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Daily Caller

Inflation has hit the corporate extortion market, for sure. Recent studies estimate that corporate America has been shamed into spending between $83 and $340 billion on various racial causes including Black Lives Matter (BLM) and related entities since the massive (“mostly peaceful”) riots protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020. BLM has made Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who reigned supreme as kings of the corporate shakedown movement from the 1980s into the early 2000s, look like amateurs.

In its analysis of the BLM shakedown record, the Claremont Institute for the American Way of Life, compiled a lengthy and well-documented database of more than 400 companies that have made pledges and contributions to numerous entities and causes favored, if not demanded by BLM. The list is quite interesting in what it reveals about the spending priorities of major U.S. corporations and other organizations. For example:

• The three major sports associations – the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and the National Football League — together anted up $700 million. No wonder ticket prices to attend their events are so expensive.
• Insurance companies are among the biggest spenders, with New York Life Insurance alone spending $1 billion, and Northwestern Mutual and State Farm each throwing in a cool $100 million.
• Uber, a company that has yet to turn a profit, is down for $61.0 million.
• Not surprisingly, Starbucks coffee is in the elite category of billion-plus pledgers, with more than $1.6 billion thrown into the pot.
• Tik Tok, much in the news these days, pledged $4.0 million to the cause.
• Silicon Valley Bank, which just enjoyed a taxpayer-funded bailout and is in the process of being bought by other banks, dedicated a whopping $70,650,000 to the BLM cause.
• Wayfair, also a company having trouble making ends meet, has gifted $30 million.
• Peloton Interactive, which has suffered a series of financial hits in recent years, nonetheless found $20.5 million lying around to donate.
• Another company appearing on recent lists of financially troubled corporations, Bed Bath & Beyond, nonetheless decided to donate $1.0 million.
• While the usual liberal suspects, such as Silicon Valley tech companies, media giants, and social media darlings are in the billion dollar-plus range, even “smaller” companies considered far less liberal in their corporate culture, appear on the shakedown list. This includes companies such as Chick-fil-A ($6.2 million), Caterpillar ($1.0 million), and AFLAC ($25.0 million). Even Tractor Supply slipped in $125,000. These illustrate the power of the racial guilt movement spearheaded by BLM.
• Banks, ever sensitive to charges of “racial redlining” and other indictments by government and non-government entities as well, appear throughout the list, with JP Morgan Chase & Co. kicking in more than $30 billion and Bank of America devoting some $18 billion of its depositors’ and investors’ monies to the cause.
• Major defense contractors are not absent from the list, with Boeing weighing in at a robust $15.6 million and Northrop Grumman a relatively paltry $2.0 million.
• The country’s two largest soft drink producers, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, of course are on the list, but surprisingly the latter has pledged ten times as much as its Atlanta-based rival — $400 million vs. $40 million.
• One of the country’s most dyed-in-the-wool liberal organizations – Planned Parenthood – got off lightly by tossing in a mere $160,000.

Unlike the earlier phase of the corporate shakedown movement, focused largely if not solely on racial “equity,” and led in the 1990s and early 2000s by the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, today’s operatives have many more arrows in their quiver. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) compiles and publishes annually a “Corporate Equality Index” to rate corporations on a range of criteria, including LGBTQ factors.

Shaking down corporations has itself become Big Business. Organizations like BLM and its earlier and smaller cousin, the Rainbow Coalition, obviously have found it is much easier to make massive sums of money in this way than the more traditional route of hard work and producing a product in the competitive marketplace. In this regard, racial shakedown players reflect what a recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found: today only 14% of Americans value hard work. Clearly, BLM is not part of that 14%.

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.

Townhall

In a stunning, but not altogether surprising statement, America’s top Navy official declared that “fighting climate change” is a “top priority” for the U.S. Navy. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced this last week not at the Pentagon or the U.S. Naval Academy, but at a conference in the Bahamas.

