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Townhall

“Project 2025.” It was mentioned during last night’s debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, just as it has repeatedly come up over the course of this year’s remarkably unusual presidential campaign. True to form, it was criticized by Harris and disavowed by Trump.

Much has been written about Project 2025, which is detailed in a 887-page book – Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise — published last year by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based, conservative think tank, as a guide for a hoped-for conservative-oriented presidency to follow that of President Biden.

The programs outlined in Project 2025 are neither new nor ground-breaking, and follow similar volumes issued by Heritage in the lead-up to presidential elections since the first edition was published in 1981.

As noted by its authors, it is a “governing agenda” designed as a roadmap for a conservative president to implement where possible and advocate when necessary, for changes in an administration and in the individuals who will populate it, in order to reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government.

In no other election, going back to those in the 1980s, has this election-year project become a central and recurring target by the Democrat nominee and the Party itself. Why this year?

On the broadest level, one could attribute Project 2025’s prominence this cycle to the basic parameters according to which virtually everything relating to national politics and to candidates and office holders, is subject to virulent objection by whichever side or individual disagrees with all or a portion of whatever is being put forward. Thus, insofar as Project 2025 describes a conservative governing agenda, Democrats blast it as the most evil and anti-American document ever written and presented in the public policy arena.

Such vehemence is not surprising since Project 2025’s central thesis is that the federal government, particularly in its regulatory reach, has become far too powerful and unacceptably restrictive of individual liberty. It aims to curb that behemoth and return as much power as possible to the states and to individual citizens. Project 2025 is in this sense, a red flag and a logical target of Democrat ire.

A review of some of Project 2025’s proposal illustrates why Democrats, including the Party’s presidential nominee, are so disdainful of the program:

• Reducing the reach and influence of the federal Department of Education, including reforms to Title IX that would return the expansive reach of the Title back to basics, and also restoring due process rights to students and others accused of violating Title IX’s mandates.

• Restructuring and streamlining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a way to avoid a repeat of the incompetent manner by which it administered defenses against the COVID-19 pandemic, and implementing reforms that would stop the pharmaceutical industry from contributing millions of dollars to the CDC through its “Foundation.”

• Ensuring federal policies and programs are centered on pro-life rather than pro-abortion principles.

• Eliminate the scandal-ridden Head Start program, long a shibboleth of big government proponents.

• Bring the FBI under tighter accountability within its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, and support a move by Congress to remove the current 10-year term for the Director of the FBI.

• Secure our southern border, not only directly through policy and advocating for increased appropriations for border security, but also requiring U.S. Attorneys across the country to vigorously prosecute immigration-related offenses.

• Reorganize and refocus the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

• Add a citizenship question to the decennial census form.

• Close all “Confucius Institutes” in the U.S., which have served to spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda throughout American universities.

• Repeal the century-old “Jones Act” that has decimated U.S. shipbuilding but is a favorite of maritime-related unions.

It seems clear why Democrats and nominee Harris don’t like Project 2025, but why Trump’s statements disavowing it? Hard to say, especially insofar as many members of his first administration helped draft it.

It is, however, deeply disappointing that both major political parties in 2024 are at pains to distance themselves from a substance-laden policy document like Project 2025, and that neither presents any alternative of substance. Sadly, both major political parties appear to have concluded that their voters no longer will make decisions based on substance. In this, we have come a long way downward since the 1980s.

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 is president of the National Rifle Association.

Daily Caller

The first ten amendments to our Constitution are known as the “Bill of Rights” for a reason — within it are denoted numerous “rights” that belong to individuals and which are guaranteed as such against government limitation. Any American elected official who fails to grasp this foundational principle, or who understands it but refuses to accept it, is undeserving of holding public office. Take, for example, Kamala Harris.

Our current vice president, the Democrat Party nominee for president, is on record positing that one of those fundamental individual liberties expressly guaranteed against government intrusion, does not actually protect an individual right after all. So much for the clear language and history underpinning the Bill of Rights.

Not surprising, the context in which Harris has taken such a posture openly antithetical to the very principle on which the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 is the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms. She proudly lent her name as the then-district attorney for San Francisco, to a legal brief opposing what turned out to be the seminal 2008 Heller decision that declared expressly that the Second Amendment does in fact protect an individual right to possess a firearm.

Harris’ stance set forth in that legal brief tells us all we need to know about her disdain for the Second Amendment.

In the years since Heller, Harris has continued to support all manner of government restrictions on possession of firearms by law-abiding citizens, including among other measures, confiscatory bans on the country’s most popular rifle the AR-15, lauding Australia’s draconian gun confiscation program and most recently, criticizing the Supreme Court’s Cargill decision in June that stopped the ATF from arbitrarily declaring “bump stocks” to be “machine guns” under federal law.

The choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is further hard evidence of where the current vice president stands with regard to the rights supposed to be guaranteed under the Second Amendment.

As governor of the North Star State, Walz has supported and signed legislation expanding so-called “red flag” laws and background checks for gun purchases that go beyond those already mandated under federal law. It was a quite different story during Walz’s tenure in the U. S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019, however, when he needed and avidly sought the support of the NRA.

In the language du jure for what previously was known quite accurately as “flip-flopping,” Walz now declares his views have “evolved” such that he criticizes the NRA by name, and declares he is proud to be the recipient of an “F” rating from the Association that supported him previously. He has made a show of donating to charity a sum of money equal to that which he happily received from the NRA while a congressman.

And oh, how his positions have “evolved.” For example, that most popular rifle in the country among law-abiding citizens – the AR-15 — now is considered by Walz a “weapon of war” that must be banned.

As with many latecomers to the gun control movement, Walz considers his anti-Second Amendment views appropriately constitutional because, well, they help “keep our kids safe.” Lost in his probably cursory study of the historical underpinnings of the Second Amendment, and even as reflected in recent Supreme Court decisions (most notably the 2022 Bruen decision), is the fact that “keeping kids safe” is nowhere to be found even impliedly in any writings by our Founders justifying the Second Amendment (or elsewhere in the Bill of Rights for that matter).

To Walz, as to his gun control colleagues in Washington, including Kamala Harris, “common sense” equates seamlessly to “constitutional.”

It will be interesting to see how Harris’ and Walz’s extreme anti-Second Amendment views will resonate nationally with voters who do not live in the states they have represented in public office (California and Minnesota), particularly considering that private ownership of handguns for self-defense continues to rise across the country, especially among women and Black Americans. Hopefully a majority of votes tallied after the polls close Nov. 5th will reject the views of the Democrat Party’s national ticket that the Bill of Rights can be casually discarded based on their vague notion of “common sense.”

Bob Barr currently is President of the NRA. He previously represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, 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

There are many reasons why President Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous, 1937 “court-packing plan” went down in flames the year after he won a landslide reelection, and even though his Democrat Party controlled both Houses of Congress. High among the reasons for FDR’s humiliating legislative defeat was the correct perception both in Congress and among the population generally that the plan was nothing other than a blatant move to politicize the Supreme Court.

Now, nearly nine decades later, another Democrat President is trying the same gambit; this time by proposing to discard the lifetime tenure enjoyed by Supreme Court justices since the adoption of our Constitution in 1790, and instead limit them to a single, 18-year term on the High Court.

As with FDR’s ill-fated ploy to jimmy with the nation’s highest judicial body, President Biden’s term-limiting proposal, announced on July 29th as a “Bold Plan to Reform the Supreme Court,” should never become law.

Despite the Administration characterization to the contrary, Biden’s plan is nothing more than political sour apples; motivated by dislike of recent decisions by the current Supreme Court majority that are not in accord with either the President’s or his Party’s ideological views on abortion and the scope of presidential immunity for former President Donald Trump.

Biden’s plan also is contrary to his vow as a candidate in 2019 to oppose  “court-packing.”  The handwriting for Biden’s flip-flop on this issue, however, was evidenced by an Executive Order he signed in April 2021 setting up  a “presidential commission” to study “reforms” to the Supreme Court.

Whether it be the mallet employed by FDR in 1937 or the lighter hammer wielded by Biden last month, both proposals are contrary to the idea of a Supreme Court as free as possible from political pressures from the presidency or the Congress; a principle enunciated clearly and at length in the Federalist Papers. Most notably, as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 78, “permanent tenure of judicial officers” was essential if the nation in the future was to enjoy “liberty” under a government of “limited” powers.

Although the structure of a federal judicial system when Hamilton penned those words in 1788 was as yet untested, he and his Federalist co-authors (James Madison and John Jay) recognized even then that its judges must have the protection of permanent tenure — in the language of the time, during “good behavior” — in order to withstand inevitable pressures to serve the interests of the other two branches of the newly organized government.

Every student of contemporary American government of course knows that the size, scope, and power of the federal government has grown far, far beyond anything that could have been imagined by Hamilton and our other Founders. Uncle Sam’s behemoth does not even faintly resemble that of “limited and enumerated powers” as they proposed and for which they so eloquently argued in 1787 and 1788.

