by Bob Barr | Feb 2, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallIn 1971, left wing provocateur Saul Alinsky published Rules For Radicals, which remains even today, a half century later, a favored handbook for extremists intent on undermining our nation’s economic, civic, and legal foundation and rebuilding it in the image of a socialist society. For the radical disruptor in Alinsky’s worldview, “everything is relative and changing”; in other words, to succeed as a revolutionary, existing values and norms must attacked and unanchored. Only by so doing can the new, radical ideas take hold and replace existing principles. This is precisely what the “woke” movement is doing, most disturbingly to our legal system.At the most fundamental level, the “anchor” for our legal system is the Bill of Rights, which provides a set of substantive and procedural guarantees designed to ensure that fairness and objectivity attach to all aspects of the civil and criminal justice processes. These well-known standards include among many others, the right to counsel, the right to be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to be considered innocent unless and until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. These are not “relative and changing” standards, and if they were thus unmoored, legal chaos would prevail. Yet this is precisely what the “woke” movement is attempting to do to our judicial system and the legal profession.How about the right to have a lawyer to represent you? The idea that even hated defendants have a right to be represented by competent legal counsel to ensure their rights are protected, predates the incorporation of that principle in the Bill of Rights. John Adams, one of our Founders and our second president, declared it was an...
by Bob Barr | Jan 26, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
TownhallDuring the 2020 election cycle, uber wealthy Mark Zuckerberg orchestrated much of Big Tech’s plan to ensure that more Democrat votes were cast and counted in key precincts across the country.In this, Big Tech was aided in large measure by three factors: the cover of COVID as an excuse to “facilitate” the voting process, lax election laws in many states, and the lure of “free” money for local officials (including Republican office holders) always eager to receive more of it.Three years later, some things have changed that will force these players to alter their tactics in manipulating election procedures, but Big Tech’s will to do so has not in the least diminished.Changes to voting procedures implemented in recent years, most notably widespread mail-in and multi-day voting, have become systematized to the degree that voters (and many courts) now consider it a right to be able to cast votes days if not weeks in advance of scheduled and lawful voting days. It has become the status quo.Granted, it has not always worked out the way Democrats hoped and planned; just ask Georgia Democrat super star Stacey Abrams, who lost decisively to incumbent GOP Governor Brian Kemp last November.On the other hand, Democrats have achieved several notable successes thanks to massive early and mail-in balloting. By all accounts, for example, Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, and now sitting Sen. John Fetterman, benefitted greatly from having a huge number of votes cast for him in the days and weeks before his sole debate with his GOP opponent, during which he performed miserably.Much media attention was drawn to the Left’s brazen and prideful effort...
by Bob Barr | Jan 19, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallThe Hippocratic Oath, for centuries a foundational recitation of the objective goal of physicians to preserve life, remain ethical, and above all to serve their patients wisely, has, like so much of contemporary civil society, been largely cast aside as outdated – in the words of a dean at the Yale School of Medicine, it had become “impersonal, cold, and too pat.” In many medical schools, the oath now taken by graduating medical students is personal and subjective rather than objective, thus allowing each newly minted physician to decide for themselves what code they will follow in their career. The dilution of a common, universal code for doctors is one of many reasons why the practice of medicine in the United States, and even more so in our neighbor to the north, has become unmoored from the formerly sacred doctor-patient relationship, and more closely tethered to “equity” and the whims of patients, including facilitating abortion and even euthanasia.As with many troubling trends in the country, the beat-down of scientific inquiry and reasoned debate within the practice of medicine is being led by California, where the primacy if not the infallibility of the federal CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is now the law.The COVID pandemic opened the door to perhaps the most unscientific approach ever to public healthcare policy, reaching its nadir with the new California law that prohibits physicians from communicating information critical of federal COVID guidelines. Failing to adhere to this prohibitory statute can result in doctors losing their licenses. Interestingly, one prominent medical organizations, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) blames the federal government for much of the “lack of trustworthiness” that...
