by Bob Barr | Jul 26, 2024 | Uncategorized |
By Bob Barr and Jason Altmire Washington Examiner With the Supreme Court recently expressing clear disapproval of many of the Federal Trade Commission‘s operating procedures, Congress must aggressively steer this key regulatory agency back to its original mission of protecting consumers. When we served in Congress, we relied on the FTC’s challenges to artificial monopolies and predatory business activities to conduct our own legislative business. Its work and guidance helped us construct fair regulatory frameworks that worked for businesses and consumers alike, regardless of how wealthy, poor, big, or small they were and irrespective of how politically well-connected they might or might not have been. Today, however, the FTC is placing its political policy agenda above the rule of law and the interests of the consumers it is charged with protecting. It would be unfair and wasteful for people to wait years, or even decades, for challenges to further regulatory abuses by the FTC and other agencies to reach and be decided by the courts. The ball is in Congress’s court. Congress still oversees the FTC, and the federal legislative body has an obligation to step in and reform the regulatory agency it created more than a century ago. Most importantly, Congress must roll back the FTC’s new enforcement policies and operational standards — standards that the commission itself has admitted do not necessarily represent the interests of consumers. The real problem started two years ago, when the FTC rescinded its antitrust enforcement policy that properly had kept its actions “guided by the public policy underlying the antitrust laws, namely, the promotion of the consumer welfare.” Sadly, in 2022, the commission, under the leadership of Chairwoman...
by Bob Barr | Jul 24, 2024 | Uncategorized |
The Regulatory Review In Garland v. Cargill, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its statutory authority in issuing a final rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns. Assessment of this common-sense opinion must start with a review of the National Firearms Act, which defines a “machine gun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The definition also includes “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively… for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.” In contrast to a machine gun, which can fire multiple shots when its trigger is engaged once, a semiautomatic firearm can fire only one shot per trigger engagement. There are shooting techniques, however, to increase the rate at which semiautomatic firearms can be fired. One technique is “bump firing.” When bump firing, the shooter keeps his trigger finger stationary, while allowing the recoil energy from firing the gun to push the gun backward quickly and reset the trigger. Simultaneously, the shooter applies forward pressure on the gun with his non-trigger hand to “bump” the trigger into his still-stationary trigger finger, which fires a subsequent shot. When done effectively, bump firing allows semiautomatic firearms to fire at rates approaching machine guns. A bump stock is a device that makes bump firing easier. Importantly, even with a bump stock, the Court noted that “as with any semiautomatic firearm, the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot.” Moreover, bump firing—with or without a bump stock—requires significant manual input from the shooter....
by Bob Barr | Apr 17, 2024 | Uncategorized |
Townhall President Biden’s family, individuals within his Administration, and his political supporters will defend him aggressively when former President Trump and others in the GOP deride him for his many gaffes and policy blunders. Mainstream media pundits will continue to cover for him when presented with inescapable evidence of his advanced age. There is, however, one trait exhibited repeatedly by the current President that is beyond dispute or defense even by his most ardent supporters – Biden’s utter disdain for the rule of law. This disturbing characteristic was on full display recently with the signing of a regulatory “rule” placing further limits on the Second Amendment without bothering to secure the legislative approval to do so as required by the Constitution. Constitutional Law 101 reminds us that of the three branches of our government, only the Legislative is empowered to pass, amend, or change laws. In fact, the very first operative sentence of the Constitution makes this abundantly clear, vesting All legislative Powers in the Congress; not in the presidency and not in the Courts. Once the Congress has spoken by passing legislation, and once signed by the president, it becomes the law of the land and can be changed only by subsequent act of Congress. It is black-letter law that a president cannot, consistent with the Constitution and the principle that America operates as “a government of laws, and not of men,” simply change terms defined and codified in statutes to suit his policy preferences. This is, however, exactly what the Biden Administration has done with long-standing firearms laws which provide that if individuals or businesses regularly and...
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...
by Bob Barr | Jul 6, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
Townhall For more than a decade, China has been carefully and strategically making commercial, diplomatic, and even military inroads in Latin America and the Caribbean. Now, Beijing reportedly is building a military facility on the northern coast of Cuba, less than 100 miles from the United States. Our response has been less than impressive. It is not as if Beijing’s multi-pronged strategy to increase its presence in the Western Hemisphere has escaped Washington’s attention. Even in the late 1990s, I and several other Members of Congress expressed concern that Chinese companies (all of which ultimately answer to the governing Chinese Communist Party) were establishing commercial beachheads at both entrances to the Panama Canal, just as Panama gained control of the strategic waterway pursuant to the treaty signed with the Carter Administration in 1977. Our concerns fell on deaf ears. In 2018, a smiling President Xi Jinping was photographed next to Panama’s president, alongside the Panama Canal. Chinese trade with countries in the region has soared in recent years, ballooning from $180 billion in 2002 to $450 billion last year. China’s investments have included everything from mining and agriculture projects to infrastructure and communications technology that has surveillance capabilities. China’s diplomatic gains in the region have been no less significant, with Paraguay the only South American country that still recognizes Taiwan. Even in the Bahamas, a one-hour flight from Miami, China’s presence is far larger than ours. Not coincidentally, the U.S. Navy maintains a major test and training facility in the Bahamas. While there is little the United States can do to directly thwart China’s commercial and diplomatic moves in the region, our...
by Bob Barr | Mar 13, 2023 | Uncategorized |
Democrats embrace antitrust attack on JetBlue merger with Spirit Airlines FoxNews.com Markets are more flexible, more innovative, and move faster than the government. Still, repeatedly over the years we have seen the government decide to take antitrust action against innovative private companies, only to realize years later, as the markets in question matured, just how costly and counterproductive such moves truly were. Now, as Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once said, it’s “déjà vu all over again.” In the 1960s, government antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice targeted IBM. “Big Blue” was sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, with the feds claiming it attempted to monopolize the market for “general-purpose digital computers.” Embarrassingly, a cottage industry of personal computers was coming into the computer market at the time, making IBM far from the only game in town. The case, however, lingered for more than a dozen years until, on January 8, 1982, the Department decided it lacked merit. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration targeted Microsoft for offering its Internet Explorer browser as part of its operating system, a move the Justice Department found unfair to Netscape, which at the time was its leading competitor. Today, neither browser exists. The market moved on despite government efforts to constrain it. More recently, a federal court in 2018 threw out the government’s case against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, reflecting the reality that the idea of a cable company having a viewer monopoly was laughable, considering that YouTube, satellite TV, Netflix, Roku, and others were all competing for the attention of the viewing public. Today, we are witnessing this same antitrust folly repeating...
