From the Desk of Bob Barr

Townhall

During the 2020 election cycle, uber wealthy Mark Zuckerberg orchestrated much of Big Tech’s plan to ensure that more Democrat votes were cast and counted in key precincts across the country.

In this, Big Tech was aided in large measure by three factors: the cover of COVID as an excuse to “facilitate” the voting process, lax election laws in many states, and the lure of “free” money for local officials (including Republican office holders) always eager to receive more of it.

Three years later, some things have changed that will force these players to alter their tactics in manipulating election procedures, but Big Tech’s will to do so has not in the least diminished.

Changes to voting procedures implemented in recent years, most notably widespread mail-in and multi-day voting, have become systematized to the degree that voters (and many courts) now consider it a right to be able to cast votes days if not weeks in advance of scheduled and lawful voting days. It has become the status quo.

Granted, it has not always worked out the way Democrats hoped and planned; just ask Georgia Democrat super star Stacey Abrams, who lost decisively to incumbent GOP Governor Brian Kemp last November.

On the other hand, Democrats have achieved several notable successes thanks to massive early and mail-in balloting. By all accounts, for example, Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, and now sitting Sen. John Fetterman, benefitted greatly from having a huge number of votes cast for him in the days and weeks before his sole debate with his GOP opponent, during which he performed miserably.

Much media attention was drawn to the Left’s brazen and prideful effort in 2020 to use its vast resources to “improve” voter access to ballots and to assist vote counters, especially in key battleground precincts. A foundation controlled by Zuckerberg – the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — did not shy away from letting the media know that it plowed some $400 million into programs to expand mail-in balloting, increase the number of ballot drop boxes, and related administrative activities by local election offices.

This go round, the Left is proceeding more subtly and indirectly; but its Big Tech mega benefactors definitely remain in the hunt to influence the 2024 elections. It is engaging the battle across many fronts, including having the CTCL lobby Congress to appropriate billions to states to help cover the rising cost of paper for ballots (used primarily for mail-in ballots, of course).

Even as Zuckerberg publicly had “sworn off bankrolling local election administration,” other Big Tech players are funding programs designed to accomplish the same electoral goal.

The Honest Elections Project (HEP) has identified one organization at the center of this drive — the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence (USAEE). This benign sounding, self-proclaimed nonpartisan entity was, according to its website, “introduced to the world at TED2022” with funding “catalyzed” from the aptly named “Audacious Project.”

In fact, the very same CTCL that orchestrated the delivery of hundreds of millions of so-called “Zuck Bucks” to local election offices three years ago, proudly announced the “launch” of this new Alliance on April 11, 2022 with an initial commitment of $80 million.

Same story, different dust jacket.

Many states do not restrict private entities, including nonprofits such as CTCL and USAEE, from giving money to local election offices to supplement their budgets. In these states, “nonpartisan” organizations funded by Big Tech can spend freely to indirectly influence voting patterns and practices, just as in 2020.

In those two dozen or so states that do restrict such financial meddling in election processes, the USAEE has to be more circumspect in how it goes about its business. Instead of directly supplementing election office coffers, the Alliance “shares knowledge, experience, and best practices” with “local election offices across the nation.” It offers training, mentoring, and support systems to help qualifying “centers” in chosen states create “values and standards of election excellence.”

Gobbledygook it is, but behind the flowery rhetoric, these so-called “dark money” groups will once again be doing everything they can to ensure their preferred, left-leaning candidates garner as many mailed-in or drop-boxed ballots as necessary to prevail.

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

In addition to writing one of the seminal novels of the 20th Century in 1984, British writer George Orwell was an accomplished linguist. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he sized up the language of politics as the practice of designing something “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Lewis Carroll put it perhaps less eloquently, but no less accurately, in Through the Looking Glass – “When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

A perfect example of Orwell’s and Carroll’s pithy observations was displayed last weekend when a freelance write named David Peisner, described the torching of a police cruiser and smashing of bank and storefronts in Atlanta by a group of eco-terrorists angry about the construction of a public safety training center in a wooded area just outside the city, as something — anything — other than “violence.” His sophomoric rambling was defended by a pedigreed CNN national security analyst with gobbledygook of her own.