It is likely that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting this week in Moscow to discuss closer military cooperation, shared a high five on hearing the Navy Secretary’s declaration.

Del Toro’s admission that strengthening America’s dwindling fleet of naval ships is no higher a priority than is “embracing climate-focused technologies” was not totally unexpected.

Since taking office two years ago, President Biden repeatedly has stated that “fighting climate change” is and will remain his top national security priority. This was made crystal clear in an October 2021 presidential “Fact Sheet” directed to our nation’s military, foreign policy, and national intelligence leaders.

Rather than resist such a priority directive, the Navy Secretary joined other top Defense officials and saluted their Commander-in-Chief’s warped policy decision; one that will further weaken our country’s defenses. Making matters worse, Biden’s latest defense budget submission to the Congress proposes a 40 percent increase in “climate spending” and a net decrease in the number of operational ships in our Navy’s fleet, continuing a troubling trend highlighted in the Administration’s FY 2023 budget proposal.

Such cuts reflect what one military expert refers to as “seablindness” — a short-sighted policy accounting for America’s shrinking dominance of the world’s oceans, a strength on which we and the entire Free World have relied since World War II.

In an insightful analysis just published in The Atlantic (“The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over”), former Navy officer Jerry Hendrix chronicles the many shortcomings in our country’s civilian and naval shipbuilding capabilities, even as Russia and China aggressively continue to expand theirs.

In one striking example, Hendrix notes that Russia maintains a robust fleet of Arctic ships and has been moving in the direction of unilaterally declaring parts of the Arctic Ocean within its territorial waters, while the U.S. “has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s.”

Also questionable is our capability to quickly or timely build needed ships, considering the small number of U.S. shipyards capable of constructing such massive and complex vessels (as Hendrix notes, there remain only one dozen such “graving docks” certified to build or work on Navy ships).

Elsewhere, China has embarked on a massive, multi-year expansion of its Navy and is asserting claims to large swaths of the East and South China Seas.

Currently, neither of our two adversaries’ navies come near to matching our overall naval capabilities, especially when it comes to our premier warship the aircraft carrier. But our failure to expand, much less retain, a commitment to domestic maritime and naval shipbuilding, has created a long-term weakness in being able to protect oceanic trade routes on which we and almost all other nations increasingly rely.

Budget cuts by the current and prior administrations of both political parties, especially the Clinton administration, purposefully reduced the number of defense contractors able to build modern naval vessels, and policies have favored development and modernization of air power over naval power. The resulting slippage in the number of operational naval vessels in our fleet, now down to 293, imperils our ability to project power in the decades ahead and also to maintain the freedom of the oceans for commercial purposes.

One facet of naval power in which the United States maintains a clear advantage over every other maritime power is in the number of foreign bases and port facilities available to our ships; but even here, China is moving to close that gap. While China has a long way to go in this regard, it is aggressively expanding its reach on the west coast of Africa, and continues to use its “civilian” shipping company, Cosco, to build and operate container port facilities in areas long allied with the United States, including Israel, western Europe, and South and Central America.

If the United States continues the folly of focusing on “climate change” rather than taking concrete short and long-term steps to counter Chinese and Russian moves to assert sea power interests adverse to ours, we and the entire Free World will pay a heavy price in the decades ahead.

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.

Daily Caller

Without even waiting to see if the New York City District Attorney’s office issues an indictment against former President Donald Trump, House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, made a complex situation even more complicated by calling for investigations of prosecutor Alvin Bragg to determine “if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

Even as the GOP denounced Bragg’s anticipated indictment as a “weaponization” of prosecutorial power, House Democrats levelled precisely the same charge at McCarthy for “weaponizing” the investigatory powers available to the new Republican majority.

This exercise in dueling weaponizations is not good for the country, for the reputation of the Congress (already at an anemic 18 percent), or for the GOP, which has been struggling to articulate a substantive agenda with which to widen its majority in the 2024 election cycle.

