by Bob Barr | May 11, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham is holding a Judiciary Committee hearing to consider “Examining Liability During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The subject could not be more timely or important. When Sen. Graham and I served together on the House Judiciary Committee 18 years ago, we understood that in the aftermath of 9/11 the threat of lawsuits was an impediment to innovators developing the antiterrorism tools that America needed to remain safe and secure. That is why we came together with the rest of the Congress to pass the SAFETY Act of 2002, which granted liability protections to companies developing antiterrorism technologies. The SAFETY Act worked extremely well in the years following those attacks, allowing the Department of Homeland Security to approve over 1,000 critical technologies and services to fight terrorism. Now, Graham appears ready to lean on this precedent, to safeguard the innovators and public servants experiencing similar anxieties as they strive to meet the challenges presented by the Coronavirus pandemic. Graham has long recognized the need for lasting reform of our legal system. Just last year, he remarked that, “litigation abuse is real” and that “class action reform is something we probably should look at.” But while long term reorganization of the legal system is a matter necessitating long and careful study, the need for a COVID-19 liability shield is as urgent as any we ever have faced. The Washington Post even conceded in a recent column that, “Fear of covid-19 lawsuits is not mere Republican reflex,” suggesting that now is the time for bipartisan action. Just as counterterrorism specialists were most at risk of abusive litigation after 9/11,...
by Bob Barr | May 4, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller Much has been reported in recent days about the manner in which the FBI “trapped” President Trump’s former National Security Adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, into lying in an early 2017 interview. Under federal law, it is strikingly easy for unethical federal officials to successfully play a game of legal “gotcha” with individuals they decide to target. This is precisely why we must insist on maintaining the highest ethical standards for federal investigators and prosecutors, which tragically did not happen in Flynn’s case. What the FBI — then under the leadership of the since-discredited James Comey – did to Gen. Flynn constitutes a blatant violation of the most basic ethical principles which federal investigators and prosecutors are sworn to uphold. The fundamental ethical foundation according to which these men and women, including Comey and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller — whose office prosecuted Flynn — is best captured in a speech delivered by then-Attorney General Robert Jackson in early 1940. Jackson’s remarks, delivered at the Justice Department to the assembled United States Attorneys, concluded with this eloquent statement supposed to undergird the duties of these powerful officials: “The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who...
by Bob Barr | Apr 29, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com Last December I suggested that conservatives hold off uncorking the champagne when the Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments on its first major gun rights case since it decided District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. Chicago two years later. On Monday, my cautionary note proved prescient. The High Court once again sidestepped providing jurisprudential support for the fundamental right to possess a firearm. In what has become a recurring theme for conservatives looking to Chief Justice John Roberts for a degree of constitutional backbone in protecting individual liberty against government overreach, he sided with the more liberal members of the Court in not taking a position. The case before the Court (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York) involved a New York City ordinance that prohibited even the few New Yorkers permitted by the Big Apple’s police department to have a gun in their home, from transporting it to any location outside the city’s limits, even if necessary to practice at a lawful gun range. In taking this case for consideration, the Court appeared ready at long last to put some teeth into its 2008 and 2010 majority decisions (which included Chief Justice Roberts), that declared the right to possess a firearm as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, to be an individual right rather than a collective right as favored by the more liberal justices and by gun control advocates like former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. New York City officials were not asleep at the switch, however, and once the High Court agreed to take the case for decision,...
by Bob Barr | Apr 27, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller Speaker Nancy Pelosi this past weekend launched a broadside invective at the United States Supreme Court, calling the Court’s justices – apparently all nine of them — “political hacks.” Additional opinions expected in the coming weeks, however, are likely to heighten the Speaker’s ire. While the country continues in the grip of a medical pandemic made worse by a series of draconian measures instituted by state governors and local officials limiting individual liberty, Ms. Pelosi found time to vent her anger at the Supreme Court. Interestingly, the Court did not incur the Speaker’s wrath because it dared limit what has become the Left’s most sacred shibboleth – unfettered access to abortion on demand. Nor was the Speaker’s anger precipitated by a majority of justices finding cause to support the right to possess a firearm, which, unlike the right to an abortion, is expressly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. No, Ms. Pelosi was furious that the nation’s highest court let stand a decision by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin that did nothing more than allow a long-scheduled primary election to proceed on April 7th without extending the time for absentee ballots to be gathered in. From the perspective of Speaker Pelosi, who just weeks ago delayed for many days a House vote to provide essential financial assistance to individuals and businesses harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing an election to proceed according to the law makes the Supreme Court justices nothing more than petty “political hacks.” Pelosi’s judicial peeve notwithstanding, one has to give her a small degree of credit for paying attention to the goings on...
by Bob Barr | Apr 20, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller For more than two decades, the system codified in federal law for ensuring that persons prohibited from possessing a firearm are not able to lawfully acquire one from a licensed firearms retailer has worked reasonably well. Since 1998 when the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or “NICS,” became operational, the FBI has completed hundreds of millions of background checks on prospective gun purchasers; 28.4 million last year alone. For some reason, however, the FBI recently has taken to playing games with NICS, and by bureaucratic fiat ignoring or overriding an important provision in the law. Neither firearms purchasers nor retailers should stand for such skullduggery. The provision at issue is that which permits the FBI to place what amounts to a “hold” on a prospective firearm purchase, in order to allow the Bureau time to determine if a particular purchaser falls within one of the several categories of persons not permitted to possess a gun. Under the law establishing NICS, with the FBI as the “go-to” agency, that temporary “hold” is strictly limited to “three business days.” While the vast majority of inquiries submitted to the FBI each year by firearms dealers (Federal Firearms Licensees or “FFLs”) are approved or denied almost immediately (hence, the “instant” check system), occasionally there are those that raise questions, and in each such instance, the FFL is notified and the statutorily allowed “three business day” period begins to run. If the dealer does not receive a denial within that window, the dealer is permitted at its discretion to allow the purchase (or “transfer”) to proceed. The three-business-day hold period is...
by Bob Barr | Apr 17, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Atlanta, GA Friday, April 17, 2020 Bob Barr, who represented the 7th District of Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, today issued a statement praising Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s decision to circulate a draft FCC Order, that would at long last move forward the process of opening up a segment of mid-band satellite spectrum for commercial use in 5G technology. An application by Ligado Networks to free up mid-length spectrum for commercial purposes essential to deployment of 5G communications, has been languishing for years awaiting the green light from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) embedded within the Commerce Department. Pai’s decision to approve Ligado’s application was predicated on a number of modifications in the company’s application that would protect against harmful GPS interference. If adopted by the five-member Commission headed by Pai, the draft Order would tangibly signal to the country and the world that the United States is committed to seize the leadership in deployment of 5G technology, a role China openly covets. Pai’s move also is in accord with statements last year by President Trump strongly supporting freeing up wireless spectrum for 5G...
