“Woke” is a word that’s newer to us, but did you ever imagine that its cultural superiority would wipe other words from the dictionary? Today’s Idiot of the Week is a University that is ‘humbly’ doing their part in re-writing the allowance of both the English language and idioms based on what they believe to be “acceptable.”
by Bob Barr
The problem with having a reputation as a political bomb-thrower is that sometimes a good idea gets lost in the dust-up. This was the case last week when, in an interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stated she would “kick out every single Chinese in this country that is loyal to the CCP.” Predictably, critics latched onto the word “Greene,” and immediately discounted the substance of what the freshman congresswoman proposed.
In fact, if you brush aside her phraseology, there is something worthwhile and timely in what Greene is saying, and which confronts a serious national security problem most leaders in Washington, D.C. refuse to acknowledge.
The dirty little secret is that our national security is being seriously undermined because far too many Chinese nationals are living and working freely here in America, even as their allegiance remains tied to the communist regime in Beijing, our primary adversary on the world stage (as I have noted previously).
Federal agents rounding up large numbers of Chinese immigrants holding visas or who have resident alien status, in order to scrutinize their “loyalty” to the Chinese Communist Party, does not make for an effective (or likely constitutional) response to the threat posed by China. As a public policy, it is akin to using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is the far better tool.
Moreover, were Republican leaders to adopt such a proposal, China’s leaders would sit back and smile serenely while the media, academia, and U.S. businesses with ties to the communist behemoth soundly bash the idea, thereby ensuring the proposal will fail to materialize as policy, while providing additional camouflage for their nefarious activities in our country.
The essential point Greene appears to be making, is that it is high time the federal government direct some of its vast intelligence apparatus toward identifying Chinese aliens who have verifiable, working ties to the CCP or its Red Army, and then take steps to send them home. On this point, Greene could not be more correct.
For far too long, federal officials in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our government have worn the same rose-colored glasses they donned in the 1990s, believing that increased economic ties would liberalize China and turn the Communists into allies. Instead, and quite predictably, under President Xi Jinping, China has hardened its position against the U.S. in economic matters as well as military.
Years of kowtowing to Beijing, especially a naive attitude towards Chinese students and those with work visas, have allowed Chinese intelligence assets to become embedded in American academic, technological, scientific, and even our military institutions. Members of Congress are not immune from being targeted as information assets; just ask Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).
Identifying Chinese nationals involved in sensitive research or technology and who have links to the CCP or the Red Army, and revoking their visas in order to send them back to Beijing, makes sense however you look at it, except of course, if considered from China’s perspective. Clearly, the Chinese leadership is betting that American “wokeness” will prevail and such a bold move not taken seriously.
Implementing a policy such as at the root of what Greene is getting at would be neither easy nor uncomplicated. It necessarily would require participation by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, in addition to the departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security.
If our government performed as it should (and as it did in decades past), our intelligence agencies would expertly, but covertly, lead the charge. Unfortunately, this is 2021 not 1981 and these agencies are now far too busy surveilling, investigating, and prosecuting “white nationalists” and domestic “anti-government” groups, to be bothered countering the very real national security threats posed by foreign enemies (including those inside our borders).
This should not, however, dissuade Republicans from at least trying. Pressing the issue will, if nothing else, raise the profile of the threat China poses and hopefully move it from the backburner closer to the front.
Greene’s many critics may continue (as surely they will) to inaccurately label her proposal “racist” and xenophobic, but the longer our government fails to respond meaningfully to the threat she has stepped forward to identify, the harder it becomes to dislodge these real enemies among us.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
You hear it all the time, from Democrats as well as Republicans: “The most important responsibility of our government is to keep us safe.” It is so axiomatic that no one ever really questions it, regardless of whether it is posited in a discussion about COVID restrictions, national security policy or law enforcement. But it is not an accurate statement.
The primary responsibility of the federal government is not to keep us safe; it is to protect and guarantee our liberty and our individual rights as guaranteed by (not given by) our Constitution. This principle is clearly described in the Federalist Papers, and is every bit as relevant today as when those essays were drafted 233 years ago, regardless of the context in which it is applied.