None of this is to disagree with the Republican criticism of what the New York D.A. is doing, which may indeed turn out to be a politically motivated prosecution, but neither I nor McCarthy have seen the evidence presented to the Big Apple grand jury. If it returns an indictment of Trump, the burden will be on Bragg to show the public – and eventually a judge and jury – that the charges are based on solid evidence reflective of serious public interest. If Bragg fails in this task, he will have only boosted Trump’s image as a victim and destroyer of the Establishment.

But, jumping to the conclusion that the still-unrevealed indictment is not only without substantive merit but also somehow rendered in violation of federal laws as would give the House Judiciary or Oversight committees jurisdiction to launch investigations, truly is a “bridge too far.”

I have some experience in handling political charges of “prosecutorial misconduct,” having been on the receiving end of such accusations from both Republicans and Democrats during my tenure as United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990. During my time as a federal prosecutor, my office investigated and prosecuted both prominent Democrat and Republican office holders, which led members of both political parties to level accusations of political animus against me and the office – notwithstanding the ultimate successes of those prosecutions.

While such accusations are not unexpected and tend to come with the territory, calling for congressional investigations of a local prosecutor without any apparent basis other than disagreement with his possible motivation — and in advance of his actually issuing formal charges – undercuts the credibility of congressional oversight more broadly.

Adding fuel to that partisan fire, are calls by other Trump supporters for Ron DeSantis, as governor of the state in which Trump resides, to delay or otherwise thwart the prosecutor’s effort to have the former president extradited if he were to fight being brought to the Empire State to answer formal charges.

While such a move by DeSantis might momentarily win him the affection of some Trump supporters, it would be seen correctly by virtually everyone else as a naked political maneuver. The reality is that DeSantis, like virtually every other state governor, exercises extradition power as a ministerial duty rather than as a tool to challenge the substance of the charges themselves. Injecting himself into the legal processes Trump would face if  New York does indict him, would benefit DeSantis not a whit, and would do him great harm, politically and legally.

DeSantis already has lent his voice to other GOP figures in calling Bragg’s investigation and perhaps imminent indictment of Trump a politically motivated prosecution, but he has wisely refrained from going further.

As Trump’s main rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, DeSantis knows that whatever he does (or doesn’t do), the former president will come back at him with vicious personal attacks. In fact, Trump did precisely that on Monday after the Florida Governor, while criticizing the New York prosecutor’s investigation of Trump as “political,” also made an indirect reference to the hush-money payments apparently at the center of the New York prosecutor’s investigation.

The mud swamp into which Trump pulls anybody trying to play his game on his terms rarely, if ever, benefits anyone other than Trump. The sooner the GOP and its key players understand this, the better off they will be.

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.

Townhall

President Biden signed an Executive Order on “Reducing Gun Violence and Making Communities Safer” this week and delivered prepared remarks to those gathered in Monterrey Park, California, to witness the event. The Order itself promises the American people more “reports” and “plans” that largely repeat what the laws already on the books allow or require. His public remarks added nothing new to the “reduce gun violence” debate, even as he reiterated a favorite gun-control lie to the American people.

In other words, the much-heralded event was more of the same – plans, reports, and lies.

First, the Big Lie.

A major component of this administration’s narrative to “reduce gun violence” has been to shift blame from failures by prosecutors to enforce gun laws already on the books, to businesses that lawfully sell firearms and to the firearms industry more broadly. To market this blame-shifting, Biden and the previous Democrat administration of which he was a part, routinely claim that the “gun industry” is immune from being sued.

Yesterday, for example, Biden declared that the “gun industry” is “the only outfit you can’t sue these days.” This is a flat out lie, but, as with other falsehoods by government officials, the more it is repeated the more likely it is to be believed by the American public and to serve as the basis for more gun control measures.