Still, the disdain for those ideals, and the disingenuous manner by which today’s politicians, exemplified by Biden’s recent effort to change the make-up of the Supreme Court by mandating temporary tenure for its justices, should be deeply troubling to Democrats as well and Republicans, and to liberals as well as Conservatives. His proposal erodes and cheapens one of the true hallmarks of our system of checks and balances between branches of the federal government.

Just as importantly, however, distinguishing federal judges who are appointed by the president and subject to confirmation by the United States Senate, from their state system counterparts who are elected popularly and serve limited terms, provides another important and unique manner by which important, even life-saving civil and criminal matters are considered according to sometimes differing interests by the several states and the federal government.

Cavalierly toying with this carefully crafted and magnificently balanced judicial system has served America well for more than 234 years, even with all the political slings and arrows directed at it (some with good cause). Whether changes to that system are proposed by a popular and powerful president such as FDR in his second term, or a weak, lame-duck President Joe Biden in his final months in office, such moves should be quickly shown the exit door on Capitol Hill regardless of which Party is in power.

Bob Barr currently serves as President of the National Rifle Association. He 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.

Washington Examiner

With the Supreme Court recently expressing clear disapproval of many of the Federal Trade Commission‘s operating procedures, Congress must aggressively steer this key regulatory agency back to its original mission of protecting consumers.

When we served in Congress, we relied on the FTC’s challenges to artificial monopolies and predatory business activities to conduct our own legislative business. Its work and guidance helped us construct fair regulatory frameworks that worked for businesses and consumers alike, regardless of how wealthy, poor, big, or small they were and irrespective of how politically well-connected they might or might not have been.

Today, however, the FTC is placing its political policy agenda above the rule of law and the interests of the consumers it is charged with protecting.

It would be unfair and wasteful for people to wait years, or even decades, for challenges to further regulatory abuses by the FTC and other agencies to reach and be decided by the courts. The ball is in Congress’s court.

Congress still oversees the FTC, and the federal legislative body has an obligation to step in and reform the regulatory agency it created more than a century ago. Most importantly, Congress must roll back the FTC’s new enforcement policies and operational standards — standards that the commission itself has admitted do not necessarily represent the interests of consumers.

The real problem started two years ago, when the FTC rescinded its antitrust enforcement policy that properly had kept its actions “guided by the public policy underlying the antitrust laws, namely, the promotion of the consumer welfare.” Sadly, in 2022, the commission, under the leadership of Chairwoman Lina Khan, replaced that consumer-centric enforcement policy with new, anti-consumer, anti-business standards.

Khan’s revised policy allows the FTC to go after any company or business tactic the agency’s commissioners deem “coercive,” “exploitative,” “abusive,” or “restrictive” — all undefined terms.

Making matters worse, the commission also decided it could deviate from antitrust precedent when taking regulatory action. In short, it is rewriting the rulebook whenever it fits the Biden administration’s political agenda.

By annulling its long-standing consumer-welfare standard, the commission opened the door to target any business behavior it disfavored, including mergers and acquisitions that had the effect of reducing consumer prices.

More than 100 career attorneys at the FTC, and one of the presidentially appointed commissioners, have resigned in the wake of the commission’s politically motivated anti-business and consumer-harming policies.

Congress, however, still has oversight authority over the commission, and it is high time to exercise it.

First, the House should begin public oversight hearings to take a hard look at how Khan and her cohorts are mismanaging what historically ranked as one of the best midsized government agencies in terms of workforce satisfaction. Her politically motivated management of the FTC has resulted in the commission’s once stellar workforce ranking dropping precipitously.

In a series of recent decisions, the Supreme Court has provided Congress a veritable road map by which to reform federal regulatory processes.

In late June, the court rendered its decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, which invalidated the administrative state’s use of in-house administrative law judges instead of federal jury trials to handle certain proceedings. Earlier this term, the court’s Axon v. FTC decision specifically took aim at unfair administrative trials held by the agency.

More broadly, Congress should use the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the “Chevron” decision as leverage to rein in the FTC. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce effectively ended the 1984 Chevron approach that long had permitted regulatory agencies to interpret vague regulatory standards in laws passed by Congress themselves.

It would be manifestly irresponsible for Congress not to seize this historic opportunity to review the agency’s rule-making powers and actually determine which ones are and are not consistent with congressional intent and Supreme Court decisions. This process hopefully will be followed by congressional action to repeal or defund regulations found to be beyond the scope of congressional intent or inapposite to judicial mandate.

These recent Supreme Court cases should serve as a wake-up call that no federal agency is above the law — not even the powerful FTC. The sooner Congress acts to restore the FTC to its proper role of protecting consumers, the better off America’s consumers will be.