In the context of the Second Amendment, for example, debating the pros and cons of gun control, if we start with the premise that the “primary responsibility of the government is to keep us safe,” then we have ceded to the Left the basic “playing field” on which the extent to which the right to keep and bear arms is to be decided. Flowing directly from this premise is the next building block of the gun control movement — that only those gun “rights” that can be shown by their advocates to be “needed” for self-defense are to be permitted. If the government and its advocates then show that a particular firearm or firearm accessory is not “needed,” it properly can be outlawed without violating the “right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
Furthermore, if it is conceded that it is the responsibility of law enforcement officers employed by government to “keep us safe,” then the fundamental need for individual possession of a firearm is easily brushed aside as not “needed,” as indeed some 21st century law enforcement officials have asserted.
To the contrary, however, those who framed the construct of our government, as codified in the Constitution of the United States, understood it is the responsibility of the individual to protect themself, not the government’s. Were it otherwise, there would have been no need whatsoever for the inclusion of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the individual right to keep and bear arms in self-defense.
In furtherance of that foundational principle, the Supreme Court of the United States has explicitly recognized that the police, as agents of the government, are not legally responsible for protecting each of us as citizens, insofar as this is a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of each individual citizen.
Still, Republicans and Democrats alike continue to mouth the false premise that it is the government that enjoys this fundamental responsibility; a power from which flows all manner of restrictions not only on Second Amendment rights, but others as otherwise protected by the Bill of Rights, such as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Democrats always have embraced the false premise that is the primary function of government to “keep us safe,” for the simple reason they want government to be able to exercise such powers. Republicans buy into it largely out of ignorance or fear.
The notion that certain firearms rights are not “needed” by individual citizens and therefore can be limited by government laws, regulations, and exercise of “police powers,” is reflected in the array of restrictions on the type and number of firearms already enforced by many states and municipalities. But gun control advocates do not rest on only those restrictions now in effect.
For example, if the Left asserts (as it does) that an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — the most popular rifle in the country — is not “needed” for any legitimate purpose as they so define, then it becomes simple to declare such a firearm illegal. The same holds for so-called “high capacity” magazines, arm braces, bump stocks and sound suppressors, among other guns and accessories.
The fact that Republicans, traditionally considered to be of the party that supports the Second Amendment against being infringed by the government, so easily and often fail to push back against this line of reasoning, is indeed cause for concern if not alarm for the future of gun rights in America, especially with a president who openly advocates broad restrictions on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
To some degree there has been a Cold War waged against conservatives since at least the Soviet infiltration of Hollywood in the 1940s. Under President Biden, however, this war has become red hot and very real. Leftists embedded across political, non-profit, academic, and government institutions are pulling out all the stops to destroy the conservative culture and political movement in America.
Never before in our history has such a concerted action been undertaken. It did not spring forth on January 20th when Biden was inaugurated. The left has been imbedding itself into institutions private and public for decades preparing for the right moment to openly launch its war. The January 6th protests on Capitol Hill provided that spark.
Earlier attempts by a political party in power to use government agencies to punish political opponents were limited in their impact, largely because they were not able to co-opt major elements of those agencies to join their unlawful plans. Thus, the Nixon Administration’s use of components of the IRS, the CIA, and the FBI to go after its critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, failed to destroy its perceived enemy — the anti-war Left — because career elements within those agencies refused to join. In the end it was the perpetrators themselves who were destroyed, including the President.
Now, a half century later, the situation has changed dramatically, as demonstrated in the fact that Biden’s Department of Justice and the FBI, with their vast arsenal of tools with which to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate those deemed enemies, are leading the effort to destroy the conservative movement.
Moreover, the technological tools now available, undreamed of by Nixon’s Watergate co-conspirators, make it immensely easier to identify and take action against those labeled by the Administration according to whatever term best fits their destructive narrative — usually today, “domestic extremists,” or the even more vilifying “white extremists.”
As the first sentences for the hundreds of those the government has deemed “insurrectionists” are now being handed down, it is clear just how serious the Administration is to secure its pound of flesh from those citizens being prosecuted for, in some cases, simply having entered the Capitol on January 6th.
The first felony sentence for someone who participated on that day has now been meted out. Paul Hodgkins committed no acts of violence and did not damage any property or person while he was in the historic building on January 6th. Notwithstanding this, and even considering his lack of a criminal record, he will have to spend eight months in a federal prison facility.