by Bob Barr | Jan 12, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallEvery impeachment article filed in the U.S. House of Representatives recites, as it must, the language found in Art. II Sec. 4 of the Constitution, that the target has committed “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Increasingly, however, the constitutional vehicle by which to begin the process of removing from office not only a president but any “civil Officers of the United States,” has become a tool with which to express congressional displeasure with a president’s policies or now, those of a cabinet official.On Monday, just days after Speaker Kevin McCarthy assumed his post and swore in 434 Members of the 118th Congress (there being one vacancy), a resolution calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was introduced. The impeachment resolution, H.Res. 8, has not yet been officially printed, but according to its sponsor, Texas Republican Pat Fallon, it charges that Mayorkas “engaged in a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with his duties,” and undertook “willful actions [to] erode our immigration system, undermine border patrol morale, and imperil American national security.” On top of all that, Mayorkas lied to the Congress by claiming falsely that our border with Mexico is “secure.”Evidence that Mayorkas has been a disaster at Homeland Security is not hard to come by. Illegal border crossings are at historically high levels, illicit drugs, especially fentanyl, are flooding across our southern border, and morale among border patrol officers is extremely low. By any reasoned definition of the term, the border is not “secure.”Gross incompetence by a senior government official, including cabinet secretaries, could, in theory and practice, provide grounds for impeachment. However, the line between such gross incompetence that violates federal...
by Bob Barr | Jan 5, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallAided by liberal Members of Congress and armed with a taxpayer-funded report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal Department of Education is set to embark on a crusade to establish a uniform, national school dress code in order to ensure “equity and safety.”Dress codes have long been targeted by the Left as violative of students’ civil rights. Recently, with the rise of “equity” as the shibboleth of the Left, groups such as Planned Parenthood consider dress codes as tools of “sexism, racism, and transphobia.” Teacher-based organizations, such as We Are Teachers, have hopped aboard the anti-dress code bandwagon, declaring, for example, that dress codes must be “gender neutral” and pass a “diversity test.”Who would have thought a generation or two ago that simply requiring students to dress appropriately was so sinister.To be fair, there are instances where teachers and school administrators misuse dress codes; abuses that should not be tolerated. However, concluding that dress codes constitute a civil rights violation and urging the Education Department to implement a national standard to ensure they do not “discriminate” in any way against anyone at any time, is a typical overreaction by the Nanny State. Yet this is precisely the direction in which the Department appears headed, as revealed in its response to the GAO study.Never shy about coming up with ways to spend taxpayer dollars, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights responded to GAO’s recommendation that it “design . . . equitable and safe dress codes” by committing to devote “resources” (i.e., taxpayer dollars) to develop such codes for K-12 public schools nationwide. In order to accomplish this goal, the Department also (of course) would...
by Bob Barr | Dec 28, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallI am not a Marine, but I have been honored over my years to count several formerly active and now-retired U.S. Marines as close personal friends. Additionally, I worked with many active-duty Marines during my years serving with the CIA in the 1970s and as a Member of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. The United States Marine Corps represents the very best of what America stands for, most notably attributes of ethics, reliability, loyalty, patriotism, strength, and innovation. These are some of the reasons why I and many others, including several former Marine officers, have grave concerns about policies now being forced onto the Corps, especially by a pair of official documents published over the past nearly three years — Force Design 2030 and Talent Management 2030.The Marine Corps has served our country honorably in every major foreign conflict since before we became an independent sovereign nation. One of our country’s most beautiful memorials is the one just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., depicting the four Marines raising the American flag at Mt. Suribachi during the fierce battle for Iwo Jima in February 1945.Despite the tremendous successes and great human cost borne by the Marine Corps in fighting to protect our national security, the service periodically has faced serious bureaucratic attacks here at home. Some of these challenges have been rooted in inter-service rivalries, with others based on myopic fiscal concerns or the well-known bureaucratic game of change-for-the-sake-of-change. The current attacks on the Marine Corps structure and culture, however, truly are existential.The changes recommended by these documents are considered by retired Marine Corps generals who have studied them thoroughly, not...
