©2022 Liberty Guard, Inc. All rights reserved.
Designed and Developed by Media Bridge LLC
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee demonstrated once again that the GOP does not know how to conduct effective oversight of the Executive Branch. The occasion was the appearance of Attorney General Merrick Garland before the Committee for an entire day, at the end of which nothing of value was revealed.
Oversight, along with the appropriations power and passing substantive legislation, is one of the three great responsibilities of the Legislative Branch. It has the power to employ congressional committees to question witnesses and gather evidence supposed to ensure that the president and all executive officers, departments and agencies, are operating within the law and consistent with the intent embodied in legislation passed by the Congress.
It is, unfortunately, the one power possessed by the Congress that is the least understood and the most often squandered.
The Judiciary Committee hearing on September 20th was billed expressly as “Oversight of the Department of Justice,” but the Republican members demonstrated little interest in actual oversight of the massive Department, which includes the FBI, ATF, every United States Attorney in the country and our government’s immigration and border control agencies. Instead, they took the opportunity to beat up on Garland over one matter — Hunter Biden.
To be sure, the failure of the Justice Department to seriously investigate or prosecute the “First Son” for what appear to have been numerous, and serious violations of federal law, is a matter deserving of oversight.
Additionally, the failure by this Administration to carry out the myriad powers of the Justice Department fairly and transparently, constitutes a political failure that is fair game for the GOP.
However, to bring the Attorney General of the United States before the one committee with substantive and authorizing jurisdiction over the department he heads, and ask him six ways to Sunday the same questions over and over, knowing in advance he would play the “ongoing investigation” card and not offer anything beyond generalities, is a massive, wasted opportunity.
High on the list of other issues bothering the American people and leaders of the Republican Party, is the ongoing crisis of illegal immigration at our southern border. Strangely, the obvious and abject failure by this Attorney General to enforce laws and regulations designed expressly to stop unlawful entry into the country, barely registered on the litany of concerns expressed by the majority Party at last week’s “oversight” hearing.
Similarly lost in the rush to berate Garland for failing to prosecute Hunter Biden, were other serious questions clearly within the ambit of the Department he heads. These include, for example:
The Republicans may rightly claim in their defense that there will be additional opportunities to conduct oversight of the Justice Department and its component agencies, and that other committees have a piece of the oversight pie and will exercise their powers. Both are true statements.
At the end of the day, however, last week’s hearing was a clear missed opportunity to showcase for the American people that the GOP leadership in the House is ready, willing and able to effectively perform its vital oversight responsibility. Among the audience watching the show are next year’s voters.
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.
“We have met the enemy and he is us” –Pogo (by Walt Kelly, 1970)
The 2024 election is well underway already, with control of the House, the Senate, and the White House all hanging in the balance. Advertisement
So, what is the Republican Party doing? Presenting a clear set of priorities to the American electorate? Discussing issues of importance to the average voter? Showcasing leaders with a firm grasp of the issues and ready to take on a vulnerable, aging, and unpopular incumbent president?
Nope.
Republicans are busy fighting among themselves and squandering a razor-thin House majority pursuing matters having little if anything to do with issues that are uppermost on the minds of voters.
This is hardly a recipe for success either in government or at the ballot box, but nowhere to be seen is the adult leadership necessary to right the congressional ship, such as then-Speaker Newt Gingrich brought to the House with the Republican sweep of 1994.
In a sense, at least part of the blame for this predicament can be traced to the basic nature of the Republican Party, in which independence and diversity of views is encouraged — the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the GOP.
Unlike the Democrat Party, which as a general rule maintains a strict code in public of philosophical uniformity, Republicans to their credit welcome a wide variety of views on many key legislative issues, such as abortion, spending priorities, and even to a degree, immigration. Ideologic uniformity has never been a core GOP precept.
However, to govern successfully in the Congress, a certain level of internal Party discipline is essential. Absent this, the diversity of views Republicans value sooner or later will cause significant friction, even splintering the Party.
In 1994, the Republican Party gained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. The resulting collegium was diverse, with senior members including moderates who had labored for years in the minority, suddenly in January 1995 sharing a caucus with six dozen Republican freshmen spanning the ideological spectrum but with heavy emphasis on the conservative side.
Despite that diversity, the leadership team of Speaker Newt Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey, and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, was able to quell repeated internal insurgencies and cobble together winning majorities when it counted most.
The glue that held our new majority together was a shared sense that individual Members owed a degree of loyalty to the Party that provided the vehicle by which they were elected. This was Party loyalty that did not trump a Member’s commitment to their constituents, but rather fidelity that was to be factored into each Member’s decision-making on key pieces of legislation. Advertisement
Also present back in those relatively halcyon days was an understanding that some compromises had to be made in order to move the Party’s entire agenda forward.
