by Bob Barr | Jul 7, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall by Bob Barr California’s slide into a socialist wasteland is hardly news. What is somewhat surprising, or at least intriguing, are the depths of stupidity to which local and state officials in the “Golden State” will go to fulfilling their destiny. Take, for instance, San Jose’s latest anti-gun gambit – a compulsory tax to pay for the “costs” of criminal gun violence, coupled with a tax directly on lawful gun owners by forcing them to purchase liability insurance. These ordinances most assuredly will be challenged in court, and all but certain to be eventually struck down, even if they survive appeal to the uber-liberal U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This means significant public resources will be spent defending mandates not even considered by their proponents to be meaningful. City officials admit as much, saying the ordinances “won’t magically end gun violence,” but vowing to press forward regardless. This should remove any doubt that the city of San Jose considers law-abiding gun owners to be part of the problem and sees them as second-class citizens to be run out of town rather than respect their constitutionally protected rights as Americans. In all their gushing over how smart and innovative they are with their latest anti-gun scheming, Mayor Sam Liccardo and his equally clueless cohorts on the city council fail to explain how punishing 99.9 percent of non-violent, law-abiding gun owners for the misdeeds of the other .1 percent will have any positive effect on crime in the city. If California’s already highly restrictive gun laws could not prevent the horrific mass shooting at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority rail yard...
by Bob Barr | Jun 30, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall It is not clear exactly when it became such an awful burden on citizens to vote on one particular day at a pre-assigned polling place, but somewhere along the line it became so difficult that pressures on state governments resulted in wholesale changes to how, when, and where people actually vote. The changes thus wrought has thrown the proverbial monkey wrench into what had been a well-established, universally understood, and simple system of voting. Vast expansion of mail-in balloting, coupled with weeks-long “early voting,” has created a Rube Goldberg-like system that has severely undermined voters’ confidence in elections. It also has planted seeds for myriad legal challenges, such as the one filed last week by the Biden Department of Justice challenging Georgia’s recently enacted ballot reform measures. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who still harbors deep resentment of Republicans for refusing to confirm him as a Supreme Court associate justice in the waning weeks of the Obama Administration, was joined at the Justice Department podium last Friday by Kristen Clarke. Together they announced that Georgia was being sued for violating the Voting Rights Act. Kristen Clarke heads the Department’s Civil Rights Division and has long advocated that America is a deeply racist country. Her current position provides the perfect vehicle with which to drive home her opinions, by alleging that laws designed to make it harder to cheat at the ballot box, are nothing more that disguised measures to perpetuate systemic disenfranchisement of Black voters. The strings for this litigation will be pulled by Justice Department lawyers but the venue will be the federal District Court in Atlanta, which...
by Bob Barr | Jun 23, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Most Americans understand that in our system of justice, a person is “innocent until proven guilty” and that someone cannot be punished if they are not guilty. Bedrock due process, right? Not necessarily. For years, many judges have punished individuals who appear before them even though they have been determined to be innocent. These judges, all of whom have taken an oath to uphold our Constitution, are basically thumbing their nose at jurors who had determined the government failed to meet its burden of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Unfortunately, this practice has not been halted either by the U.S. Supreme Court or federal law. Finally, however, a bipartisan group of United States senators are pushing legislation that would prohibit this shameful practice of punishing people for crimes for which they had not been convicted. The bill is S.601, the “Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2021.” Observers might scratch their head and wonder why such a piece of legislation is even needed, considering the clarity with which our Bill of Rights guarantees such fundamental rights as due process, equal protection of the law, and freedom from excessive punishment, among others. But such a law is needed, and it is needed now. The practice of punishing individuals for crimes not proven results from a decades-long trend of giving judges and prosecutors ever more power over defendants coming before them. Mandatory minimum sentences may be perhaps the most visible reflection of this trend but is certainly not the only one. The problem had not escaped the attention of sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his two late...