Even though in our federal system of criminal justice individuals are to receive sentences based on the circumstances involving their actions and their background, the federal prosecutor in Hodgkins’ case demanded that the judge send him to prison as a lesson to others; a “loud and clear message” to conservatives that they will in fact be severely punished by this Department of Justice for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and especially for possessing the wrong political views.
Clearly, this was just the opening salvo from Biden’s Justice Department, whose lawyers are routinely demanding that others arrested for participating in events on that day, or for simply being there, be held without bail for as long as it takes to have their cases heard in the pandemic-delayed federal court system. Sadly, government lawyers are having no trouble finding federal judges willing to go along with this travesty.
Still to come are cases involving evidence that in more rational times would be laughed out of court if presented as evidence of nefarious criminal activity; evidence such as a box of plastic Lego bricks depicting a model of the U.S. Capitol building.
In this environment, populated by individuals possessed of such zealotry, where might one turn for even a small degree of compassion or objectivity.
Actually, if a person found himself arrested not on January 6th of 2021, but during one of the riots in the summer of 2020, in Portland, Oregon or even in Washington, DC — incidents in which federal buildings were torched and otherwise damaged, and during which federal law enforcement officials and other government employees were intentionally harmed — compassion is overflowing. Dozens of such prosecutions brought by the Trump Department of Justice are being dismissed outright by this Department of Justice.
The sound of double-standard justice now ringing throughout our government truly is deafening. Sadly, however, for an Administration whose goal is not to see that justice is done, but to destroy an inconvenient political movement, who’s listening?
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
To assist in its drive to demean American culture and history, the Biden administration has turned to the United Nations. Last week Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony “Tony” Blinken, actually invited the U. N. to come to America to study how racist and violative of human rights the United States is.
This study will be conducted under the leadership of former socialist Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who now serves as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She will be aided in this effort by the U. N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a 117-member subsidiary of the United Nations with a history of anti-U.S. bias such that former President Trump in 2018 rescinded our country’s membership in the organization. Biden reversed that decision on Feb. 8, shortly after deciding to rejoin both the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization.
Among the nations that will now sit in judgment on our country’s human rights record are such human rights luminaries as China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.
Biden always has held the U. N. in high esteem, with its massive bureaucracy headquartered on the banks of the East River in Manhattan that sits on real estate donated by the Rockefeller family seven decades ago. Despite many of the United Nations’ previous so-called “peace keeping” missions having themselves been plagued by serious human rights violations, Biden and Blinken obviously consider the international body an appropriate judge of U.S. culture and history.
Now, five months after we formally rejoined the UNHRC, one of its top officials, known as “rapporteurs,” will be among those studying and passing judgment on the systemic racism and human rights abuses this administration sees as a driving force behind virtually every aspect of our nation’s culture and public policy history.
Specifically, Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, a left-wing law professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, will be one of those leading the effort to uncover “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in the United States. Ms. Achiume has written and spoken widely on the prevalence of racism and racial injustice around the world and within the United States.
In an interview last September, for example, Prof. Achiume opined that “Black and brown communities” in the United States “are still [being] terrorized” by the police. She is among the most extreme of open border advocates, writing in 2019 that “First World” nations such as the United States, “have no right to exclude Third World migrants.” Given her background and that of the UNHRC generally, it is a foregone conclusion that the study Blinken has authorized will “discover” exactly what they are looking for – “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”
All this will support the multi-faceted effort already well-underway by the FBI, the NSA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and other components of the federal government to hunt down and destroy “white extremism,” considered by this administration to infect virtually everything with which it disagrees. Adding the State Department and the United Nations to this conglomerate of domestic government agencies rounds out the administration’s team which it hopes will ensure that the Democrats retain their grip on power not only through next year’s midterm election, but far beyond.
Inviting the United Nations into our country so it can tell us how to “confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” and in addition to propose “a wide range of reparations measures,” is demeaning and an affront to our sovereignty and national dignity.
Biden and Blinken may actually believe that their decision inviting the UNHRC to study and judge America’s record of “racism” and “human rights violations” will encourage other nations, including those like China that systemically and regularly do violate human rights, to follow Washington’s lead and admit of their own shortcomings. If they do actually believe this will happen, both Biden and Blinken are possessed of a naivete that is not only laughable, but dangerous.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
In a 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union the “evil empire;” perfectly capturing the moral and political danger presented by that communist regime. Reagan properly cautioned Americans not to “ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses” of an enemy that was “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Unfortunately, what was clear to Reagan about the Soviet Union in 1983 appears only as a blur to Joe Biden about China today.