Though not alone among media outlets in its pursuit of linguistic fluidity, CNN in particular has made a practice in recent years of describing scenes of destructive rioting as “mostly peaceful,” and in fact not even meeting the network’s threshold of being “violent” in the first place; as in its 2020 coverage of widespread disturbances in Kenosha, Wisconsin following a police shooting.

CNN’s practice of torturously twisting language in order to avoid calling violence “violence” may be premised on the fact that the network disagrees with the underlying acts or the reasons behind the disturbances. Whatever the reason for describing hoards of individuals burning cars and buildings as “mostly peaceful,” the phenomenon opens the doorway to a new lens with which to view the world, or at least one’s place in it – the “Mostly World.”

In the Mostly World, for example, grades are meaningless. So long as a student is able to claim with a straight face that their answers to the test or assignment are “mostly correct,” they pass and eventually graduate.

The “mostly” auto mechanic invoices are to be paid so long as the work performed was largely completed.

Restaurant fare must be accepted by patrons if the waiter affirms that the meals have been prepared “mostly” according to customers’ stated preferences.

Elections at all levels in this brave, new Mostly World hinge not on which candidate secures the majority of votes as actually cast and counted, but based on who asserts their claim to “most” of the votes received.

“Mostly” currency is no longer tethered to hard value such as gold or even to balanced government spending, since to do so would require absolute valuation rather than the far more flexible approach to economics and budgeting practiced in this new environment.

The legal system, including both civil and criminal proceedings, has essentially nullified the need for juries, with decisions of life or death, right or wrong, and divorce or marriage determined by which verdict “mostly” satisfies the decision-maker. Grand juries would be prohibited from issuing an indictment for perjury so long as “most” of the answers demanded of a witness are truthful.

And, of course, there would be no unlawful riots or “violent” demonstrations or disagreements so long as “most” people did not join in such goings on.

Oaths previously required of judges, legislators, cabinet officials, and even presidents no longer are necessary in the Mostly World, as they are predicated on adherence to defined codes of conduct and legal responsibility. Principles of “honesty” and “truth” no longer can be demanded, as the requisite certainty and consistency on which they are founded does not fit within the resilient parameters of the Mostly World.

The decennial census no longer becomes necessary as otherwise mandated by the Constitution. All that is required, indeed all that can be done is a reasonable estimate of the population, whether individuals of either legal or illegal status.

Even the Congress becomes a far less-structured venue in which issues are debated and votes taken on the fly, and with attendance no longer mandatory since “mostly” attendance or majorities are all that is required. Presidential statements and speeches are evaluated and judged only on whether they reflect mostly what may be true or accurate.

Come to think of it, we already are living in the Mostly World.

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

The Hippocratic Oath, for centuries a foundational recitation of the objective goal of physicians to preserve life, remain ethical, and above all to serve their patients wisely, has, like so much of contemporary civil society, been largely cast aside as outdated – in the words of a dean at the Yale School of Medicine, it had become “impersonal, cold, and too pat.”

In many medical schools, the oath now taken by graduating medical students is personal and subjective rather than objective, thus allowing each newly minted physician to decide for themselves what code they will follow in their career.

The dilution of a common, universal code for doctors is one of many reasons why the practice of medicine in the United States, and even more so in our neighbor to the north, has become unmoored from the formerly sacred doctor-patient relationship, and more closely tethered to “equity” and the whims of patients, including facilitating abortion and even euthanasia.

As with many troubling trends in the country, the beat-down of scientific inquiry and reasoned debate within the practice of medicine is being led by California, where the primacy if not the infallibility of the federal CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is now the law.

The COVID pandemic opened the door to perhaps the most unscientific approach ever to public healthcare policy, reaching its nadir with the new California law that prohibits physicians from communicating information critical of federal COVID guidelines. Failing to adhere to this prohibitory statute can result in doctors losing their licenses.

Interestingly, one prominent medical organizations, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) blames the federal government for much of the “lack of trustworthiness” that caused “inequity” in the response to the COVID pandemic, but turns right around in a study – “The Way Forward Starts Now, Lessons From COVID-19” – advocating for expanded federal money and guidance.