In fact, the 2005 “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,’’ does not shield firearms businesses from being sued for the negligent manufacture of a firearm, nor does it immunize them from being held legally liable if they sell or transfer a gun knowing or having reason to believe it will be used unlawfully. This is the same standard that applies, and that should apply, to all products that can be abused or that are produced negligently and cause harm.

The plain language of the law routinely is cast aside by gun control advocates, including this president, in favor of demonizing the firearms industry and turning Americans against it.

Far easier is it to blame the thousands of licensed and heavily regulated federal firearms dealers, than to do the heavy lifting of investigating, charging, and consistently prosecuting violators of laws already on the books. Easier also is it to revoke licenses of federal firearms licensees for minor paperwork errors, which the administration has been doing to great fanfare over the past year; and which it promises to continue pursuant to this latest executive order.

The actual text of Biden’s latest “gun violence” executive action follows a laughable and self-serving “list” of “21 Executive Actions to Reduce Gun Violence” published last July. This month’s contribution is a monotonous rehash of laws and executive branch powers already available, and a call for the Congress to “do more,” gussied up as something new and bold.

In addition to the demonization of lawful “firearms dealers” as somehow responsible for the acts of deranged murderers such as Huu Can Tran, who shot and killed 11 innocent victims at a dance hall in Monterey Park on January 21^st, Biden just for good measure blasted “MAGA Republican[s]” and congressional Republicans more generally.

Biden’s order calls on the Attorney General and heads of other departments and agencies variously to prepare “plans,” “proposals,” “principles,” and “reports” on various matters already codified in laws currently available to the administration.

Notwithstanding the executive order’s promises to direct federal agencies to do what they already can do, there is real danger to law-abiding citizens and firearms businesses lurking in Biden’s written and spoken words.

Constantly attacking lawful firearms dealers (the number of which has dropped significantly since 1992) will raise the costs of compliance with federal laws and regulations, will likely push more sales into the non-regulated market, and will needlessly increase tensions between ATF and the industry.

Even more troubling is the clear threat that the administration is considering regulation of firearms industry advertising, a course of action raising not only Second Amendment concerns but First Amendment issues as well.

During his remarks in Monterey Park, Biden referred to the fantasy-comedy film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (which just won the Oscar for best picture). This pointless gesture actually captures the fantasy-comical, yet serious, nature of what this president is doing to the firearms industry and to the Second Amendment.

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.

Daily Caller

While there is no definitive, scientific definition of “Generation Z,” or “Zoomers” as they also are known, in general they share much in common with what in the last decade of the 20th century became known as “Snowflakes” — individuals who are overly sensitive, timid, and self-centered.

In contradistinction to this timorous façade, however, the sense of Snowflakes’ high self-worth leads them often to be extremely intolerant, mean and nasty, especially when in a group.

Emory University English Professor Mark Bauerlein noted this in The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, his most recent book analyzing today’s young adults who, while being led to consider their internet-filled lives a path to “utopia,” morph into a “fury” when threatened with ideas and circumstances not in accord with their worldview.

This Snowflake fury was on display just last week at Stanford University Law School, when a federal appeals court judge, who had been invited by the Federalist Society to speak at Stanford Law School, was rudely heckled by students upset that he did not share the disrupters’ views on abortion, the Second Amendment, and other controversial topics.

Unlike other similar disruptive scenarios, the Stanford wannabe lawyer-hecklers were egged on by one of the law school’s top administrators – the associate dean responsible for ensuring “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Once the heckling and calls for the “racist” judge to shut up began, this “adult” in the room, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, usurped the lectern reserved for the speaker and bloviated at length about how the mere presence of such a jurist was “threatening” to her and some of the students in the room.

“Threatening,” indeed, simply to hear from a judge who might even indirectly challenge the Snowflakes’ heartfelt support for abortion and their equally vociferous opposition to the Second Amendment.

In Bizarro Snowflake universe, a federal judge whom a law school dean prevents from engaging in civil discourse on the law with law students is accused of exhibiting intolerance for politely attempting to regain the lectern to which he had been invited.