by Bob Barr | Jun 16, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall In a free market system, sellers compete by offering products of either a higher quality, or at a lower price. However, when sellers collude to sell their products all at a fixed price, consumers pay a higher price because there is no longer a need for competition. In the private sector, this is called a cartel. In the public sector, we call it a G7 summit. Joe Biden fancies himself something of a straight shooter, so why is he not shooting straight with Americans when it comes to the G7’s latest scheme for a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent? Try as they might to spin it, the G7’s plan is a global tax cartel, and while this sort of socialism is par for the course for Europe, America should know better. America is a country whose entrepreneurs built the world’s greatest and strongest economy. We are home to recent success stories like Apple and Amazon, but also benefit from some three million businesses owned by immigrants that generated more than a trillion dollars for the U.S. economy. Why in the world, then, would we voluntarily agree to make doing business in America and with American companies worse, so that by comparison, it makes doing business in Europe better? It is not the American taxpayers’ job to subsidize European socialism, but that is exactly what Biden is volunteering them to do by pledging U.S. support for this tax cartel. If European countries want to band together and levy higher taxes on corporations, that is their business. America should be working in the opposite direction, however, by taking...
by Bob Barr | Jun 9, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall In a world of facts and reason, Rebekah Jones is an outlier. As National Review’s Charles Cooke elaborately detailed last month about the Florida Department of Health’s former COVID-19 data analyst, Jones is many things – fabulist, grifter, disgraced former professor, and subject of numerous criminal charges from felony robbery to cyber-stalking. But courageous “truth teller” she certainly is not. Then again, in today’s world that depends on one’s politics. The case against Jones’ credibility is as clear-cut as it gets among today’s flurry of media disinformation, but the Left has nevertheless embraced her as a Joan of Arc figure of the COVID-19 crisis; largely, if not exclusively, because her allegations that Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis manipulated COVID-19 health stats for political gain fits the narrative they yearn to believe. And, as the saying goes, that is their story and they are sticking to it – facts, or Jones’ deranged behavior, to the contrary. There is little more to add in discrediting Jones’ wild claims against DeSantis that Cooke has not already addressed over the last month, but Jones’ ability to hoodwink liberals simply because her story confirms their personal and political biases, is worth exploring further. It reflects a disturbing trend, particularly among the mainstream media and Democrat politicians, in which “truth-seeking” is more about confirming a narrative, than actually seeking the truth. Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept information more readily as true if it reflects currently held beliefs, as well as to more quickly reject information that challenges these. To some degree, confirmation bias is a part of human nature. However, when it comes...
by Bob Barr | Jun 2, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Why in the world was the U.S. funding virus research in China? This is the $10 trillion question about which more members of Congress other than Sen. Rand Paul should be grilling Dr. Anthony Fauci, who thus far has failed to give Americans the straight answers we deserve. The issue is far bigger than Fauci and what Republicans should be demanding is a clear answer to why America funds any research of any sort with our primary world adversary, especially research that is at best “dual use” research, and at worst a precursor for devastating biological warfare. One reason is that the Left has never appeared to understand the real world, in which there are friends and enemies; including enemies with smiling faces and offering candy, but whose aim is to kill you. In the case of China, smiling faces are empty promises of domestic liberalization, and its proffered candy is lucrative Chinese markets for U.S. companies. The truth behind the mask is all too easy to spot – if one is willing to look. Human rights abuses against the Uyghur people, Orwellian surveillance networks and “social credit” systems, a tyrannical crackdown in Hong Kong, and state-sponsored cyber-hacking of U.S. companies are but a few examples of China’s recent reprehensible conduct. Still, the Left continues to mollycoddle this global power as if it were nothing more than a puppy wetting the carpet. This behavior is embarrassing when it comes from the private sector, as when the NBA, an avowed “social justice” advocate, shushed its players from criticizing China for fear of jeopardizing the league’s $5 billion investment in that country, or when a spineless...
