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Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Since at least the early 1990s, Democrats and other gun control advocates have used the term “common sense” to characterize virtually every scheme they concoct to limit citizens’ ability to own,  possess, use or carry firearms, gun parts or ammunition. The phrase has served as a clever way to camouflage the true nature of what such measures are designed to do, which is to undermine the rights protected by the Second Amendment to our Constitution. The linguistic ploy often has worked to Democrats’ advantage, which is one reason President Biden has proposed a new round of “common sense” gun control measures.

There soon may be some good news on the “common sense” front, however, not for gun control advocates but for Second Amendment supporters.

Late last month, and for the first time in more than a decade, the  United States Supreme Court accepted a lower court case that directly confronts the fundamental scope of the Second Amendment. If the High Court actually decides this case — New York Rifle & Pistol Assn., et al. v. Corlett, et al.  — by overturning the lower court’s decision, it will in fact be rendering one of the most common sense decisions in its 232-year history. Moreover, it will make all those liberals constantly clamoring for “common sense” gun control furious beyond anything we have seen in many years.

Considering the blatant and heavy-handed attacks now being leveled against the Court by Biden and Senate Democrat leaders, and despite conservatives now enjoying what many observers consider a 6 to 3 “conservative” majority among the nine justices now serving, how the Court will rule in the case, and how broadly that opinion will reach, is far from certain.

The case found its way to the Supreme Court because New York has for many decades vested its government officials with the absolute, arbitrary power to deny law-abiding citizens the ability to carry a firearm outside the four walls of their home for self-defense, even if they live in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

Unlike virtually all of the other amendments comprising the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment), over the decades the Second Amendment has not benefited from having the Supreme Court affirm its intended purpose as a guardrail against government infringing the liberties supposed to be protected by it. Not until 2008, for example, did the Court finally confirm that the amendment indeed protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Unfortunately, and important as it was, the decision in that case (District of  Columbia v. Heller) limited the right to “keep” a firearm to the interior of the gun owner’s home; once the owner stepped outside, the right vanished and could be infringed by state and local governments essentially at their will.

As the result of that important but narrow ruling 13 years ago, New York and a handful of other states have been able to prevent citizens from taking lawfully held firearms beyond the threshold of their home .  .  . except when a “licensing official” decides that the owner falls into a very special subclass of “persons” able to “bear” a firearm because he or she has demonstrated some undefined “proper cause” to the satisfaction of the official; something that in New York almost never happens. According to this nonsensical analysis, lawful gun owners are allowed to defend themselves with a gun if necessary, but only inside their home and not outside it.

Such a tortured and artificially constrained concept of the fundamental human right to self-defense is the polar opposite of “common sense,” but it is one that the Supreme Court only now has finally taken under advisement. If the Court asserts itself and applies “common sense” in accord with the clear historic and legal bases on which the Second Amendment was conceived and ratified, and overturns New York’s extremely restrictive law, it will have struck a mighty blow for “common sense” and for the rule of constitutional law more broadly.

If a majority of Supreme Court justices rule against New York and in favor of individual liberty in this case, it will also signal that at least five justices have the backbone to stand up to Democrat threats to dilute their power and undermine our judicial system for partisan purposes by “packing” the Court. History and the American people will be watching.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7 District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

President Biden is returning to the Barack Obama playbook of “reforming” municipal police departments by forcing multi-year federal court “consent decrees” down their throats — a strategy that makes it extremely difficult for those departments to hire and retain good officers, or to administer their agencies in accord with the needs of the communities they serve.

Of course, as with everything being undertaken by this Administration, it is all about race and politics, not good policing. Police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville are but the latest recipients of this federal intervention.

It is noteworthy, though not often noted, that both of these cities have been under Democrat Party control for more than three-quarters of a century. One reason why left-wing propagandists, such as Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media fail to note this anomaly, is that it invites the uncomfortable question of how, with Democrats at the helm of these cities for so long, police departments under their purview descended into the alleged hotbed of systemic racism that now warrants federal oversight by the notoriously heavy-handed Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.

A key question that should be asked, but of course is not, is what precisely is to be accomplished by Democrat bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. that has not been possible for Democrats locally across nearly eight decades of control.

