Liberty Guard Author

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

Anyone hoping to find consistency in how courts are assigning responsibility for the so-called “opioid crisis” will be sadly disappointed.  Last May, a North Dakota judge dismissed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma that sought to hold the pharmaceutical manufacturer responsible for that state’s opioid problem. Just last week, an Oklahoma judge in a very similar case decided to take the opposite approach and found that another drug manufacturing giant, Johnson & Johnson, was responsible for the state’s high number of individuals using the opioids it manufactured; to the tune of nearly $600 million.

In each of these lawsuits, the pharmaceutical company was charged under the respective state’s “nuisance” laws, with engaging in “deceptive” marketing practices that in turn caused and contributed to individuals’ opioid addiction.  

Using nuisance laws in this way — targeting deep-pocketed corporations selling or manufacturing dis-favored products within a state – is a legal maneuver increasingly favored by aggressive state attorneys general to attack everything from cigarettes to firearms. 

Considering the facts in these two most recent opioid cases were very similar, why were the judges’ rulings dramatically different?  As Reason’s Jacob Sullum put it, the rulings “pit a simple narrative of the ‘opioid crisis’ with a clear set of villains against a more complicated story that’s closer to the truth.” In other words, the two courts had very different concepts of “justice” regardless of the facts presented.

In North Dakota, both sides of the controversy were argued and weighed, with Judge James Hill holding that the State failed to meet its burden of proof; not that Purdue was completely innocent, but rather the State did not have sufficient evidence to find the company legally responsible. Oklahoma Judge Thad Balkman took a far more policy-based approach. He appeared to essentially ignore the evidence presented by the corporate defendant, including strong evidence showing that abuse of the prescription medication it manufactured was only a small part of the overall opioid death trend.  He then went for the multi-hundred-million-dollar pound of corporate flesh.

In North Dakota, we see judicial reasoning reflective of the objective standard normally expected from courts.  The Oklahoma judge’s reasoning reflects something more akin to mob justice; purposed only to slake society’s collective thirst for assigning blame and punishment. 

Broadly speaking, the problem with the Oklahoma verdict extends far beyond the opioid setting on which it and its North Dakota counterpart were based.  

For example, as Democrats continue their relentless effort to dismantle the buffer between politics and the judiciary at every level, we face the very real danger that courts are becoming little more than public stockades, where true guilt matters far less than simply finding someone to punish and shame. It is distressing that many of today’s judges appear willing, if not eager, to make decisions reflecting such a philosophy.

Democrats understand this well, and it is why they have become adept at using our state and federal court systems as political bludgeons to hamper President Trump’s ability to implement the public policies on which he was elected.  In this emerging game of judicial brinksmanship, a single federal judge is able to bring to a screeching halt virtually any important national policy move Trump makes. 

Democrat kingmaker George Soros also clearly understands the power inherent in our supposedly impartial judicial system.  In recent years, he has devoted significant financial resources to ensure that local prosecutors, state attorneys general and state judges who share his political philosophy are elected to such offices (along with a willingness to thus abuse the powers of those positions).  

At the federal level, Democrats are keenly aware that Trump’s picks for district, appellate and Supreme Court judges are far less likely than those nominated by his Democrat predecessors to view courts as policymaking bodies.  It is precisely why Senate Democrats remain so hatefully dedicated to regaining control of the Senate and defeating Trump next year.  The Oklahoma judge’s expansive assignment of responsibility to a perhaps unsympathetic corporation for individuals abusing a product is but a small taste of what is to come if the Democrat Party succeeds in its political goals next year.

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

Higher education in America today should come with the disclaimer, caveat emptor. The cost of tuition has more than doubled in the last two decades, with the value of a four-year college degree heading in the opposite direction. 

The “fix” championed by Democratic Party leaders – a bailout for those already graduated, and “free” tuition for those entering the pipeline – will only make matters worse.

A part of this long-developing problem is simply supply and demand; the overabundance of bachelor’s degrees in the market means they are worth less in the eyes of employers. There also is more talent in the marketplace for specialized jobs, meaning graduates with narrowly tailored degrees in obscure fields are less likely to find employment regardless of how much they spent on those degrees. Moreover, employers cannot be sure about the quality of graduates; are they getting someone who is smart and capable in the workplace, or a lite snowflake who melts outside the “safe space” sanctuary of college.

It is a badly broken system, and cannot be remedied by the Democratic Party’s much-ballyhooed “bailout” proposals.  

The $1.6 trillion student loan crisis is not to be ignored or overlooked. The massive amount of debt shouldered by mostly young Americans has been shown to have a sweeping economic and social impact — from delaying marriages and having children, to stunting small business entrepreneurship. Yet, a bailout of student loans, in the form of cancellation or forgiveness such as supported by almost all of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, absolves from responsibility those whose policies caused the problem, while doing nothing to address the root cause. In other words, the standard Democratic strategy.