If the Soviet Union were the evil empire, then China is surely the evilest empire. The Soviet Union’s global ambitions for its evil empire were hampered by its own incompetence. China, however, actively spreads its insidious tentacles across the world with a shocking mastery, facilitated by the apparent unwillingness of global leaders, including Biden, to take the threat seriously.
Today’s China presents for the United States and other western powers a far more complex and multi-faceted danger than that posed by the Soviet Union in the second half of the last century. While China’s military build-up, and its well-documented willingness to use that power (especially as it relates to Taiwan) is a real concern, it is but one dimension of the broader threat, and in some ways not the most serious.
Take, for instance, China’s push for greater influence in American academic institutions by way of funding educational programs and centers, under the guise of benignly teaching Chinese language and culture. As a white paper published at the Heritage Institute earlier this year suggests, this funding is a Trojan horse for Beijing to expand its influence in American culture more broadly. Strings attached to such financial largesse ensure that recipient universities carefully avoid saying or doing anything that Beijing considers insulting or critical of its policies. This is, of course, when Chinese students themselves are not agents for their government, as the FBI itself had warned.
In the global economy, state-based hacking of U.S. companies operating in China to steal trade secrets and reverse engineer products for theft is common knowledge. However, consumer goods produced from Chinese companies are also routinely – and often literally – weaponized for the communist government and its military.
China made headlines a few years ago when it was discovered it used compromised microchips to infiltrate several major U.S. companies.
Evidence that the COVID-19 virus was the byproduct of Chinese military research persists, despite being routinely downplayed by the Biden Administration and other governments and international organizations. As I have written previously, even prior to the arrival last year of the COVID virus, it is insane that American companies and other institutions remain willing, and are permitted by our own government, to engage in highly sensitive research that can and will be used by China’s military.
Just this month it was revealed that a prenatal genetic screening test sold by a Chinese company was developed in tandem with the Chinese military and used to harvest genetic material for military and social research. If secretly stealing the genetic material of unsuspecting women is not the definition of evil, one might wonder what is.
China’s domestic agenda, with its brutal crackdowns on minority groups and on Hong Kong citizens, provides a horrifyingly clear picture for what this truly evil empire would have in store for the rest of the world.
Despite the naivety with which many commentators from both the left and right fawn over China’s booming “private” sector, this faux capitalism is simply another weapon for China to use against its global adversaries. The illusion of Chinese markets ready and waiting for foreign investors is merely the bait in the trap. After those investments are made, investors like Disney, Google, and the NBA discover that doing business in China comes with many “conditions.” It is no coincidence that the hyper-political NBA is deathly silent on China’s human rights abuses.
Unlike the Soviets, who were consumed with immediate expansion of their influence and power, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, China is committed to playing the long game. A crucial part of this plan is undermining America’s historic role as the world’s moral compass. China does this by compelling our silence through political intimidation or economic ransom, thus giving tacit consent to their evil deeds.
Not only are the Biden Administration and its cohorts in the Congress blissfully ignorant of Reagan’s prescient warnings about dealing with evil empires, but they appear to be willing facilitators of China’s strategic goals.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
In a breathtaking assault on the Constitution of the United States, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week signed a new law and an executive order targeting his self-declared “Gun Violence Disaster Emergency.”
While the governor’s disdain for the Second Amendment is well-known, the degree to which his July 6 executive order targets the amendment is unprecedented. His actions undercut not only the right to keep and bear arms codified in the Second Amendment, but also broader rights guaranteed against government intrusion by the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the fundamental right to contract protected in the main body of the Constitution.
Even before Cuomo’s brazen executive action last week, New York maintained among the broadest and strictest gun control measures of any state, according to which, among other restrictions, it is almost impossible for a citizen to obtain a required permit to purchase a handgun or secure permission for a concealed carry permit.
Despite the existing array of gun control mandates, Cuomo decided the Empire State now suffers from a “gun violence” emergency necessitating even more extreme measures. The executive order issued last week based on this bogus conclusion, is modeled after COVID pandemic executive mandates Cuomo issued last year, which were used by officials to strip New Yorkers of the most basic of civil liberties.
The “gun violence” on which Cuomo premised his dictatorial actions has nothing to do with lawful ownership of firearms by citizens of the state.