Investigating and prosecuting real cases of alleged civil rights violations by police officers is a legitimate focus for the Department of Justice, especially in cases for which there is no adequate prosecution by state authorities. Were this the sole focus by the Civil Rights Division, it might constitute an appropriate use of federal law and resources. However, this Administration, just as the Obama Administration before it, instead looks to deploy federal resources as a bludgeon with which to publicly humiliate police as a whole, rather than as a scalpel to delicately remove those few bad apples.

Here is how the scam works. The Justice Department opens a civil rights investigation into a local police department on the pretext that its officers “target” young black men or some other identifiable category. It always is relatively easy to find some “evidence” of civil rights issues on which to file a lawsuit in federal court against the local police department. Justice Department lawyers then leverage that potentially lengthy and costly proceeding to force local departments to consent to legally binding court decrees that place them under federal control for years, in some cases 10 years or more.

Such consent decrees rob local police chiefs and elected city officials of the ability to establish and administer hiring and training programs, and to set priorities that meet the needs of the communities they serve, as opposed to priorities deemed worthy by lawyer-bureaucrats in Washington. With federal monitors looking over the shoulder of every officer in such departments, it is no wonder that individual officers back away from proactive policing and that the departments receive fewer qualified applicants and suffer higher rates of retirement.

What do citizens get for all of this — police departments with fewer and less well-trained officers, whose performance is measured not by local needs, but by the “woke” standards mandated by liberal lawyers and bureaucrats far away in the nation’s capital. Any true reforms that might result from such programs move at the glacial pace favored by bureaucrats not subject to local voters, and whose ultimate goal is to maintain control and their respective budgets as long as possible.

This is nothing more than a charade so Democrats in D.C. can make it look like they are taking action to cover decades of failures by local Democrats in city leadership.

Yes, there are problems in America’s law enforcement, and as entities populated by real, fallible human beings, there always will be. However, employing bureaucratically conceived and driven national templates to “solve” deeply complex problems between diverse communities and police, is both foolhardy and ultimately dangerous.

Any meaningful effort to resolve today’s problems in community policing must focus on core fiscal, cultural, and social issues, employing solutions founded on local needs and concerns rather than performative Beltway meddling. In other words, exactly what this Administration does not want.

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

by Bob Barr

Last week it was revealed that the United States Postal Service (USPS) is an active participant in the government-wide effort by the Biden administration to surreptitiously surveil social media postings by American citizens, with the apparent goal of identifying individuals inclined to protest government policies and activities; in other words, people who plan to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The response on Capitol Hill to this news of a special USPS intelligence unit called “iCOP” (Internet Covert Operations Program) secretly surveilling social media usage by citizens, was predictable – Democrats yawned, and House Republicans expressed shock and amazement.

The sad reality is that anyone who has followed government operations ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, knows that every federal, state and local government agency with even the slightest degree of law enforcement power is always looking for ways to gather more information on citizens. This has only become far worse since the Jan. 6 trouble on Capitol Hill.

A brief review of the legal authorities according to which the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) operates reveals that the Service in fact can be employed to investigate far more than mail theft or damage to postal facilities, which had been its long-standing and primary responsibility. For example, the Attorney General of the United States can direct Postal Inspectors to aid in enforcing any “laws of the United States.” All that is needed to send Postal Inspectors off on such missions is a decision by the Attorney General “that violations of such laws have a detrimental effect upon the operations of the Postal Service.”

In other words, according to authority already on the books, the USPIS can investigate whatever the attorney general wants it to investigate, so long as such investigations have something to do with negatively affecting some aspect of Postal Service “operations.” More troubling still, such broad, open-ended investigative power can be given to the USPIS in secret, and the Postal Service need not provide any answers to public inquiries about its surreptitious surveillance. Last week, for example, when asked about the Yahoo News revelations about the iCOP program, the USPIS declared dismissively that it “does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods, or tools.”

On April 22, the day after Yahoo News broke the story on the USPIS social media surveillance program, 32 GOP House members signed a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy demanding to know what was going on with the program. In keeping with the absolute partisanship within which all congressional business is conducted these days, not a single House Democrat signed the letter, notwithstanding that it touches directly on possible violations of citizens’ rights guaranteed by the First Amendment – something the Democrat Party once professed to care about.

