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Townhall

Knee-jerk responses by government officials and legislators following incidents in which individuals have been killed by police can cause lasting harm to law-abiding citizens. One of these dangerous policies is something called the “Driving Equity Act,” which is now the law in Philadelphia.

The Driving Equity Act, known also as the “Driving Equality Act,” is an overreaction to isolated incidents of alleged police misconduct, and reflects a troubling trend going back nearly a decade.

For example, following the 2014 death of Michael Brown during a confrontation with police in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Justice Department launched a drive against a number of local police departments that resulted in “consent decrees” – mandatory edicts that made it demonstrably more difficult for those departments to carry out their mission of protecting the public.

Several years later, the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a nationwide backlash against law enforcement generally which led to policies that reduced or defunded law enforcement agencies, causing problems that resonate still today.

Early this year in Memphis, Tennessee, members of a “special” police unit beat Tyre Nichols to death, a tragedy that revived calls for state and local governments to defund and disband specialized anti-crime units.

Often camouflaged as “restorative justice” or “reimagined policing,” legislative and executive actions to curtail police funding and powers usually are premised on the notion that traditional police powers, including traffic stops, are inherently racially biased and thus have been abused as tools to target members of racial minorities, especially Black men. It is not, however, as if there are not ways to deal with such abuses.

At the federal level, and in every state and municipality across the country, there are regulations as well as civil and criminal laws available with which to hold accountable and punish police officers who violate a person’s civil rights. The conviction and lengthy prison sentence handed down against the Minneapolis police officer whose actions caused the death of George Floyd is the clearest example.

Holding individual officers accountable for unlawfully harming or killing an individual, however, takes time and hard work by investigators and prosecuting officials. Many government officials, especially those in liberal jurisdictions or those beholden to progressive supporters, find it easier and more politically rewarding to paint with a broader brush.

Responding to police misconduct incidents by characterizing an entire police unit, or the whole department as racist, to then justify new “progressive” policies to rein in such abuses, appears the solution of choice for many local and state legislators and executives.

Tossing aside long-standing law enforcement authorities rather than tackling specific incidents of police misbehavior, reflects the adage of throwing the baby out with the bathwater — leaving the law-abiding public at greater risk than were a more focused, incident-based solution implemented.

There is no better example of this endangering policy than the so-called Driving Equity (or “Equality”) Act signed into municipal law by Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney in late 2021.

The law took effect in March 2022 and prohibits city police from stopping vehicles for a number of alleged violations, including driving with an expired registration sticker or operating a vehicle with a missing headlight or taillight. These violations have been used for decades by police departments across the country to protect against unsafe drivers or vehicles endangering the public.

Certainly there have been incidents in which such traffic stops have served as a pretext for a stop not truly warranted, but the laws themselves are sound and do enable police to protect against unsafe vehicles, and at times lead to arrests for far more serious crimes (including murder).

No longer is this the case in Philadelphia (and perhaps soon in Memphis), thanks to Philadelphia Councilmember Isiah Thomas, who sponsored the Driving Equity Act simply because he saw “a history of oppression and institutional racism” in the city’s police department, predicated also on a previous incident in a different city involving a police shooting of a detained driver.

For Councilman Thomas and Mayor Kenney, thus handcuffing the police responsible for protecting the citizens of a major American city, is justified if it results in “reimagining” police behavior that will “reduce the likelihood of negative interactions between police officers and Black drivers.”

Police organizations including Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police (which has challenged, thus far unsuccessfully, the Driving Equity Act), common sense, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analysis of traffic fatality rates on U.S. roadways resulting from limits on police enforcement powers, paint a far more sobering picture of such feel-good policies like Philadelphia’s.

Liberals in charge of “blue cities,” however, would rather traffic fatalities and injuries continue to rise rather than allow police to continue using tried-and-true methods to keep roadways and drivers safe for the rest of 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.

Daily Caller

President Joe Biden claims regularly that his Administration is for the “middle class,” is there to help “American workers,” and is committed to support America’s families. The reality is otherwise, and it is not just “Bidenomics” that is to blame.

Although little known to the average consumer, it is the legal and regulatory policies of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that demonstrate most clearly this Administration’s commitment to anti-free market policies that ultimately harm rather than help consumers.

For more than a century and a quarter, one of the sharpest arrows in Uncle Sam’s quiver with which to target alleged uncompetitive forces in the marketplace has been antitrust laws, most enacted in the late 19th and early 20th Century to dismantle large monopolies such John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. To better enforce these laws, in 1919 the U.S. Justice Department grew a new enforcement arm – the Antitrust Division.

It was not until 1968, however, that the Department set clear guidelines by which U.S. companies would be measured if they sought to consolidate. The touchstone was “consumer welfare,” and unlike many (perhaps most) policies designed and implemented by the federal government, this standard made sense. Mergers between companies would be measured by their effect on consumers in the marketplace.

Dan Mitchell, a noted libertarian economist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, described the “consumer welfare” metric best, when he wrote just last month, that the policy limits the damage that can be wrought on the marketplace because it “create[es] a presumption that mergers are okay if prices go down.”

Of course, as with any government policy, even one that is purposefully sound, sooner or later Congress and Executive Branch lawyers cannot resist monkeying with it and causing distortions. The government’s infamous antitrust litigation against IBM — which began in 1969 and ended 13 years later when Antitrust Division lawyers finally decided the case was “without merit” — is a prime, but by no means isolated example of the damage that results when the federal government attempts to overzealously enforce its statutory powers.

Nonetheless, over the decades and numerous administrations during which the consumer welfare policy remained largely intact, American consumers have benefitted greatly from marketplace competition. The myriad tech services available to consumers worldwide by U.S. entrepreneurial companies such as Apple and Microsoft, and more recently, Space X, attest to the value of a federal policy focused largely, if not totally, on the benefits to consumers of minimized marketplace meddling.