Matters are even worse in Canada, where doctors now must submit to reeducation courses and fear having their licenses pulled, for doing nothing more serious than “retweeting a comment .  .  .  about the unnecessary severity of the COVID lockdowns” – via procedures that apparently can be initiated against the doctor by any person, whether or not a patient.

The glorification of abortion as the new Holy Grail of Democrat politics, finds wide acceptance among doctors, many of who no longer adhere to earlier oaths that recited the protection of “human life from its beginning.”

Protection of life has been so devalued that Uncle Sam’s Food and Drug Administration, the primary regulator of prescription drugs, decided that the COVID pandemic necessitated allowing the abortion pills Mifepristone and Misoprostol to be available to pregnant women by telephone. That opening has empowered Planned Parenthood offices in states such as Kansas in America’s heartland, to begin offering “teleconferences” so that the abortion pills can be even more easily obtained.

At the other end of the life cycle, Canada has taken to marketing “Medical Assistance in Dying” as a coloring book for children. This bizarre step starts the process of normalizing euthanasia so that by the time children become young adults, the practice will be as widely accepted as, well … abortion.

Such cavalier treatment of life and death fits comfortably within the broad parameters of modern “science,” at least as directed by learned universities and government agencies, that now considers the scientific fact of two sexes – male and female – outdated.

The looseness with which medical schools and government agencies now are treating “science” has spilled over into the corporate arena, where standards for testing and certification have fallen victim to scams and lax regulatory oversight. The Theranos scandal is the most prominent of scientific testing scandals, but a recent decision by a federal judge dismissing claims against a formerly top-selling heartburn medicine, Zantac, which had been accused by a questionable testing firm as being carcinogenic, illustrates that the problem of junk science remains a very real and costly danger.

Welcome to the brave new world of modern medicine.

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

On January 10th, Democrat Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, fresh from being sworn in to a second term, signed into law a sweeping gun control bill that bans so-called “assault-style weapons”(which he absurdly calls “weapons of war”),  including numerous handguns, rifles, and shotguns, and, of course, the AR-15 platform rifle which is the most popular rifle in the country.

Pritzker’s action has put him on a collision course with more than seven dozen of the state’s elected sheriffs who are refusing to enforce at least some of the new law’s provisions because they consider it, rightly, to conflict with the Second Amendment.

Among many provisions onerous to otherwise law-abiding firearms owners, the new law requires that individuals fortunate enough to have owned any now-banned firearms prior to Pritzker’s action must register them with the state police in order to avoid becoming instant criminals.

The broad reach of the governor’s mandate, including the draconian registration mandates, is the flashpoint between him and the sheriffs who have publicly stated their disagreement with the law.

The new law became effective when Pritzker signed it, and the governor indicated he expects all law enforcement officials in the state, including sheriffs, to enforce its many mandates. In response to the sheriffs’ statements indicating they will not do his bidding, the governor issued a veiled threat that the offending sheriffs would not be in office long.

Sheriffs in Illinois, as in the vast majority of the 50 states, are elected by voters, and thereby immune from Pritzker’s huffing and puffing. Still, the confrontation between these two elected public figures – a governor and local county sheriffs – illustrates one of the key dynamics of American government: the absence of “one-size-fits-all” governance.

We see this at the national level, where the federal government is charged with exercising only those powers enumerated to it by the Constitution. The remaining powers are reserved to the states and the People. However, those reserved powers cannot be exercised by states in violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed to individuals in the Constitution, including the right to keep and bear arms. And here lies the clash between Illinois sheriffs and the state’s governor.

We see this “duality” of government power within states even at the local government level. For example, most of the more than 3,000 sheriffs in the country are constitutional officers elected by the voters, and thus protected against removal or veto by another local or state official such as a governor who disagrees with their actions.

In this regard, the status of sheriffs as elected officials places them in a category different from police chiefs, who are appointed by local county, parish, or city officials and thereby answerable not to the voters but to the appointing officials.

This difference accounts for the fact that it often is sheriffs and their deputies, rather than local police officers, who are more sensitive to constitutional issues when it comes to gun control, and therefore more hesitant to enforce provisions arguably or clearly at odds with the right to keep and bear arms incorporated in the Second Amendment.