Across the Capitol rotunda, also on April 22, members of a Senate committee were questioning three nominees whose names had been submitted by President Biden to serve as members of the USPS Board of Governors. Reflecting the Senate’s lack of interest in social media surveillance by the Postal Service, nary a question was raised about the matter by Republican or Democrat members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

This disinterest is consistent with how little all but a handful of senators care about the degree to which law enforcement agencies routinely undermine citizens’ privacy rights supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights. On the House side at least, 32 Republicans cared enough to send a letter of inquiry to the postmaster general.

Unfortunately, if past investigations are any guide, interest in the matter will soon fade and the Postal Service, in conjunction with innumerable other agencies at all levels of government, will settle back to their business as usual of gathering as much information, however they can on the social media and other communications of American citizens.

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

by Bob Barr

For the eight years I represented Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House, I was a member of the Financial Services Committee; a committee on which California Rep. Maxine Waters also served. It did not take long for me to learn that she is as mean-spirited as they come, a characteristic she wears proudly to this day.

Over the course of the past year, however, as violence, looting, and attacks on law enforcement officers spread across our country, Waters’ mean streak has become far more than a reason to avoid crossing her path in person. Her calls for demonstrators in Minneapolis and elsewhere to become ever “more confrontational” reveal Maxine Waters to be more than a deeply unpleasant individual, but rather a public menace, inciting mobs to violence as a new mini warlord for the Left.

While Waters might prefer for people to think that her bluster is the result of heat-of-the-moment passion, the reality is that it is all carefully planned political grandstanding, something she has perfected over decades of haranguing. Three decades ago, for example, as a freshman member of the House, Waters cheered on as mobs rampaged through south Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict. More than five dozen people died in those riots.

True to form, in 2020 as mobs ransacked businesses, police headquarters, and other government buildings in cities from Portland, Oregon to New York and Washington, DC, Waters has been in the forefront of urging continued confrontation against law enforcement and all manner of other targets of demonstrators’ ire. Last year’s rioting added up to $2 billion in damage to property and cost more than two dozen lives, making them the costliest riots in American history.

Not content with simply encouraging movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) to “confront” police “in the streets,” Waters injected herself directly into the Minneapolis trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin as the case was being sent to the jury. Her cries urging “confrontation” if the verdict was not “guilty, guilty, guilty” earned an unusually explicit rebuke from the judge presiding over the trial.

Waters remains unfazed by such pushback, insofar as she is safely ensconced in a heavily Democrat district in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Moreover, with Democrat leaders in both the House and the Senate trembling at the possibility of upsetting the leftwing extremists in their midst who wield a voice far larger than their numbers, Waters remains immune from being disciplined by Speaker Pelosi, her nominal boss. Actually, in the aftermath of Waters’ most recent exhortations, Pelosi publicly defended her.

The fact that Waters receives no punishment for exhorting people to confront police and “take to the streets,” highlights the grotesque double standard practiced by Democrats at the national level. Earlier this year, for example, House Democrats, lording their majority power over their GOP colleagues, stripped Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green of all her committee assignments as a form of punishment for sending some old social media posts to which Pelosi and other Democrats objected; this, even though Taylor Green publicly apologized for the objectionable posts, which were not by any reasoned analysis confrontational.

The hypocrisy so blatantly on display in the Maxine Waters imbroglio, and the notion that a high-ranking member of Congress can directly incite to violence and inject herself into the very workings of an ongoing criminal case and escape accountability for such dangerous actions, may account in part for why the Congress itself is not trusted by a strong majority of Americans (61% according to a recent Gallup survey).

Unfortunately, so long as Maxine Waters’ district remains prohibitively Democrat (she won with more than 71% of the vote in 2020), and so long as Democrat leaders in the Congress remain scared to death of open rebellion against them by the likes of Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, conservative-leaning citizens, along with small businesses and law enforcement officers across the country, will pay the price for the disgraceful behavior of this mini warlord of the Left.

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

by Bob Barr

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States was instituted by Article III of our Constitution as ratified by the states in 1788, many of Western civilization’s greatest legal minds have served as justices on that august bench. One of these exceptional jurists was America’s very first Chief Justice, John Marshall, who served from 1801 to 1835.