Yet this is what many so-called “elite” law schools now consider an appropriate environment in which to prepare Generation Z-ers for adulthood.

It was displayed last summer on the East Coast, where the student body at The George Washington University — or at least some 12,500 of that group who signed a petition — told Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas he was no longer welcome at the school where he had for more than a decade volunteered his time to lead seminars on Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Justice Thomas’ unforgivable “sin” was being a member of the five-justice majority that in a June 2022 opinion, returned to the people of the states the power to decide the legality of abortion procedures — a principle of federalism obviously foreign to the Zoomers’ warped notion of “democracy.”

Snowflake fear of COVID and subsequent support for all manner of short and long term restrictions imposed by governing bodies from the United States Congress down to public schools across the country, showcased the liberty-snuffing milieu in which Generation Z youth wander. A law student at another of America’s top universities – Georgetown – was suspended for doing nothing more subversive than questioning the efficacy of the draconian COVID restrictions imposed on him and other students during the pandemic.

While the Georgetown law student subsequently was allowed back into the school, it was not because the Snowflake student bar association changed its stripes from meanness to reconciliation or from ignorance to understanding. Fear of bad publicity alone appears to have precipitated their capitulation.

Despite having access to all manner of information through their ubiquitous use of “smart” devices, Zoomers are notoriously poorly informed and, again as noted by Prof. Bauerlein, unmoored from any understanding of history or culture.

These intellectual “drifters,” including the likes of the “threatened” Stanford law students, tend to make up for their shortcomings by engaging in the mass bullying that has become commonplace on college campuses.

Worse still, however, is the fact that, due to their intellectual vacuity, Gen-Z snowflakes appear easily manipulated by others, including those who do engage violently. This is the case with the ongoing construction of a police training center just outside the city of Atlanta, where outside agitators have joined with Snowflake tree huggers to destroy equipment, threaten construction crews, and engage in gun fights with police.

There is indeed a very mean underbelly to this Snowflake Generation.

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.

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 itself, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, attacking the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, and now, Attorney General Merrick Garland filing a lawsuit to stop the proposed business deal.

In a recent letter to the Department of Transportation, Warren declared her opposition to the merger, because “the four largest airlines—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—control 80% of the domestic market, more than at any point in the modern history of commercial aviation” and the “proposed JetBlue-Spirit merger is just the latest threat to consumers in this long string of mergers.”

On Tuesday, March 7, Garland brought the full weight of the Justice Department to bear in support of Warren’s misguided position.

It is difficult to look at all this without concluding that their approach, if successful, will simply protect the four largest airlines from competition by lower-cost carriers.

JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit, which will give the new company less than 10% of the industry’s market share, is designed to provide the company with the added scale it needs to better compete against the Big Four. It will increase the number of flights in JetBlue and Spirit’s current routes and add more flights in areas that the legacy carriers currently hold, thereby increasing choice and lowering prices.

And there’s a factual history here.

Over the last two decades, airline customers have watched JetBlue, which is always near the top of the pack for airline customer satisfaction, successfully do both things – increase choice and lower prices.

An MIT study found that JetBlue’s initial foray into the market had reduced airline fees by an average of $32. Even the Justice Department has conceded that “JetBlue’s reputation for lowering fares is so well known in the airline industry that it has earned a name: the ‘JetBlue Effect.’”

Warren’s credo, and now the policy of the Biden administration, that the federal government must stop every company from becoming bigger is a relic of the so-called “Progressive Era” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The notion that “big is bad” as a principle of governance should have died with that anti-free market era.

Back then, politicians began demonizing the trusts for increasing their market shares. While there clearly were some problem actors, in many cases the so-called “trusts” brought market prices down to record lows. Government regulators targeted them anyway, with a hammer they continue to wield a century later against companies for the mere act of growing larger.

Today, we are witnessing this same antitrust folly repeating itself, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, attacking the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, and now, Attorney General Merrick Garland filing a lawsuit to stop the proposed business deal.