Left-wing groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have long opposed such actions by elected sheriffs, but it reflects a history of independence on the part of local elected law enforcement officials against central power dating back to the Magna Carta, signed by Britain’s King John under pressure from local officials in 1215 — principles later embodied in our Constitution.

This phenomenon is playing out now in Illinois in the context of Pritzker‘s new, far-reaching gun control law, but it is far from the first or only such conflict.  During the 2020-21 COVID pandemic, for example, when many state officials instituted mandates for public employees to be vaccinated and for law enforcement agencies to enforce mask and social distance mandates, many sheriffs refused to carry out such edicts.

The new gun control law, which many experts consider unconstitutional and at odds with recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, will quickly be challenged in court — as promised, for example, by the Illinois State Rifle Association.

For the interim at least, Illinois citizens living in counties represented by these Constitution-minded sheriffs, will have at least some protection against the governor and the Democrat-controlled state legislature’s anti-firearms agenda.

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

Every impeachment article filed in the U.S. House of Representatives recites, as it must, the language found in Art. II Sec. 4 of the Constitution, that the target has committed “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Increasingly, however, the constitutional vehicle by which to begin the process of removing from office not only a president but any “civil Officers of the United States,” has become a tool with which to express congressional displeasure with a president’s policies or now, those of a cabinet official.

On Monday, just days after Speaker Kevin McCarthy assumed his post and swore in 434 Members of the 118^th Congress (there being one vacancy), a resolution calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was introduced.

The impeachment resolution, H.Res. 8, has not yet been officially printed, but according to its sponsor, Texas Republican Pat Fallon, it charges that Mayorkas “engaged in a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with his duties,” and undertook “willful actions [to] erode our immigration system, undermine border patrol morale, and imperil American national security.” On top of all that, Mayorkas lied to the Congress by claiming falsely that our border with Mexico is “secure.”

Evidence that Mayorkas has been a disaster at Homeland Security is not hard to come by. Illegal border crossings are at historically high levels, illicit drugs, especially fentanyl, are flooding across our southern border, and morale among border patrol officers is extremely low. By any reasoned definition of the term, the border is not “secure.”

Gross incompetence by a senior government official, including cabinet secretaries, could, in theory and practice, provide grounds for impeachment. However, the line between such gross incompetence that violates federal laws or undermines the very office itself, and disagreement with the policies being implemented (or not) by the official, is a fine but important one.

The historical record for impeaching a cabinet secretary is sparse, with but a single one impeached over the course of our nation’s history; and even then, President Grant’s impeached Secretary of War, William Belknap, was acquitted by the Senate in 1876.

The fact of the matter is, there are a number of tools available to Congress with which to punish or express extreme displeasure with a cabinet secretary, whether through a House Resolution of Censure or lack of confidence, limitations on appropriations for the secretary to draw upon, or other legislative constraints.

More importantly, the House now is in a position to conduct serious oversight of the sprawling department Mayorkas heads.

Responsibility for such hearings, to probe deeply into the dysfunction at the Department and the incompetence of its leadership, falls to the Committee on Homeland Security and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Both committees should engage in extensive and coordinated hearings on such matters.

Taking the time and putting in the effort to engage in meaningful oversight hearings, which would bring transparency and a degree of accountability now absent, should be the order of the day for this 118^th Congress; more so than rushing to impeachment which is more a political than a substantive remedy.

If the GOP majority in the House is serious in its pledge to hold the Biden administration accountable and to bring transparency to its myriad faults, strong oversight investigations and hearings of key departments such as Homeland Security, will be far more effective than a narrowly focused move to simply go after the person at the head of the department (who the Senate would not remove at any rate).

Moreover, and again, if the new Republican House majority truly is committed to uncovering serious leadership and policy abuses rampant in departments and agencies in this administration – from the FBI to IRS and DHS, and beyond – Speaker McCarthy, should direct that every committee and subcommittee chair employ the extensive investigative, subpoena, and budgetary powers now at the majority’s disposal.

This would mean hauling Mayorkas and other department and agency heads before those committees and subcommittees – repeatedly if necessary – until demanded answers are furnished and the full groundwork laid for structural reforms that will come when, hopefully in 2024, the GOP strengthens its majority in the House, wins a majority in the Senate, and captures the presidency.

