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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.
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 44th 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 232nd 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.
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.
Unsurprisingly, it was Benjamin Franklin who, three years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, popularized the notion that the public good should not only encourage, but reward citizens who exposed government wrongdoing. In fact, this very principle was incorporated legislatively by the Second Continental Congress in 1778 and signed by then-President Henry Laurens.
Privateering and price gouging during the Civil War became so widespread that Congress in 1863 passed the False Claims Act, pursuant to which a private citizen could initiate a civil action against government-employee scams, and be entitled to a significant cut of any monies eventually awarded.
It was not, however, until more than a century later that the act of being a recognized “whistleblower” achieved significant public and political notoriety. In 1989 the “Whistleblower Protection Act” was signed into law, providing meaningful protection against retaliation for any federal employee who discloses wrongdoing to the Congress. Ten years later, similar legal protection was extended to employees of intelligence agencies who disclosed “urgent” wrongdoing to the specified congressional committees through the proper channels.
Famously (or infamously, depending on one’s political perspective), it was a self-described whistleblower – Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman – whose claim that then-President Trump engaged in a corrupt phone call with Ukrainian officials, provided the Democrat justification for Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
While Republican and other supporters of Trump raised serious — and legitimate — concern that the real motive for Vindman ’s disclosure to his superiors and then to the Congress was partisan and political rather than evidence of actual and serious wrongdoing by the president, the now-retired Lt. Col. was deified by the Democrats and much of the media.
Most recently, the now-GOP controlled House Oversight Committee conducted a public hearing late last month during which a pair of IRS whistleblowers alleged that their investigation into Hunter Biden’s legal misdeeds (including those that formed the basis for his aborted plea deal in federal court last week) had been improperly stymied by the Justice Department.
The manner with which one of the IRS agents sought the limelight in his post-testimony media interviews seemed ebullient and exaggerated, neither of which characteristic adds gravitas to such testimony.
While the public testimony by the IRS duo did raise legitimate questions about just how the long-running, and now apparently still-ongoing Hunter Biden investigations have been handled (or mishandled), much greater factual evidence needs to be brought forward to buttress these whistleblowers’ testimony, if in fact the GOP inquisitors are to strengthen their credibility sufficient to bring impeachment charges against Hunter’s Dad – President Joe Biden.
Democrats already have levelled charges that information revealed behind closed doors by the IRS agents either contradicts their public statements or may be inconsistent therewith. It behooves the Republicans to address such concerns sooner rather than later.
In order to bolster those investigations, GOP leaders need also to establish clearly that reasons underlying the Justice Department’s alleged “slow walking” the IRS investigations was nefarious, rather than reflective of the very different jurisdictional priorities and requirements defining how these two federal agencies set and manage prosecutorial decisions.
The strength of the Republican oversight investigation of the Bidens was not aided when, the very same week the IRS whistleblowers testified about Hunter Biden’s serious and questionable escapades, a former Air Force intelligence officer, also claiming whistleblower status, testified before a different House subcommittee that non-human, alien UFO remains were being withheld from the public by Uncle Sam.
Mixing serious evidence of prosecutorial misconduct by the Biden Justice Department with eyeball-rolling testimony that the Defense Department has been hiding UFO materials and extraterrestrial body parts, just is not the best way to enhance the GOP’s investigative credibility.
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.
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There remains but two months before the current federal fiscal year ends September 30th. Half of that remaining period will be spent by lawmakers in their home states and districts during the traditional August recess.
When the Congress reconvenes after Labor Day, the Republican Party will be in a position to either strengthen its currently slim majority in the House, or risk losing it.
Much depends on whether the GOP can discipline itself to stick to a strategy that is laser-focused on the 2024 election, rather than on passing bits of legislation playing largely, if not solely to its base for short-term gain.
A key factor in this equation is whether the appropriations process — which even in the most nonpartisan of times presents a messy picture to the American electorate – can be managed by Speaker McCarthy in such a way as to avoid a government “shutdown,” which already is being whispered in the corridors under the Capitol dome.
Some Republican budget hardliners claim to not “fear a government shutdown,” and others look to “stare down” Democrats. The fact of the matter is that in recent decades, so-called “shutdowns” rarely benefit the Party orchestrating them.
Forcing a shutdown over specific issues (even very important ones), such as spending on abortion or constructing a few more feet of a border wall, may reap short-term political gain, but likely will come with long-term political harm.
Historically, pushing the budgetary process to a stand-off with a president of the other political party rarely has demonstrably helped the party driving the process in the Congress; and then only if it is part of a coherent and consistent longer-term strategy.
The best example of this is in the late 1995-early 1996 budget showdown between the then-new GOP House majority led by Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton, who at the time was still licking his wounds after a historic shellacking in the 1994 mid-terms.
At the time, that three-week long “shutdown” was a public relations nightmare for the House GOP majority (I know, I was there as a freshman Member from Georgia). But the long-term benefit was historic.
The goal of the stand-off was not simply to pass a fiscal year budget or to force Clinton to accept as part of that budget bill a particular appropriations rider. Rather, the plan was to draw a bright line in the sand that told Clinton and the American electorate that the new Republican majority was serious about balancing the budget and putting the nation’s fiscal house back in order.
The strategy worked wonderfully, and by the middle of the very next year (1997) both the House and the Senate had passed, and Clinton had signed legislation that in fact balanced the federal budget for the first time in nearly three decades.
Contrast that strategically planned budget showdown with the much longer (at 34 days) December 2018-January 2019 stare-down between the Democrat-controlled House and Republican President Donald Trump. At the time, Trump was demanding funds for his preferred border and immigration policy initiatives. The resulting impasse was part of a tactical skirmish, not of a strategic plan.
In the end, the 2018-2019 shutdown, despite being the longest in our history, achieved little if anything of lasting importance for either political party or for the country.
Whether the American people will witness yet another “shutdown” this Fall (or next year even as voters will be casting early ballots in many states) remains uncertain. It is not clear if McCarthy will agree to even a partial omnibus “reconciliation” spending bill this year if there remain one or more of the dozen appropriations bills that could not win a majority of votes before the end of September. Whether the far-right Freedom Caucus insists absolutely that favored abortion or immigration limitations be included in certain of the spending measures also remains to be seen, but the signs already are indicating moves in that direction.
Becoming bogged down in a shutdown slugfest may please former President Trump cheering from the sidelines, but it would be a strategic blunder for the Party; signaling to the electorate beyond the GOP base that the current leadership lacks the strength and the vision to effectively govern, and perhaps even to be awarded a second, two-year term in the majority.
Governing is a serious game, and maintaining and projecting a clear and consistent strategy is far more important than any short-term tactical achievements. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions in recent years, the GOP seems not to understand that principle.
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.