It was Marshall who, in 1805, authored an opinion that to this day remains a bedrock principle according to which our government, and indeed our very culture, has rested. In that seminal case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court declared that the final authority by which the constitutionality of any law passed by Congress and signed by the president is to be measured, is the federal judiciary, with the Supreme Court of the United States at its apex.

Over the ensuing 216 years, presidents, members of Congress, lower courts and citizens of all political stripes have complained – sometimes bitterly – when application of this principle of judicial review results in a decision with which they disagree. However, Marshall’s assertion that such process is essential for “the government of the United States” to remain “a government of laws, and not of men,” is at least as important today as it was in 1805.

Our 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was so angered by the Supreme Court’s decisions during his first four years in office declaring provisions of his “New Deal” to be unconstitutional, that in 1937 he launched a frontal attack on the independence of the court; a proposal that quickly became known as Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan.” FDR’s plan would have amended the Judiciary Act of 1869 that established the number of High Court justices (including the Chief Justice) at nine, to increase that number by permitting the president to appoint up to six additional justices for each justice over the age of seventy-and-one-half years old.

The nakedly partisan nature of Roosevelt’s move, to which even some members of Congress in his own party objected, resulted in the plan failing to be enacted into law. Despite this salutatory result, Roosevelt’s move did result in serious damage to the fabric of independence that always and eventually has undergirded the Court.

The seriousness of the threatened court packing, proposed by a very powerful and extremely popular president, was sufficient to accomplish FDR’s real goal, which was to so intimidate one or two of the sitting justices so they would have a change of heart concerning the constitutionality of principles underlying the New Deal. It worked. Within weeks of Roosevelt’s unveiling his court-packing plan in a nationwide radio address, one Justice (Owen Roberts) did a “180-degree turn” and decided in a key decision that the principles underlying the New Deal were constitutionally permissible after all.

Today, the same party that gave us Franklin Roosevelt is pressing to do precisely what their mentor did 84 years ago — intimidate the Supreme Court. While the precise manner by which today’s congressional Democrats are proposing to pack the High Court differs in detail from FDR’s (the House bill introduced last week simply expands from nine to 13 the number of justices), the goal is the same. Democrats hope to intimidate the court so that at least one or two of the more “conservative” justices become less likely to render decisions adverse to Biden’s agenda.

While Speaker Pelosi said publicly that she had no plans to bring this latest court-packing proposal to the floor for a vote, such rhetoric is of little consequence. The reality is that since 2019, in the wake of the horrendous confirmation battle the previous year over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination as an Associate Justice, senior Democrat senators, including now-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have been openly campaigning that if the “conservative” majority on the Court dares to issue opinions against key liberal programs, such as on abortion rights and gun control, those justices would “pay the price” (Schumer’s threat) and face some form of “restructuring” (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s words).

Whether any of the three associate justices appointed by former President Trump in particular will be swayed by this congressional bullying (Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly shown himself to be at best a “Sunshine Justice”) remains to be seen. But if any are thus moved, it will signal a new era of judicial cowardice has arrived.

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.

FullMAGnews

by Bob Barr

As the expression goes, “talk is cheap.” When it comes to gun control, however, talk about taking away or diminishing a right expressly guaranteed in our Constitution is most definitely not “cheap.” Quite the opposite. Perhaps most important in this context is the often un-asked, but disconcerting question for gun control advocates – precisely how would you take away all those now-legal firearms currently in the hands of law-abiding citizens?

What might in the past have been sloughed off as a mere hypothetical question, is becoming increasingly relevant as the Biden Administration and its cohorts in the Congress move their gun-control agenda into high gear, legislatively and by executive action in the aftermath of several highly publicized mass murders.

True to form, such criminal acts already are fueling efforts by Democrats not to address the root causes underlying such evil acts, but rather to push for greater and greater controls on the instrumentality by which many such murders are committed – firearms.

President Joe Biden self-proclaims as America’s most anti-gun president, exceeding in both rhetoric and drive of his former boss, Barack Obama. A recent spate of mass murders by deranged young men already is being used as an impetus for sweeping gun control – by Congress and myriad Executive Branch agencies including but certainly not limited to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and its parent agency, the U. S. Department of Justice

It is no longer a matter of if, but when, substantive restrictions and outright bans on firearms, gun parts, and ammunition make their way onto the books.