Such electoral gains in two years will be far more likely if extensive, substantive oversight is undertaken now, rather than the easier but less consequential path of impeaching Mayorkas or another top Biden administration operative.

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

The dust has settled on the raucous start to the 118th Congress. Now, the slim Republican House majority under Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership must step up and show the voters it is serious about governing.

The newly adopted rules, under which both sides of the aisle must operate for the next two years, will aid the GOP in its drive to shrink the federal government and increase transparency — but only if it employs those rules to accomplish substantive goals and not simply to score political points against the Biden administration. That is a big “if.”

The media has focused in the past week — during which McCarthy endured numerous attacks from his own colleagues — on the rule that allows a single member of the House to call for a vote to remove him (“vacate the Chair”). This “Sword of Damocles” will be a constant reminder to McCarthy of the fate that befell one of his predecessors – John Boehner – who suffered the wrath of the same GOP right wing that forced McCarthy to lose 14 votes for the speakership before prevailing late Friday night.

Regardless of how many members are required to initiate a vote to remove the Speaker, it still will take a full majority of members – 218 – to accomplish the goal. Hopefully even the most rabid “Never Kevin” Republicans would recognize the chaos such a move would unleash, and hold their fire.

More important procedurally than the vacate-the-chair issue, are those rules that will enable House GOP budget hawks, of which there are many, to force transparency into the often-Byzantine congressional appropriations and budget processes – procedures that include “mandatory” deadlines that congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle and in both houses of Congress have simply ignored.

With the Senate still under firm Democrat control, serious budget cuts and limitations (“riders”) on the administration’s favored funding programs will be extremely difficult to attain.

However, the new House rules (which do not constrain senators on the other side of the Capitol dome) actually afford members time to review spending measures before voting. The rules also permit members to offer far more amendments from the floor than in the recent past.

If these changes are used carefully, then the GOP should not only win some budget cuts, but more broadly demonstrate to the public that its members are actually serious about cutting spending. This is of course if the Republicans in both houses stick together (never a given), and McCarthy’s team uses these powers strategically (also not a given).

This brings us to the matter of a new “Select Subcommittee” within the standing Committee on the Judiciary, which will investigate the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” The new rules provide the authority for such a subcommittee, but little beyond that general provision.

The effectiveness of this new subcommittee will become apparent only once its members are named and, more importantly, whether McCarthy and the incoming Judiciary Committee Chair, Jim Jordan of Ohio, use it to investigate more than the many personal and low-hanging misdeeds of the Biden Administration.

The name of the new subcommittee, which incorporates the overtly political word “weaponization,” is in itself unfortunate. It is a term with clear partisan overtones which unavoidably conjures images of attacks on the Biden administration’s policy misdeeds.

The reality is that serious federal abuses of civil liberties long predate the current administration. Americans should robustly enjoy privacy and other civil liberties, which presidencies by both major political parties have deeply eroded over many years. These abuses have become systemic and deeply entrenched in agencies from the FBI to the IRS and HHS.

If, for example, the new Select Subcommittee centers its investigations on narrow, partisan activities involving Biden and his family, rather than undertaking the harder but far more consequential task of uncovering why and how federal agencies, including but certainly not limited to the FBI and the CIA, have grown to wield virtually unchecked and obvious unconstitutional powers, the GOP will have missed an historic opportunity to at long last begin reversing that truly terrible trend.

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

Aided by liberal Members of Congress and armed with a taxpayer-funded report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal Department of Education is set to embark on a crusade to establish a uniform, national school dress code in order to ensure “equity and safety.”

Dress codes have long been targeted by the Left as violative of students’ civil rights. Recently, with the rise of “equity” as the shibboleth of the Left, groups such as Planned Parenthood consider dress codes as tools of  “sexism, racism, and transphobia.” Teacher-based organizations, such as We Are Teachers, have hopped aboard the anti-dress code bandwagon, declaring, for example, that dress codes must be “gender neutral” and pass a “diversity test.”

Who would have thought a generation or two ago that simply requiring students to dress appropriately was so sinister.