Finally, we had a clear, publicly articulated agenda coupled with a strategy to implement it — a process that within three years of the Republicans gaining a majority, gave America its first balanced budget in more than three decades.
What do we have now, more than a quarter century later with another Republican majority in the House (albeit a much smaller one than Newt worked with during his tenure from 1995 through 1998)?
We have a range of issues on the minds of voters that would appear to be drawn straight from a list of reasons to vote Republican — high energy costs, an immigration crisis, a culture in decline, the 2nd Amendment under constant attack, and a military falling into disrepair.
Rather than articulating clear and consistent solutions to these serious problems occupying voters’ minds, House Republicans fixate on Hunter Biden, argue over a no-win government “shut down,” and even propose to “expunge” actions undertaken against former President Trump by a previous Congress.
Then, rather than attempting to present at least the façade of a unified front for the voters, Republican Members of Congress are busy kicking Members out of their Party’s own internal caucuses, calling their own Speaker a “lying dog,” and labeling their own majority a “clown show.” Advertisement
Perhaps this ADHD-style of governing, with its uncivil and childish bickering, is simply another sign of the times in which we live. One thing it is not, however, is a model for governing that offers voters a reason to repeat.
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.
It appears the Left may no longer feel the need to cloak its gun control measures with even a pretense of legal imprimatur. In their zeal to restrict the ability of law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm for personal protection, some top Democrat public officials now are mandating new gun control policies without even a fig leaf of constitutional legitimacy.
Late last week, for example, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s Administration declared that no person, other than police or licensed security officers, could lawfully possess a firearm anywhere in public within the state’s largest city – Albuquerque – or in the surrounding county – Bernalillo. This blanket restriction applied also to “state property” located anywhere within New Mexico’s 121,591 square mile jurisdiction. The precise extent of “state property,” other than schools and parks, is left undefined.
Unlike recent gun control policies announced by governors of other Democrat-led states such as New York’s Kathy Hochul, which have been at least presented as responses to last year’s Second Amendment-affirming Bruen decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and clothed with a façade of legal respectability, Lujan Grisham’s action offered no such pretense.
Her Administration’s new draconian measures – already being challenged in federal court – have been presented as an “action plan” to “do more” to stop criminal gun violence and rampant illicit drug usage plaguing the state. To Lujan Grisham, blatantly imposing her anti-gun will on the citizens over whom she maintains colorable power, is an appropriate (if nonsensical) way to spur a “debate” about gun control.
The announced premises on which these highly restrictive measures are based is a pair of executive orders signed by Lujan Grisham last Thursday and Friday, declaring that “drug abuse” and “gun violence” are “emergencies” of such magnitude and urgency that the Second Amendment guarantee protecting the rights of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms for self-defense, is of secondary importance (if that).
While the actual language in each of the Governor’s two executive orders declaring drug abuse and gun violence to constitute “emergencies” would appear to limit their reach only to October 6, 2023, in the very same documents both of the “emergencies” are deemed to be of “unknown duration”; in other words, indefinite.
Adding to this concern, the September 8th “Public Health Emergency Order” setting forth the actual restrictions on firearms possession by New Mexico citizens, explicitly would not expire on October 6th, but would “remain in effect for the duration of the public health emergencies declared in Executive Orders 2023-130 (“gun violence”) and 2023-132 (“drug abuse”).
By cleverly having New Mexico Secretary of Health Patrick Allen issue the operative and restrictive “action plan,” rather than include such onerous provisions in her own, more general “executive orders,” Lujan Grisham may be attempting to insert additional vagueness into the just-announced gun control policy, and also to try and insulate herself from legal accountability.
The bottom line in all this, however, is that we have a Governor who is so clueless about how the real world operates, that she has concluded the best way “to drastically reduce the number of violent incidents and fentanyl-related deaths in New Mexico,” is to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, their families, and their communities against gun violence and drug traffickers.
It would be bad enough for the citizens of New Mexico were it only their Governor’s lack of common sense in such regard that impacts them. After all, her announced measures reflect a frame of mind that has manifested itself for decades in policies proposed and implemented by the gun control movement.
Sadly, that lack of common sense exhibited by Lujan Grisham and her minions now is made far worse because it is buttressed by the notion that “inherent constitutional police power” is an appropriate tool by which to take away a constitutionally guaranteed right of the citizenry.
The co-president of New Mexico’s organization designed “to Prevent Gun Violence,” Miranda Viscoli, echoed such perspective, concluding that if voiding an explicit state and federal constitutional guarantee “saves [but] one life,” it is an acceptable price to pay.
In this warped world view, no individual liberty could ever be considered safe from the degree of vacuity and constitutional disdain now being exhibited by gun control zealots such as Michelle Lujan Grisham.
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.
©2022 Liberty Guard, Inc. All rights reserved.
Designed and Developed by Media Bridge LLC