Democrats are not just looking for campaign soundbites this time around, and Republicans better confront this imminent battle with far more seriousness than is their norm. There is no better issue with which Biden can burnish his far-Left credentials than gun control.

The Right’s standard rulebook for debating guns must be thrown out the window, and a new approach implemented. Only in this way will the GOP have a real chance to counter the manipulative word-smithing employed for decades by Democrats to disguise their true, confiscatory agenda. If Republicans respond with their usual hesitancy to boldly defend the right to keep and bear arms, the battle will be lost in its opening moves.

One of the easiest ways to push back against Democrats’ proposals to ban guns is perhaps the simplest and the most often overlooked: force them to answer a question they would rather not – precisely how they plan to confiscate the tens of millions of to-be-outlawed firearms, gun parts, and rounds of ammunition in the hands of law-abiding citizens.  No longer should Democrats be let off the hook answering this pivotal question, especially considering that the answer is worse than the alleged disease of gun violence.

It is one thing to pass a ban, even “voluntarily buy-backs” are fairly straightforward. While citizen acquiescence to such bans imposed in other Western countries – Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. – resulted in massive, non-confrontational confiscations of firearms, that would not be the case in the United States, where our Constitution expressly prohibits such government action. The Second Amendment is correctly understood by most Americans as a natural right of individuals, woven into the DNA of our citizenry. Threats of jail or promises of cash payments will not suffice to entice even a meaningful fraction of gun owners to give up this sacred right.

So, what will Democrats do?

The mass refusal to accept Democrats’ gun bans, confiscations, or buybacks is so likely it can no longer be considered a theoretical question to be brushed aside.  Voters have a right to know just what Democrats have in store for them; whether it is jail time if caught with a banned firearm in their home, or something more extreme like armed SWAT teams crashing through their doors in the dead of night.

Furthermore, how will Democrats determine who owns what guns? Will they leverage concealed-carry records, unlawfully access NICS background check records, implement enhanced domestic surveillance, or employ paid snitches? Precisely how far down the road of un-American policies will they elect to travel?

It is to these queries that Biden and others who will do his bidding must be forced to answer, especially insofar as the honest answer very well may be far more than a nonviolent standoff between citizens and the State.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of FullMagNews.com

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 by Bob Barr When I use a word, ‘Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. As villains in 20^th Century literature go, Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, would hardly seem frightful. He was not a serial killer, terrorist, or supernatural stalker, but rather a diminutive newspaper critic who brought society to the brink of ruin through nothing more than corrupting the meaning of words. It seems clear that Democrats have a similar plan in mind. It is for this reason that conservatives should not dismiss out of hand Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s inane tweet last week that paid leave, childcare, and caregiving constituted “infrastructure” projects. In Gillibrand’s and President Biden’s world, as they collect votes for their $2.25 trillion infrastructure spending package, anything can become “infrastructure,” making it easier to sell to their colleagues and to voters. Similar linguistic chicanery is displayed whenever the Administration sidesteps responsibility for the current chaos at our southern border. Rather than a quickly spiraling health and national security crisis, the border situation is simply a “challenge” — a nuisance if you will, to be noted for the record. By the same legerdemain, and at times even in the same news cycle, “climate change” becomes “climate emergency,” “silence is violence,” and “education” devolves into plopping kids in front of a laptop for six hours a day. When words no longer have definite, objective meaning, they no longer anchor policies or actions to objective, universal principles. The result is public policies that are infinitely malleable, where nothing is certain, and where rebutting such arguments is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. It is, however, precisely where the Administration and the modern Democrat Party wish us to be; a world far easier to control than the real one. When the specter of migrants flooding across our southern border is not a “crisis” but merely a “challenge,” it is by definition no more worthy of concern than might be the “challenge” of enforcing speed limits on the Interstate Highway system. At a more fundamental level, “settled science” is no longer “settled” or “science.” A nine-year-old’s school report is held up to define a global “climate emergency,” in which a drive to outlaw plastic straws becomes a primary public policy to save the planet from that “emergency.” Reliance on the COVID “emergency” to justify all manner of intrusive, and at times nonsensical public policies has accelerated our descent down this linguistic rabbit hole. This war on words has been part of the Left’s game plan for decades, even at times successfully conscripting Republican leaders into its ranks. Recall that in 2012, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts contorted the English language in order to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare. In the opinion he authored, Roberts declared one of the law’s key provisions a lawful “tax,” notwithstanding that both of the other two branches of government – the Congress and the president – had declared definitively and repeatedly that it was not a “tax.” Such wordsmithing creates precedents that can, and are, used by Democrats and Republicans alike to justify government mandates of their choosing. Gun control has always been a favorite linguistic playground for the Left. Most recently, President Biden and other Democrats have taken to declaring that the country’s most popular semi-automatic rifle, the AR-15, is now a feared “weapon of war,” though clearly it is not. The last time America’s military went to war armed only with rifles that were not fully automatic, was in the 19^th Century. This is but one example of how the entire gun control debate been robbed by its proponents of any real meaning. “Everything bad comes from the mind, because the mind asks too many questions,” opined Toohey in Rand’s novel. As Democrats move us ever more rapidly down the path of unpinning words from meaning, the mind will have far fewer questions to ask and thereby far easier to control. Both Rand’s Ellsworth Toohey and Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty would feel very much at home in this world, a situation that should deeply concern those of us who are “old school” and prefer that words retain meaning.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Editor’s note: We endeavor to bring you the top voices on current events representing a range of perspectives. Below is a column arguing that the current boycott against Georgia will not be effective in changing the state’s new voting law. You can find a counterpoint here, where Alan Tonelson argues that boycotts like the one against Georgia can be highly effective and may cause a wave of similar boycotts.