While serving as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the litmus test I used when analyzing antitrust matters was simple – if the merger benefited consumers, it deserved support it, and if it jeopardized their welfare, it did not.

Sadly, the Justice Department has decided not to employ this same equation in concluding that JetBlue should not be allowed to increase its market share to a modest 9% so it can more efficiently compete with the big boys that control 80% of the airline industry.

If Garland succeeds in this anti-free market move, it will be the traveling public that will pay the price in higher airfares and diminished service.

Former Rep. Bob Barr was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1995 to 2003.

Townhall

For more than five decades, the degree to which the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to “keep and bear arms,” and the extent to which that right may be “infringed,” have been among the most hotly debated issues demanding the attention of courts and governments at all levels.

Now, two months into 2023 (and 232 years since the Second Amendment’s ratification) things have not changed a bit. In fact, the battle between gun control advocates and Second Amendment supporters is hotter than ever, especially with banks and credit card companies moving toward monitoring firearms purchases.

The U.S. Supreme Court threw down the gauntlet to gun control advocates last June, when it ruled in a New York case that arbitrary and absolute government restrictions on an individual’s right to possess a firearm must be evaluated based on the meaning and history of the Second Amendment. Accordingly, only those government-imposed restrictions consistent with such analysis would henceforth be deemed constitutional.

Not surprisingly, the Bruen decision has met with fervent pushback from New York and several other states where gun control proponents wield the levers of government power.

Immediately following that decision, New York openly thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court, enacting a new anti-carry law even more restrictive than the one shot down by the Court. It has become clear the High Court will again be forced to tackle the underlying and fundamental questions surrounding how individuals in 2023 and beyond may possess firearms for self-defense in the real world.

Precisely when the Supreme Court will decide to again weigh in on the Second Amendment (and hopefully slap down the arrogance and insulting manner by which New York and other states are flouting its decision) is unclear. In the meantime, however, many lower federal court judges are demonstrating that they in fact do understand what the Court said and meant in Bruen.

In one of the most recent examples of a federal appeals court interpreting Bruen correctly, a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Texas and Louisiana, ruled that a 1996 amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibiting a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm, violated the Second Amendment and therefore is unconstitutional. Not surprisingly, the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has indicated it will appeal the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

Prior to the June 2022 Bruen decision, restrictions on possession of firearms such as that considered in last month’s Fifth Circuit decision (United States v. Zackey Rahimi), were widely if not routinely found to be constitutional. As noted correctly by the judges in that case, however, and consistent with Bruen, even if a federal law restricting a person’s right to possess a firearm reflects a “laudable policy goal,” to pass constitutional muster it must also be in accord with the reasoned and historical foundation of the Second Amendment.

Elsewhere, federal courts in more liberal districts such as Chicago continue to uphold other constitutionally suspect firearm restrictions, such as those on AR-15 type semi-automatic rifles and “high-capacity magazines,” simply because governments have decided that they accomplish laudable policy goals. These are decisions that hopefully will soon find their way to the High Court to strike down under the Bruen analysis.

While the Fifth Circuit decision certainly will not be the final word on the matter, it is a refreshing example of consistency and respect for the rule of law within the arena of Second Amendment law.

Not so refreshing are moves by banks and credit card companies to begin implementing a new “merchant category code” to track credit card purchases of merchandise at retail businesses selling firearms and ammunition. The obvious goal of such a plan, despite hollow claims to the contrary by its advocates, is to be able to identify likely firearms owners for law enforcement, and to eventually build a database of such information.

As I noted last September in this publication, congressional Democrats are on record supporting this new tracking policy, and now Discover Financial Services, which handles Discover card purchases, proudly has jumped to the head of the line in announcing plans to gather and aggregate such purchases.

American Express, Visa, and Mastercard are likely to soon follow Discover’s lead, thereby teeing up the next major battle over gun rights in America.

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.