The increased violent crime under which New Yorkers are now suffering is a product of disastrous measures undertaken by the governor, the state’s attorney general, and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio that stripped law enforcement of the tools needed to combat violent crime on the streets and in neighborhoods from Albany to the Bronx. These actions reflect the absurd notion that “reimagining” law enforcement by weakening law enforcement, will result in lowered crime rates. When, predictably, the opposite has happened, Cuomo’s response is to blame lawful gun owners and strip away their civil liberties.
Collaterally damaged by Cuomo’s most recent assault on the Second Amendment is another vital civil liberty — the sanctity of contracts expressly guaranteed by Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits a state from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This provision reflects what our Framers understood to be one of the very pillars of a free people – the assurance that a legal contract between individuals would be protected against abusive government action.
Now, however, in New York contracts that in some vague manner might be considered inconsistent with what Cuomo considers his declared “gun violence disaster emergency,” are subject to being nullified. The extremely broad reach of these provisions in the executive order could be used, for example, to abrogate leases for properties relied on by lawful gun retailers, or to close out bank accounts or banking transactions that directly or indirectly involve the sale or purchase of lawful firearms.
As if these constitutionally troubling July 6 executive actions by Cuomo were not enough, on the same day he signed into law legislation permitting lawsuits against lawful firearms manufacturers and retailers for engaging in a “public nuisance.” This state law conflicts with a 2005 federal law that permits suits against gun retailers or manufacturers only in limited circumstances similar to the liability standard for other manufactured products that can be misused, such as automobiles.
As a result, any firearm manufacturer whose product is sold in New York, or any retailer within the state who sells such a product, now could be subject to being sued based on such action alone. This predicament reflects the extremely broad “public nuisance” laws in the state, coupled with the declaration of a gun-violence emergency under which any firearm can be considered as contributing to that “emergency.”
If all this sounds absurd, it is. However, until these laws and executive actions are challenged successfully (which they ultimately almost certainly will be), Cuomo’s destructive “reimagining” of individual rights has cast New York citizens into an even deeper and darker constitutional hole.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
California’s slide into a socialist wasteland is hardly news. What is somewhat surprising, or at least intriguing, are the depths of stupidity to which local and state officials in the “Golden State” will go to fulfilling their destiny. Take, for instance, San Jose’s latest anti-gun gambit – a compulsory tax to pay for the “costs” of criminal gun violence, coupled with a tax directly on lawful gun owners by forcing them to purchase liability insurance.
These ordinances most assuredly will be challenged in court, and all but certain to be eventually struck down, even if they survive appeal to the uber-liberal U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This means significant public resources will be spent defending mandates not even considered by their proponents to be meaningful. City officials admit as much, saying the ordinances “won’t magically end gun violence,” but vowing to press forward regardless. This should remove any doubt that the city of San Jose considers law-abiding gun owners to be part of the problem and sees them as second-class citizens to be run out of town rather than respect their constitutionally protected rights as Americans.
In all their gushing over how smart and innovative they are with their latest anti-gun scheming, Mayor Sam Liccardo and his equally clueless cohorts on the city council fail to explain how punishing 99.9 percent of non-violent, law-abiding gun owners for the misdeeds of the other .1 percent will have any positive effect on crime in the city.
If California’s already highly restrictive gun laws could not prevent the horrific mass shooting at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in May, what do these dunderheads think a tax and insurance mandate will do?
The same question applies when considering instances of “gun violence” perpetrated by criminals wielding illegal firearms, such as gang members and career criminals. Does Liccardo think these individuals themselves are paying into the system? The answer obviously is “No,” a reality again reflected in the mayor’s own admission that, “criminals won’t obey these mandates.”
This head-scratching, self-contradicting logic would be absurd if stopping gun violence truly was the goal. It is in fact worse. These mandates are designed directly and perversely to chill lawful gun ownership. Even where San Jose could make actual strides in tackling criminal gun violence, such as aggressively pursuing straw sales (already illegal under federal firearms law), the city instead has decided to further harass gun owners by ordering audio and video recordings of all retail gun sales.
Under current law, there is nothing to prevent law enforcement from tracking the serial numbers of guns used in crimes back to the original straw purchaser without such privacy-invasive recordings, but the opportunity to use the threat of a back-door registry via government surveillance in order to chill lawful gun purchases appears to have been too enticing for Liccardo to pass up.