Anyone searching for reasoned analysis or common sense in the decision by Major League Baseball to pack up this summer’s All-Star Game in Atlanta and trek it across the country to Colorado, are doomed to be disappointed. Also destined to be let down will be liberals hoping that the brouhaha surrounding the recent reform of Georgia’s voting laws will push Gov. Brian Kemp and fellow Georgia Republicans to back away from the ballot reform measures they worked so hard to pass.

The ultimate question, of course, is whether Peach State voters will remember this controversy as a deciding factor a year and a half from now when Kemp, Democratic Sen. Ralph Warnock and dozens of other candidates from both major parties seek reelection. Only time will answer that political conundrum.

But for now, and certainly once the dust kicked up by MLB’s precipitous decision dies down after the summer classic in Denver, it likely will be a return to business as usual in Georgia.

The improbability that Democrat hopes for a surge of corporate support for their “woke” voting rights movement will grab hold in the short term, results from a number of factors. Most important among these is the fact that Kemp is in his first term as the state’s chief executive, is already actively campaigning for a second term, and knows that the Republican electorate stands firmly behind his instinctive move to stand up to corporate shakedowns.

The last time a Georgia governor was pressured by corporations unhappy with a piece of legislation backed strongly by conservative interest groups, was in 2016 when Kemp’s predecessor, Nathan Deal, vetoed the “Religious Liberty” bill. Looking to retain corporate support for his final biennium in office and with an eye on his fast-approaching post-electoral career, Deal sided with big business. The most recent voting reform legislation signed March 25, however, is very different, and Kemp already has shown himself a savvy and nuanced politician.

Democrats are riding high after their electoral victories last November and this past January, and ballyhoo that the legislation is nothing more than a vehicle for minority voter suppression. Such charges carry little weight outside partisan circles, however, and the new law itself includes measures, such as requiring voter ID to obtain an absentee ballot, that are supported by a wide swath of voters. The 2016 legislation, by contrast, was viewed by many as an unnecessary piece of social engineering.

Moreover, while pressures against the Georgia voting reform law continue to percolate in Hollywood and a handful of woke corporate executive suites, the vast majority of public corporations are not about to risk the billions already invested in Georgia. Delta also knows that with Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport being the world’s busiest, the jet fuel tax break it receives thanks to action by the Republican-controlled legislature, which could be easily rescinded (and nearly was last month after Delta joined in the anti-Kemp chorus), means millions in revenue every month.

Despite partisan grumbling about how the new law disenfranchises minority voters, movie producers and investors will be reminded pointedly by state GOP leaders that they would be hard pressed to find any other state willing and able to grant the massive tax relief now offered them by Georgia, which has the largest movie production facilities of any state other than California.