Jason Altmire, a Democrat, represented Pennsylvania’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2013, where he served as the chairman of the House Small Business Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation.

Bob Barr, a Republican, represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, where he served as a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. He served as the United States attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s.

The Regulatory Review

In Garland v. Cargill, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its statutory authority in issuing a final rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns.

Assessment of this common-sense opinion must start with a review of the National Firearms Act, which defines a “machine gun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The definition also includes “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively… for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.”

In contrast to a machine gun, which can fire multiple shots when its trigger is engaged once, a semiautomatic firearm can fire only one shot per trigger engagement. There are shooting techniques, however, to increase the rate at which semiautomatic firearms can be fired.

One technique is “bump firing.” When bump firing, the shooter keeps his trigger finger stationary, while allowing the recoil energy from firing the gun to push the gun backward quickly and reset the trigger. Simultaneously, the shooter applies forward pressure on the gun with his non-trigger hand to “bump” the trigger into his still-stationary trigger finger, which fires a subsequent shot. When done effectively, bump firing allows semiautomatic firearms to fire at rates approaching machine guns.

A bump stock is a device that makes bump firing easier. Importantly, even with a bump stock, the Court noted that “as with any semiautomatic firearm, the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot.” Moreover, bump firing—with or without a bump stock—requires significant manual input from the shooter.

Reflecting these facts, in ten different letter rulings from 2008 to 2017, ATF concluded that bump stock-equipped rifles are not machine guns, for the simple reason they cannot “automatically” fire multiple shots “by a single function of the trigger.” In 2018, however, after the U.S. Congress declined to adopt legislation following a mass shooting in Las Vegas, ATF reversed course and promulgated a final rule classifying bump stocks as machine guns. The rule states that “the term ‘automatically’” in the NFA “means functioning as the result of a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that allows the firing of multiple rounds through a single function of the trigger; and ‘single function of the trigger’ means a single pull of the trigger and analogous motions.” Furthermore, the ATF stated that the “term ‘machine gun’ includes a bump-stock-type device.”

Michael Cargill, a gun advocate and gun shop owner in Texas, challenged this rule, claiming that under the Administrative Procedure Act the ATF exceeded its authority because bump stocks are not “machine guns” under the statute. After an en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Cargill’s favor, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

The Court applied common sense to the question presented and held that a bump stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle is not a machine gun.

First, the Court noted that a firearm equipped with a bump stock “does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’” because even with a bump stock, “a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot.” Indeed, as the majority opinion reasoned, “a bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger.”

Second, a bump stock-equipped rifle does not fire “automatically,” because “the shooter must do more than simply engage the trigger one time.” Specifically, the shooter must “actively maintain just the right amount of forward pressure on the rifle’s front grip with his non-trigger hand,” requiring the shooter to exert manual input.

The Court also rejected the government’s nontextual argument that bump stocks should be considered machine guns because, otherwise, machine-gun restrictions would be rendered ineffective since offenders could instead acquire bump stocks: “A law is not useless merely because it draws a line more narrowly than one of its conceivable statutory purposes might suggest,” the Court explained.

It further remarked that “it is difficult to understand how ATF can plausibly argue otherwise, given that its consistent position for almost a decade in numerous separate decisions was that” bump stocks are not machine guns.

By invalidating ATF’s final rule, the Court reinforced the fundamental principle that executive branch agencies cannot create laws; they may only enforce them. As Justice Samuel Alito explained in a concurring opinion, the statutory text of the NFA is clear, so any change to the law must come from Congress.

In addition to invalidating the final rule restricting bump stocks, the Cargill opinion is likely to have other far-reaching implications.

By making clear that ATF cannot simply rewrite statutory language it wishes was broader, Cargill casts doubt on other ATF rules. In recent years, ATF rules have redefined unfinished frames or receivers as firearms, redefined what constitutes a short-barreled rifle, and redefined what constitutes being “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms. All these rules, like the rule re-classifying bump stocks as machine guns, not only change but contradict Congress’s clear statutory language. The Cargill decision, therefore, signifies that ATF exceeded its authority by enacting those rules as well.

In addition, both the majority and dissenting opinions in Cargill emphasized the difference between machine guns and semiautomatic firearms. Some lower courts have upheld prohibitions on certain semiautomatic firearms (repeatedly deemed “assault weapons”) by equating them with machine guns. Cargill, however, undermines this rationale by making clear that there are critical distinctions between such types of firearms.

Thus, while Cargill ensures that fundamental Second Amendment rights are not subject to the whims of unelected bureaucrats at ATF, the decision would appear to provide legal ammunition with which to challenge abuses of regulatory power by many other departments and agencies.