While Liccardo and the San Jose city council may fancy themselves brilliant pioneers of anti-gun proposals, their vacuous ideas simply demonstrate their fundamental incompetence and their unwillingness to enforce laws already on the books to target criminals. For these municipal officials, it obviously is easier to scapegoat law-abiding gun owners for the costs of run-away gun violence by gangs and other criminals within their jurisdiction.
Such strategy, if it even qualifies as one, may score political points with liberal voters and the mainstream media, but the backslapping and fist-bumping will not last long when violent crime does not subside – which it will not. In fact, by running law-abiding gun owners out of town, San Jose will become even more of a haven for criminals. And, for a city that bellyached over “illegal” fireworks stretching their emergency response capabilities too thin, such a future is all but certain.
Instead of targeting citizens who obey the law and just want to be free from government harassment, perhaps Liccardo should ask why it is that so many people are fleeing California cities like his for the prairie towns of Texas. Asking such a question, however, would take a degree of objectivity and common sense clearly not present in today’s San Jose.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.
by Bob Barr
Most taxpayers would agree, even if at times grudgingly, that the top priority for expenditure of federal dollars is our national defense, including the technology and hardware with which to win wars, that is, weapon systems. These priorities are funded according to an acquisition system as complex as it is costly, perhaps best illustrated by the $1.7 trillion F-35 “Lightning” fighter jet program that has been plagued by numerous delays and cost increases over the course of its two decade long development history.
Broadly considered, the process by which weapons systems are funded – including everything from four-wheel drive vehicles to massive aircraft carries capable of launching dozens of long-range fighter jets — is known as “weapon system acquisition.” It is a labyrinthine process that has more in common with a Rube Goldberg cartoon contraption than a well-oiled machine. The process is fully understood only by a tightly knit fraternity of current and former top-level Department of Defense officials, key Members of Congress and their staff, and the handful of major corporate defense contractors, the largest by far of which is Lockheed Martin.
As stated by the U.S. Department of Defense in a recent “Program Acquisition Cost by Weapon System,” the goal of this crucial component of our national defense is simple: to ensure that the weapon systems available to and utilized by our men and women in uniform “are unmatched throughout the world, ensuring that U.S. military forces have the advantage over any adversary.”
Few objective observers would dispute the proposition that our fighting forces and global capabilities remain the best in the world. There is, however, considerable room to debate whether the actual weapons systems and related military technology in use currently and planned for the coming decades represents the most efficient and wisest use of taxpayer resources.
The F-35 was designed to meet the projected combat needs for all three branches of our military that deploy fighter aircraft – the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines. The plane has shown itself capable of meeting those needs … when it works. Unfortunately, the F-35 has exhibited a continuing and costly series of deficiencies, from software and cybersecurity failures to structural cracks. These problems have not only swollen its per-unit cost to $110 million (and a total “lifetime” cost of more than $1.7 trillion), but have put its actual deployment far behind schedule.
There are questions about the aircraft’s capabilities even beyond the problems manifested during its lengthy development and initial deployment. For example, its hourly flight operating cost of $44,000 is double that of other jets already in the military’s arsenal, including the F-15, the F-16, and the F/A-18. More troubling from a tactical operating perspective, however, is the fact that each of these other combat jets (along with the F-22) has a higher effective operating range than the F-35, a crucial factor when providing extended air coverage for ground forces.
Not only has the plane failed to meet cost and delivery requirements, but its primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, has been able to secure additional taxpayer-funded contracts to correct those very deficiencies; in other words, to be paid more money to fix problems in its initial manufacturing processes.
Despite these costly and continuing problems, neither recent Congresses nor three successive administrations have bitten the bullet and taken steps to stanch the massive outflow of taxpayer dollars for the F-35 project. Recent congressional hearings have brought renewed attention to the issues, but nothing beyond talk has resulted.
Even as the F-35 program continues to bleed money and deliver ever so slowly on its promises, the Defense Department is making plans for the “Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD)” fighter. Whether plans for the “sixth generation” fighter (the F-35 being the “fifth”) will result finally in scaling back the problem-plagued F-35 program, or if new contracts will be awarded on a more traditional and market-driven basis, remains to be seen; but if not, American taxpayers will be in for another, possibly more costly fleecing.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.