by Bob Barr | Jan 26, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
Townhall During 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...
by Bob Barr | Oct 25, 2022 | Daily Caller Article, Uncategorized |
Daily Caller A number of sheriffs in upstate New York are declaring that their officers will not prioritize or “aggressively enforce” the state’s recently enacted, highly restrictive gun control law. These elected sheriffs have concluded quite correctly that the state’s new law is at odds with both the Constitution of the United States and with the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared New York’s previous and long-standing gun control law – the Sullivan Act – unconstitutional. The sheriffs’ actions have rekindled a recurring debate about the powers of the more than three thousand local sheriffs serving in every state except Alaska and Connecticut. The United States has had elected sheriffs long before there was a “United States of America,” with the first one taking office in Virginia in 1652. Police departments, on the other hand, are a relatively new phenomenon. The first municipal police department not established until 1838 in Boston, Massachusetts. Unlike most county sheriffs, who hold their positions under their state constitutions, police chiefs answer only to local office holders who appointed them, not to the voters. It is this distinction that has caused a number of sheriffs in “Blue States” to earn the ire of the Left. Two factors have exacerbated this enmity in recent years – increasingly restrictive gun control measures and abusive COVID mandates by Blue State governors and legislatures. Sheriffs who decline to prioritize enforcing such laws find themselves increasingly maligned by the Left, notwithstanding the fact that they are carrying out their sworn duty to support the federal and state constitutions, and in accord with the wishes of the voters they represent. Consider Los Angeles...
by Bob Barr | Jun 27, 2022 | Uncategorized |
RealClear Politics From dialysis to chickens, the U.S. Department of Justice and its regulatory compatriot, the Federal Trade Commission, are flexing Uncle Sam’s antitrust muscles, notwithstanding strong headwinds from skeptical judges and juries. As the United States Chamber of Commerce recently warned in a brief filed with the courts, “Allowing [DOJ] to retroactively criminalize behavior strikes at the heart of the ordered liberty guaranteed to all Americans.” The work of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division receives far less public attention than its bigger brother, the Criminal Division, and the 93 U.S. attorneys who prosecute the vast majority of cases brought each year against individual and corporate defendants. Still, the broad reach of modern federal antitrust laws, dating to the early 20th century (the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1909 and the Clayton Act five years later), can strike fear into the hearts of major corporations and their executives, who can be targeted for either civil or criminal prosecution, with hefty fines possible in either context. While far smaller, the FTC can employ its regulatory reach in tandem with the Antitrust Division to boost policy initiatives favored by an administration intent on punishing the business sector. In this regard, the Biden administration has been particularly aggressive. Fortunately for the free market, the results of this push have been less than impressive. However, recent actions by both the FTC and the Antitrust Division clearly signal this administration’s intent to continue using both its civil and criminal powers to attack the business sector. In a highly unusual if not unprecedented move, the head of the Antitrust Division, Jonathan Kanter, declared that its lawyers would try...
by Bob Barr | Apr 6, 2022 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
Townhall Why has the U.S. Postal Service been permitted to develop a domestic spy arm? And will the Congress ever rein it in? Red flags were everywhere regarding the United States Postal Inspection Service’s Internet Covert Operations Program, or “iCOP” for short. But no one in Washington cared enough to heed them The first clue was that an agency supposed to deliver mail – that is, a postal service — was engaged in online surveillance. The next red flag was that in conducting surveillance, the postal service was employing controversial technology, including facial recognition, fake profiles, and social media scrapes of terms involving constitutionally protected activities (like “protest”). Finally, there was the fact that a recent audit by the USPS Inspector General concluded that none of this was legal to begin with. It gets worse. The most frightening aspect of the Post Office’s latest snooping program was not so much the tools the agency was using, but that their tactic, in the words of a Vice.com report, was “casting the widest net possible then working their way backwards” to determine who and what was a relevant catch in their high-tech fishing expeditions. This happens to be the polar opposite of what is constitutionally required of law enforcement agencies; namely, reasonable suspicion must at a minimum exist and precede an evidentiary search. Here, the postal inspectors would search for a potential target, and if one was found, work back from that to gather evidence justifying the search. Have we learned nothing about the nature of federal of law enforcement since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency? Apparently not, as in...
by Bob Barr | Apr 8, 2021 | Uncategorized |
The FTC is supposed to be a non-partisan federal regulatory agency, un-swayed by partisan politics and the influence of outside companies. As the Google documents show, it’s not. The Federalist It is hardly a secret the Barack Obama White House had a cozy relationship with Google. Between 2009 to 2015, representatives and lobbyists for the company averaged one White House meeting a week. In what can only be described as a Google-Obama revolving door, nearly 250 individuals moved either from the government to Google or Google to the government during the Obama presidency. While politicization of executive branch agencies has become the norm for both major parties, the Obama administration’s tentacles of politicization appear to have reached even further, deep into the regulatory arena. Leaked documents recently obtained by Politico demonstrate the Obama White House’s tight relationship with the search engine giant may have even influenced the behavior of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the highest so-called independent regulatory enforcement and consumer protection agencies in the land. The memos reveal, for example, that despite having overwhelming data that the company operated as an unchecked monopoly, the FTC declined to pursue enforcement against Google in 2013. As a former senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, I find these revelations deeply distressing and believe they should drum up calls in Congress to reform and depoliticize these vital federal institutions. This is essential to ensure — to the greatest extent possible — that truth, justice, and law and order prevail in our country. Federal investigators at the FTC were alerted early in Obama’s first term that Google’s surge in the then-nascent mobile phone industry appeared to...