To be fair, there are instances where teachers and school administrators misuse dress codes; abuses that should not be tolerated. However, concluding that dress codes constitute a civil rights violation and urging the Education Department to implement a national standard to ensure they do not “discriminate” in any way against anyone at any time, is a typical overreaction by the Nanny State. Yet this is precisely the direction in which the Department appears headed, as revealed in its response to the GAO study.

Never shy about coming up with ways to spend taxpayer dollars, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights responded to GAO’s recommendation that it “design . .  .  equitable and safe dress codes” by committing to devote “resources” (i.e., taxpayer dollars) to develop such codes for K-12 public schools nationwide. In order to accomplish this goal, the Department also (of course) would have to collect massive amounts of “data” to ensure the resulting plans are “equitable.”

The ACLU often is a partner in Uncle Sam’s crusade to weaken the ability of local schools to develop and administer rules for running their schools in ways that make most sense for the communities in which the students and parents live. Bringing lawsuits against local schools trying to maintain a degree of autonomy in dress codes is a favored tool with which to undercut such local policies.

These legal challenges have gone so far as to allege, in some cases successfully, that a charter school’s dress code simply requiring girls to wear skirts and boys to wear trousers is a violation of both the U.S. Constitution and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Court challenges against dress codes and other local school policies being sexist or racist are not new. What is new, are charges that dress codes discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and therefore are “inequitable.”

The GAO report authors also discovered that schools with “strict” dress codes appear also to be among those that enforce stricter discipline policies generally – something the GAO found quite troubling.

According to the GAO’s research, such policies reflect a bias against girls, Blacks, and transgender students. The study made clear that requiring modesty with regard to clothing worn by female students must be no different from standards enforced as to boys and transgendered students.

The idea that public schools should be able to enforce reasonable dress codes for students, as a way to help foster an environment that focuses on educating the students with minimum distractions, and on keeping them safe, used to be a common sense and widely accepted notion.

Now, as is clear in the GAO study and in the Education Department’s well-known predisposition to mandate all manner of standards for virtually every aspect of public school life, it is becoming increasingly difficult for local schools to maintain reasonable disciplinary and dress code policies.

In the eyes of these Nanny State bureaucrats, dress codes that prohibit school-aged girls from wearing revealing or sexually suggestive clothing reflect old fashioned and debunked ideas that boys might be “distracted” by such attire. In the Bizzarro World envisioned by GAO and the civil rights zealots at the Education Department, teen-aged boys are not distracted by the way their female classmates dress, and dress codes predicated on such antiquated ideas actually endanger girls and should no longer be tolerated.

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.

Regardless of where the vote for House Speaker winds up — with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) either winning his sought-after job as Speaker or returning to his seat as one of 435 sitting Members — the chaos a handful of conservative Republican Members have caused will do lasting damage to their party and accomplish little of long-term substance.

McCarthy has already taken severe damage to his position. The “Never Kevin” members of the Republican caucus have so wounded him that he would be largely unable to control the mechanisms a speaker must wield to keep the body functioning. In his weakened state, just controlling his own side of the aisle for two years would be a Herculean task.

McCarthy’s forced, eleventh-hour concessions after his months-long campaign for Speaker will simply reinforce allegations that he lacks principles on which to govern. More importantly, and beyond the wounds to McCarthy’s political persona, some of these concessions will make it harder for the slim GOP majority to achieve its priorities.

For example, agreeing to establish one or more “select” committees to investigate the Biden administration’s abuses of power, will undercut the powers of standing committees and their chairmen to set and coordinate the majority party’s priorities.

That agencies of the Executive Branch have been abusing their powers was not a concept undiscovered until the Freedom Caucus latched onto it. Executive Branch abuse of power has been building for decades. While it is fair to charge the current administration with forcing the pendulum further in that direction, the reality is that every recent administration has pushed the envelope – Republican and Democrat.

These matters of expanding and expansive powers and abuses of power by the Executive Branch need to be thoroughly investigated, but not as a politically partisan exercise by a “select” committee or committees. Republicans in the 117th Congress properly criticized the Democratic House majority for concocting just such a “select” committee to investigate the Jan. 6 disturbances. Returning the favor is neither a mature nor an effective way to govern.