No one really believes that the quality of education has risen in proportion to its cost. In fact, the value of a degree in 2019 is far less than it was in 1999. Students may enjoy more lavish dorms, massive student centers, and cushy classrooms, but nothing of substance that translates to value in the working world. Students who arrive on campus for a classical education, end up paying for liberal vanity projects with zero real-world value — expensive administrators tasked with “social justice” and leading “bias response teams,” along with liberal arts programs that pay inflated faculty salaries for teaching “courses” on Brazilian transgender prostitutes, and riffing on Twitter about Republicans being serial rapists.

The Democrats’ drive to define college education a “human right” has helped to make student loans as easy to get as sub-prime lending in the mid-2000s.  This, of course, virtually ensures colleges and universities can continue to charge whatever they want, because students (and their parents) will somehow secure the dollars demanded. This warped arrangement carries virtually no risk for the lenders, since student loans are difficult, if not impossible to discharge in bankruptcy; with many guaranteed by Uncle Sam himself.

Why should the rest of America shoulder this burden, especially those generations who worked hard to repay what they owed? Why is an expensive education at a northern school (the top seven statesfor highest average student loan debt are in the north), for a degree the student should have known had no marketable value, but was simply something he or she “wanted to learn,” suddenly the responsibility of American taxpayers generally? 

A bailout of student loans is a great marketing ploy by Democratic presidential candidates, but it represents nothing other than another higher education scam; one that rewards the perpetrators and punishes everyone else. Colleges will continue to charge astronomical tuition. Lenders will continue handing out money at zero-risk to them. And, irresponsible students will rest easy knowing that someone else will be picking up the tab for a four-year luxury vacation to study a field that only they care about. 

The crisis in higher education is the product of liberal hubris and government meddling, and has produced an educational system designed more for the personal and political vanity of edu-crats, than for the benefit of our nation’s young people. 

A bailout of this broken and corrupt system will greatly harm America’s global competitiveness in the decades to come. In fact, it already has.

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

The historically racist origins of gun control are hardly a topic for debate.  As noted by Cato Institute’s David Kopel, the matter of arming blacks in America was the subject of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision; with one Supreme Court justice warning about the rights of free blacks “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Kopel also notes that as a part of the Black Codes passed in the South during the early post-Civil War Reconstruction, free blacks were required to secure permission from police in order to carry firearms. 

From Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol with her during the heroic rescues of slaves, to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who quipped “a man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box” — there is perhaps no other group in American history whose members understand intimately the “right to self-preservation” embodied in the Second Amendment than black Americans. 

It is therefore more than a little curious as to why Democrats continue to push gun control measures that are inherently, historically, and intentionally designed to disenfranchise minority groups from their Second Amendment rights.

In spite of a downward trend of gun violence in America, even as gun ownership soars, Democrats contend there is both an “epidemic” of gun violence sweeping the country, and that access to firearms is the culprit. This mindset guides virtually every part of the Democrats’ gun control agenda; with no apparent regard to who actually is or will be impacted the most by their plans. 

Carried to its natural end, the philosophy of gun control virtually ensures the only people left with firearms in a Democrat-controlled America are cops, affluent whites, and criminals. 

Perhaps street crime and police response times are not concerns for rich liberals hiding behind privacy fences in gated communities with private, armed security guards (can you say, “Silicon Valley?”); but for millions of Americans in urban areas ravaged by gangs and crime, firearm ownership is literally a matter of life and death. 

One underpinning gun control strategy favored most by Democrats centers around price control; wherein regulatory measures squeeze both supply and the cost of production of firearms, making them cost-prohibitive to acquire and possess. 

Schemes such as removing the legal shield that protects firearm manufactures and retailers from lawsuits resulting from criminal acts by end users, and resurrecting the Obama-era tactic of employing the FDIC to bully banks into not doing business with firearms retailers and manufacturers, are measures intended to dry up the lawful gun industry.  

However, the actual and ultimate victims of such measures are not big businesses, but individual, law-abiding men and women whose ability to protect themselves, their families, their homes, and their small businesses will be made increasingly difficult. 

We see this strategy already playing out in municipalities controlled by liberal officials.  Even where technically lawful to carry a firearm, such officials delight in making firearm licensing exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming.  Overly complicated testing mandates are coupled with multiple in-person filing requirements available only during regular business hours. Such measures require significant time and effort to pursue — luxuries largely unavailable to the working poor and middle-class workers. 

One of the latest proposals gaining popularity among the Democratic presidential field is to mandate that gun owners carry firearms liability insurance; another side-door tax on a constitutionally-guaranteed right.

This “death by a thousand cuts” has now become gun confiscation by a thousand regulations; with its earliest and most numerous victims being the poor and “marginalized” citizenry these very Democrat bleeding hearts claim to champion.   

Democrats long have vigorously opposed every effort by Republicans to require voter identification as a prerequisite to exercising one’s right to vote.  Liberals assert such mandates intentionally “suppress” the minority vote.  Yet, those very same civil rights champions have no hesitancy in pressing for measures that would seriously suppress the ability of minority and poorer citizens to exercise another precious right; one that is expressly guaranteed against such suppression in the Bill of Rights.  Their hypocrisy is disgraceful.