This all may be coming to a screeching halt if the proposed “Merger Guidelines” made public last month by the Biden Administration go into effect in September. These ill-advised guidelines muddy the long-standing, consumer-welfare based antitrust enforcement policy; replacing it with  proposals that will cause innovation to stutter and companies to shrink from completing or even attempting beneficial consolidation. The new policies will also, and not surprisingly, cause antitrust litigation to expand if not explode in coming years.

The document itself, drafted jointly by the Justice Department and the FTC (currently headed by well-known business-consolidation opponent Lina Khan), is gobbledygook from its “Overview” to its lengthy appendices. In this, it mirrors the confusing enforcement actions and inconsistent results achieved thus far by the Biden Administration’s antitrust litigation.

The current Antitrust Division, for example, had three bites at convicting poultry executives at Pilgrim’s Pride of violating federal criminal antitrust laws, and failed each time. That same division at the Justice Department currently is litigating against a proposed merger between Jet Blue and Spirit Airlines that would enhance competition against the “Big Four” airlines.

Unfortunately, the new Guidelines, should they be finalized in their current form, would open the door wide to significantly more antitrust mischief by these agencies.

Clearly in the gunsights of the proposed guidelines, for example, are tech platforms and supporting worker rights. The disturbing theme underlying the document appears to be that consolidation is presumed to be bad.

As Dan Mitchell appropriately describes the new Biden merger policies, by jettisoning the consumer welfare standard in favor of amorphous criteria designed to achieve equality, they will “make it easier for government officials to reward friendly companies and punish those who do not do the administration’s bidding even on matters unrelated to competition.” And that is something that should scare not only every business in America, but every consumer as well.

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

Somewhat lost in the public’s fixation on the scandals surrounding President Biden and his prodigal son Hunter, and the lengthening string of indictments against former President Trump, is a revealing and disturbing survey published last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The poll released in July found that most Americans now favor government restrictions on their freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment – specifically, freedom of expression.

Until recently, the freedoms enunciated in the First Amendment, which was ratified in 1791 to stop government from restricting expression and publication of ideas, has been considered part of the essential fabric of our culture. Apparently, this is no longer the case, at least for 55% of Americans who now consider government – not the individual – to be the best and final arbiter of what information is worthy of expression or publication; a full 65 percent would turn to “tech companies” to make such decisions for them.

Regardless of the reasons behind this failure to grasp the fundamental principle that liberty is lost when ideas can be restricted by authorities, these findings are fundamentally far more troubling than past or current misdeeds by Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

The scope of the restrictions many Americans now appear willing to surrender on their expressive freedom, as revealed by the Pew survey, are breathtaking – extending broadly to information deemed “false” or  “violent.”

The degree to which a majority of Americans appear content allowing government and tech companies to censor information has increased significantly in just the past five years. As the Pew survey discovered, the percentage of adults who are ready to have their right to enjoy the free flow of information restricted to protect against “false information” ballooned from 39 percent in 2018 to 58 percent today.

To put these findings in a broader context, a 2021 Pew survey determined that more than eight in 10 Americans gather their news information from online sources, including “smart” phones, computers, or electronic tablets. Coupled with the revelations in the July 2023 survey, it becomes clear that only a small percentage of citizens would remain comfortable receiving unfiltered news.

Seventy percent of U.S. citizens now believe that tech companies should be the gatekeepers to restrict “violent content online,” and 60 percent expressed a willingness to let the government perform such public service.

The Pew survey also found that, “Democrats have become much more supportive than Republicans of the government restricting false information online.” Say what? Was it not Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt – surely the epitome of modern liberalism – who in his 1941 State of the Union address loudly championed “freedom of speech and expression” as one of the “Four Freedoms” considered universal human rights?

And, was it not John F. Kennedy, another iconic Democrat president, who echoed that clarion call for freedom of expression in a March 1962 speech?

These oft-repeated expressions by Democrat political leaders in support of robust freedom of speech and expression, however, turned decidedly murky during Barack Obama’s eight years in office. Our 44^th President made no effort to disguise his keen desire to restrict disfavored speech – openly pressing for federal regulatory agencies, including the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to gain lawful power to regulate such content.

Today’s Democrats do not even pretend to hide their disdain for unfettered expressive freedom; openly lecturing us on the essential need for government and social media companies to censor disfavored information so it does not “harm” us. Their contempt extends even to attacks on song lyrics expressing ideas at odds with theirs.

We are approaching the 232^nd anniversary of the ratification of the First Amendment, and the fourth anniversary of the civil liberties’ disaster foisted upon us by the government’s vast and unnecessary regulatory overreaction to the COVID pandemic.

The United States has morphed from a society unafraid of open expression, into a nation populated by fear-driven citizens who, by significant majorities, see a greater good in government and tech companies – not each individual – deciding what information is “false” or too “violent,” and therefore to be hidden from view.

In this environment, it is no longer as FDR declared in his first inaugural address in 1933, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The dark and present danger now is that for a majority of adult Americans, the power to express independent ideas is itself to be feared. Ominously, as we enter the brave new world of “AI,” this looming threat to liberty will become ever more 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.

Daily Caller

Sunday, July 30 was our nation’s tenth “National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.” For those who may not care so much for whistleblowers these days, including perhaps Joe and Hunter Biden, July 30 also serves as “National Cheesecake Day.”

I like cheesecake and I have nothing against legitimate whistleblowers, but there are so many of them these days that it is becoming a bit difficult to sort them all out.

Whistleblowers long-predate formation of our country, going back many centuries to medieval England, when individuals who snitched on their fellow Brits for working on the Sabbath, were entitled to half the perpetrators’ ill-gotten profits.