charlotte Burrows, against a California moving company. The unforgivable legal sin committed by Meathead Movers that has led EEOC to file a lawsuit against it, is to hire movers who are strong and agile – precisely the qualities that would have forced such employees to don the handicappers envisioned by Vonnegut in Between Time and Timbuktu. The primary difference between the handicappers in the 1972 movie and those now the object of the EEOC’s lawsuit against Meathead Movers, is that in the fictional account, the handicappers are physical weights, while the 2023 handicappers are statutory. The punishment sought by the EEOC against the moving company is, of course, monetary. The EEOC initially demanded that Meathead Movers pay $15 million to settle the case – an offer the company refused. Notwithstanding the agency’s oh-so-generous subsequent offer of $5 million to withdraw its threatened action against the company, Meathead...