When the dust settles, as it assuredly will by mid-summer, the bottom line will remain the bottom line for businesses headquartered in or that invest heavily in Georgia — under GOP leadership, Georgia is good for business. Kemp, who already has withstood bullying by no less a bully than Donald Trump, will prove no pushover to woke corporate pressure, especially pressure premised on ignorance or deliberate mischaracterization of legislation favored by a majority of his constituents.

With the exception of the now-infamous “no-water-while-waiting-in-line-to-vote” provision in the legislation, language that could and perhaps should be tweaked to better enunciate its goal of prohibiting one of the many clever ways Democrats in fact politick voters, look for Georgia’s “Election Integrity Act of 2021” to remain the law of the land.

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

by Bob Barr

Last week, under pressure from the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party, President Joe Biden emerged briefly from his safe house on Pennsylvania Avenue and re-declared his commitment to battle the “epidemic” of gun violence.

The specific measures he outlined were covered by the mainstream media as a major newsworthy event, but in fact represented little of real substance. The importance of Biden’s message, however, lies not so much in the specific measures actually proposed, but in his words that reflect the president’s deep-seated animosity toward the Second Amendment and those who support it.

For example, it was deeply disturbing that the country’s new Attorney General, Merrick Garland, echoed the president’s commitment to gun control, and that David Chipman, a fervent gun control advocate, was being nominated to head the government agency with primary jurisdiction over federal firearms laws – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or “ATF.”

Biden began by going after the low-hanging fruit – so-called “ghost guns.” There is in fact nothing supernatural about such firearms. Calling them by this cute shorthand is a typical gun control ploy to use certain words designed to scare the public into believing there is a frightening menace lurking out there. This is the same tactic used by the Left when they call the AR-15 rifle, the most popular, lawful rifle in America, a “weapon of war” (which it certainly is not).

In reality, what Biden calls “ghost guns” are nothing more than parts kits for firearms that can be purchased and assembled by an individual, usually a hobbyist, without containing registration markings for the government to track. Such firearms scare gun control advocates for no other reason than they are not registered – a step that has become the default for gun control advocates. If such an unmarked firearm were to be transferred commercially, it would be illegal according to current law, a fact of little note for Biden.

According to Biden and his supporters, these firearms must be registered in order to save the country from further mass shootings by criminals, notwithstanding the rarity with which they are used in such crimes. He therefore directed the Justice Department to prepare regulations to accomplish this.

Biden also tasked the Department with drafting regulations to outlaw arm braces for certain pistols, specifically AR-15 style pistols. As with “ghost guns,” pistol arm braces are rarely used by criminals but often by target shooting enthusiasts, and by those with certain disabilities, because the devices make for more stable and accurate firing of the pistol.

Biden’s directives to his new attorney general to draft these regulatory measures reflects the reality that the president cannot yet count on sufficient votes in the Senate to pass new gun control initiatives, or even those that recently were passed by the Pelosi-controlled House. Those legislative measures would mandate universal federal background checks for virtually all gun purchases, and also would significantly expand the time within which the FBI, which administers the federal background check system, could delay approving any retail gun sale.

There were other less-than-momentous (but still troubling) provisions included in the President’s announcement, such as “model” red flag legislation for the states to adopt.

The real “red flag” in last week’s pronouncements, however, lies in Biden’s cavalier statements about the Second Amendment. To him, as with other provisions in the Bill of Rights, the right to keep and bear arms is always subject to government-imposed limitations, particularly by those who control the levers of regulatory powers; in this instance, Garland and soon, Chipman.

To them, the guarantee of a citizen’s right to “keep and bear arms” contained in the Bill of Rights, is not chiseled in stone but rather carved into clay and therefore malleable by federal government bureaucrats reflecting Biden’s pinched view of the fundamental right.

The Biden-Harris Administration will be characterized by a constant push for gun control, often purposefully opaque by way of regulatory measures, but with a single goal in mind – reducing the ability of law-abiding citizens (and lawful firearms retailers) to practice their fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed right to purchase and possess firearms. And if the Senate were to do away with the filibuster, that gun control slow walk would become a tsunami.

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.

The FTC is supposed to be a non-partisan federal regulatory agency, un-swayed by partisan politics and the influence of outside companies. As the Google documents show, it’s not.