Instead of payback, the new GOP majority, though slim, should be turning to the several standing committees, each of which has the power to engage in oversight and budget authorization for all departments, agencies, and offices that comprise the “federal government.” Each of these committees has broad and defined responsibilities, including subpoena power to compel answers. Let them do so without playing second fiddle to some “select committee” with ill-defined jurisdiction and purpose.

Focusing on the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of executive powers will make it unnecessarily easy for the Democrats to cry  “partisan witch hunt” to avoid a reckoning. It will continue the current stalemate rather than allowing Republicans to lay the groundwork for essential reforms this biennium and beyond.

The controversy surrounding whether one, five, or a combination of leadership votes can initiate a move to “vacate the [Speaker’s] chair” is of little actual importance. Regardless of how many sponsors the rules will require, removing a speaker still would require a majority vote of the House to achieve.

However, in so publicly focusing on the “motion to vacate” procedure, the GOP signals that consistency of leadership over next two years may be a thing of the past — a presumption that does not lend itself to a sound platform for accomplishing important goals.

These rebellious conservatives appear to have concluded that displaying their ideological purity and demanding it of others as the price for their support is the only way to accomplish substantive conservative goals. In fact, as has been demonstrated time and again, the majority of Republican voters will only support change only if undertaken at a directed, more deliberate pace than what the electorate appears to demand at the polls. Push for change yes, but pushing too fast and too hard will meet pushback from many of your own supporters.

The Washington swamp needs to be drained. But a team that doesn’t know what it’s doing pulling the plug without a plan B is hardly a recipe for long-term success. President Trump discovered that, and the Freedom Caucus is about to as well.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

I am not a Marine, but I have been honored over my years to count several formerly active and now-retired U.S. Marines as close personal friends. Additionally, I worked with many active-duty Marines during my years serving with the CIA in the 1970s and as a Member of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003.

The United States Marine Corps represents the very best of what America stands for, most notably attributes of ethics, reliability, loyalty, patriotism, strength, and innovation.

These are some of the reasons why I and many others, including several former Marine officers, have grave concerns about policies now being forced onto the Corps, especially by a pair of official documents published over the past nearly three years — Force Design 2030  and Talent Management 2030.

The Marine Corps has served our country honorably in every major foreign conflict since before we became an independent sovereign nation. One of our country’s most beautiful memorials is the one just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., depicting the four Marines raising the American flag at Mt. Suribachi during the fierce battle for Iwo Jima in February 1945.

Despite the tremendous successes and great human cost borne by the Marine Corps in fighting to protect our national security, the service periodically has faced serious bureaucratic attacks here at home. Some of these challenges have been rooted in inter-service rivalries, with others based on myopic fiscal concerns or the well-known bureaucratic game of change-for-the-sake-of-change.

The changes recommended by these documents are considered by retired Marine Corps generals who have studied them thoroughly, not only “unnecessary and unwise” and based on “unproven, experimental capabilities that will not be fully operational until 2030 or beyond,” but which in the interim will result in the “stripping away of proven and necessary capabilities.”

Discarding existing capabilities in order to pay for projected capabilities – the so-called policy of “divest to invest” – might be a useful and appropriate tool in certain businesses and government settings. The policy certainly finds favor among “green eyeshade” pencil pushers looking only to save a dollar.

As a policy by which to maintain a strong, flexible, and innovative fighting force able to meet lethal measures by an adversary in various geographic areas, such short-sighted measures are dangerously counter-productive.

Purposefully creating tactical technological and personnel gaps in America’s ability to meet and successfully defeat military challenges to our interests abroad whenever and wherever those events arise (which is the very raison d’etre of the Marine Corps) — as the proposals in both of these 2030 plans would do – will be a disservice not only to the men and women of the Marine Corps, but to our very nation.

Many of the policies proposed in the Washington-centric “Force 2030” documents (with a number of proposals already being implemented) reflect misguided assumptions that could prove disastrous if fully implemented.

For example, while China remains a major and serious threat to continued U.S. hegemony in the world, it is far from being the only threat we face currently or over the horizon. Yet, Force Design 2030 seems clearly to rest on the premise that China is and will remain the sole serious military threat the United States will face, and the one for which the Marine Corps must be reconstructed to face.

