by Bob Barr | May 13, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com As President Trump himself tweets (again) in support of 26-year-old firebrand Laura Loomer’s solid congressional campaign to unseat the liberal Democrat incumbent in his home district in Florida (FL-21), the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is acting as if the race does not exist. Sadly, it is not unusual for the establishment GOP to look the other way when a movement conservative enters the arena, no matter how strong and promising that candidate may be. In fact, this race is definitely winnable. Loomer has assembled a campaign team led by veteran operatives with numerous victories under its belt, and she already has proven herself a fundraising juggernaut. While Loomer may have some rough edges, she is no dummy, and her political backbone is as solid as they come. Loomer made a name for herself as an investigative journalist, building a massive national following of 265,000 supporters on Twitter who rabidly retweeted her work and cheered in support of all that she did. (Twitter then pulled her account and banned her for life, but that is another issue for another day.) Notwithstanding support from the highest Republican office holder in the land and from numerous other key conservatives, and despite the campaign’s momentum and her “Anti-AOC profile,” the NRCC remains totally silent on Laura Loomer. The Republican Party’s top way of promoting new candidates is its “Young Guns” program. The Party’s congressional leaders pick candidates from districts across the nation who meet “the minimum threshold of campaign organization and show potential to achieve greater status.” The program currently lists 103 candidates, but the face of young, telegenic grassroots icon Loomer is...
by Bob Barr | May 12, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller In Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty told Alice that whenever he used a word, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” In today’s political discourse, the problem is not so much that people attach their own subjective meaning to words; the problem is words and phrases no longer have any meaning attached to them. Words and phrases have become untethered from objective reality. One of the latest victims of this craziness is the “presumption of innocence.” Even though the term “presumption of innocence” does not appear in our Constitution, it is among the most significant legal principles undergirding our constitutional republic. It has been one of the pillars of western civilization going back to ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and is a key element of British common law we inherited from our prior colonial bosses. While the phrases “presumption of innocence” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” may flow easily from the lips of most citizens, increasingly there is little or no understanding behind the words; and no patience to engage in the process needed to ensure evidence of guilt overcomes the presumption of innocence. To a large degree, this troubling situation is born of the deeply polarized political environment that has swept over our society in recent years; threatening to unravel a legal system that has long served to protect individual liberty against abuse by both government and private actors. Herd mentality that presumes an opponent guilty without concern for the evidence, or that presumes a supporter innocent regardless of the evidence, has become a hallmark of contemporary public policy debate. It was...
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...