The Federalist

It is hardly a secret the Barack Obama White House had a cozy relationship with Google. Between 2009 to 2015, representatives and lobbyists for the company averaged one White House meeting a week. In what can only be described as a Google-Obama revolving door, nearly 250 individuals moved either from the government to Google or Google to the government during the Obama presidency.

While politicization of executive branch agencies has become the norm for both major parties, the Obama administration’s tentacles of politicization appear to have reached even further, deep into the regulatory arena.

Leaked documents recently obtained by Politico demonstrate the Obama White House’s tight relationship with the search engine giant may have even influenced the behavior of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the highest so-called independent regulatory enforcement and consumer protection agencies in the land. The memos reveal, for example, that despite having overwhelming data that the company operated as an unchecked monopoly, the FTC declined to pursue enforcement against Google in 2013.

As a former senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, I find these revelations deeply distressing and believe they should drum up calls in Congress to reform and depoliticize these vital federal institutions. This is essential to ensure — to the greatest extent possible — that truth, justice, and law and order prevail in our country.

Federal investigators at the FTC were alerted early in Obama’s first term that Google’s surge in the then-nascent mobile phone industry appeared to be illegal and something needed to be done. Eighteen FTC lawyers and paralegals issued memos explaining that, because of exclusionary and anti-free market deal-making, Google was the default search engine on fully 86 percent of American smartphones and controlled an astounding 97 percent of global mobile searches.

While U.S. antitrust law does not explicitly define precisely what market share moves a company from a fair competitor to a monopoly, several court cases have determined that a 70 percent market share creates a monopolization threshold. This means Google’s 86 percent share more than qualified it for at least investigation, especially when the FTC’s own report showed the commission knew that a Google executive boasted to the giant company’s CEO that the company could soon “own the U.S. market.” Still, Obama’s politically appointed FTC bosses shut the investigation down even though their attorneys suggested charges should be pursued.

Unsurprisingly, the basis for their dismissive decision appears to have been meritless or at the very least contradictory grounds. One telling example was the FTC’s use of Comcast data to allege Google only controlled between 10 and 20 percent of the web traffic for rival shopping and review sites. It did this despite knowing that Google’s CEO stated in sworn testimony to the FTC that the Comcast numbers were wrong. Google’s chief economist and even the FTC’s own attorneys stated the same thing, but Obama’s appointees at the FTC used the data anyway.

The FTC is supposed to be a non-partisan federal regulatory agency, un-swayed by partisan politics and the influence of outside companies. Their mission is to stop unfair or deceptive tactics in the marketplace and to encourage and promote competition in the free market. By not going after Google back in 2013, the Obama FTC decided to let Google squash competition. This type of behavior cannot, or certainly should not, be tolerated from an institution of this size at any time, now or in the future.

To that end, a handful of lawmakers have set out to substantively reform the FTC, among them Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.. He has pointed out the “revolving door conflict” between the FTC and Big Tech and has suggested several reforms, including relocating the FTC to the Department of Justice so it is subject to clearer and more direct oversight. Hawley also has proposed replacing the multi-member commission with a single director appointed by Congress every five years, to maximize public accountability and transparency.

Considering the increasing power of Google and the few other search engines throughout virtually all sectors of government and private businesses, while Congress can debate the best approach to solving this issue, Hawley is right. Something must be done — and soon.

Those who believe that depoliticizing the FTC is a lost cause might be forgetting how other federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies operate within guidelines to reduce political bias. Consider how the Justice Department handled Google during the Obama years. As civil rights attorney and frequent Fox News guest Harmeet Dhillon wrote recently in the New York Post:

Despite the administration’s close ties to Silicon Valley, the Obama Justice Department in 2015 filed a Supreme Court brief against Google in Google v. Oracle, arguing that the firm engaged in significant intellectual property theft in creating Android … lawyers now consider the action to be the copyright case of the century because it could help stop what appears to be one of Big Tech’s primary means of monopolizing the digital marketplace — intellectual-property theft.

If the Justice Department can operate with at least this degree of independence, so too can the FTC. With the Big Tech accountability movement gaining steam, we need the FTC to resume its role as a non-partisan protector of the free market. If it continues down its current path of blissful ignorance and partisanship, who knows where we will be after another decade of these self-serving and nonchalant practices.

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.