by Bob Barr | Jan 12, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Every 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...
by Bob Barr | Jan 5, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Aided 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...
by Bob Barr | Dec 28, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall I 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...
by Bob Barr | Dec 22, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Anti-Second Amendment Democrats are at it again, this time in Washington State, where Gov. Jay Inslee just held a press conference to urge the legislature to pass three cookie-cutter gun control measures. If the legislature grants Inslee’s wishes, law-abiding residents of the state wanting to exercise their Second Amendment rights will be severely impacted. At the same time, the edicts wend their way through the court system, to be eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Inslee knows the wheels of justice turn slow on such matters, and, like his counterpart in New York, he is more than happy to take advantage of judicial lethargy in his crusade to limit Second Amendment rights. Inslee recites the timeworn litany of false facts on which the gun control movement is founded: (1) “assault-style” rifles are “weapons of war” and have no legitimate use by civilians, (2) firearms manufacturers and retailers enjoy immunity from being sued beyond that applicable to manufacturers or retailers of other products, and (3) because a license is needed to drive a car there is no reason not to require a license to purchase a firearm. The “weapons of war” narrative is factual and historical nonsense. The AR-15 rifle, invariably cited by the Left as an example of such a firearm, is, in its lawful configuration, a semi-automatic rifle; capable of firing a single bullet with each pull of the trigger. It is not – unless unlawfully modified — an automatic rifle, meaning one that fires multiple rounds so long as the trigger remains depressed and there are rounds in the ammunition clip. Calling the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle a “weapon of war”...
by Bob Barr | Dec 15, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall As the Congress careens toward passing a multi-trillion dollar “omnibus” spending bill before adjourning sine die, at least two states – California and New York – are preparing their own massive spending sprees, called “Reparations.” If such multi-hundred-billion-dollar packages are enacted in these two most populace of states, it will lead to one of the biggest runs on government treasuries in American history – far more expensive and expansive than President Biden’s paltry-by-comparison “student loan forgiveness” program. While the concept of reparations – paying former slaves and their descendants for the horrors of slavery in centuries past – has been around since the end of the Civil War (and resurrected occasionally since then), it is only in the past several years that it has taken hold as a serious policy discussion at the federal and state levels. Considering that slavery has been outlawed in the United States by constitutional amendment and statutory law for more than a century and a half, and with the last actual slave having died in 1940, a threshold question to be posed to those officials pressing for reparations is, on what basis should those living today with no conceivable relationship to slavery be compensated? As with all things racial these days, the answer is, of course, “equity. A 2020 policy paper published by the Brookings Institute, Why we need reparations for Black Americans, makes the liberal case for mandating that governments and private entities pay reparations for every “Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in the U.S. states and territories” as well as for all “Black people who can show how...
by Bob Barr | Dec 8, 2022 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The “Convergence Accelerator” program, not to be perhaps confused with an atomic particle accelerator at a physics research lab, is part of a multi-faceted government program under the auspices of the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) to equip individuals to “identify [and] correct misinformation.” The NSF was established in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; [and] to secure the national defense…” Not surprisingly, the projects it now funds (with an annual budget of nearly $9 billion) have crept far beyond its original high-sounding mission, to now include what has become one of Uncle Sam’s top priorities: countering “misinformation.” “Misinformation,” defined as the “inadvertent spread of false information,” has proved an elusive target for the feds. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this year actually created an office – the Disinformation Governance Board — to zero in on the threat, but was pressured just months later to jettison the idea in the face of extensive public pushback. With that setback, other, less visible parts of the government have stepped into the breach. Enter the NSF. A query of NSF’s website for grants awarded for “misinformation” reveals dozens of recent and ongoing taxpayer-funded projects on the topic, directed to numerous colleges and universities and ranging in amounts from a few hundred thousand dollars to the University of Georgia in April 2022, to a massive $5 million grant to the University of Wisconsin on September 15th of this year. This $5 million grant is particularly problematic, if by “problematic” one considers a federal government agency using taxpayer dollars to equip “journalists” and others with tools to identify and...