Building a Marine Corps on such pinched perspective greatly reduces its ability to meet the myriad threats from other states and non-state actors; threats the men and women who wear its uniform have met and bested for decades.

In its predisposition to rely on technology rather than the human warriors who for centuries have served honorably as Marines, both “Force 2030” documents and their advocates are succumbing to the siren song now being heard among police reformers – move law enforcement resources from personnel into weaponry and technology. It is a proven recipe for failure, yet one clearly favored by the current Marine Corps reformers.

Finally, as if to drive a nail into the coffin, these advocates for change propose to open up the Corps for civilians to slip in “laterally” without having to endure basic training or be immersed in the culture and ethos that makes a Marine a Marine. Perhaps this will allow the Corps to bring in a future Sam Bankman-Fried if a perceived need arose for an officer knowledgeable about crypto-currency?

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

Few things strike greater fear into the hearts of many congressional Republicans — especially senators — than the specter of a “government shutdown.”

The fact – not the myth – however, is that not one of the more than a half dozen government “shutdowns” the nation has survived since the 1970s was anything close to a “shutdown.” Still, many in the GOP quake at the mere mention of one, and rush to vote “Aye” for whatever spending bill is placed before them in order to avoid being labeled by their Democrat colleagues and the corporate media as budgetary Scrooges.

While these so-called “shutdowns” do result in temporary problems for the functioning of the government and its millions of workers, the occurrences are neither government-wide nor permanent. In every case, the results are both temporary and partial, affecting only certain, “non-essential” federal workers.

Government shutdowns are the result of budget disputes between Democrats and Republicans in the Congress or between the Congress and the White House, but always accompanied by both parties’ failure to do their jobs and pass appropriations bills to fund all government agencies by the end of the fiscal year each September 30th.

This year, 18 Republican Senators blinked in their very open dispute with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) over the massive $1.7 trillion spending package laid out before them just days before Christmas. Following that senatorial GOP capitulation, nine Republican House members jumped onto the spending spree bandwagon orchestrated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her soon-to-disappear majority in the lower chamber. Not surprisingly, departing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was one of the Republican Nine.

Headlines announcing the passage of the $1.7 trillion package lauded the “bipartisan” nature of the votes, and emphasized that it would “avert [a] government shutdown.” Conveniently missing in such media coverage, of course, was any explanation that, as in the past, most federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and our military forces, would have continued to operate even if Senate leaders had failed to reach agreement prior to the December 23rd “shutdown” deadline.

Top  Republican budget negotiator Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama led the 18-member strong Republican “aye” bloc, by trumpeting that the big package had “a lot of stuff in it.”

There was indeed a lot of “stuff” in the bill, in terms of both spending and substance. Included on the spending side was yet another multi-billion dollar aid package for Ukraine. On the substance side was a provision clarifying that the vice president’s role in certifying presidential election results is purely ceremonial, and another increasing the requirements for Members to contest the electoral vote certification.

Left on the Senate floor were several measures important to the GOP, such as extension of the Title 42 immigration requirement that has served at least to temporarily and partially slow the massive flood of illegal immigration unleashed by the Biden Administration. An amendment that will somewhat continue the Trump-Administration imposed Title 42 policy was adopted at the request of Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Montana Democrat Jon Tester.

Republican efforts to stop the massive $80 billion increase to the IRS hiring budget were, not surprisingly, unsuccessful. Also set to receive significant budget increases are Democrat priorities at the EPA and the National Labor Relations Board, among many others.

The massive spending bill included a significant number of “community funding projects,” a euphemism adopted recently to avoid use of the term “earmarks.” Just between the two top Senate budget negotiators – Shelby for the GOP and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy for the Democrats – nearly $1 billion in such spending flowed to their two states alone.

Still, at the end of the day, as explained by such otherwise self-proclaimed fiscal conservative Republicans as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, the “emergency” aid to Ukraine and increased budgets for our own defense were the price to pay to avoid the dreaded “government shutdown.” Graham was in the House back in Dec. 1995 and Jan. 1996, when Speaker Newt Gingrich and a solid House majority had President Bill Clinton on the ropes in that winter’s equally mis-named “shutdown” — on the ropes, that is, until as just happened last week more than a quarter century later, the GOP folded.

Some things just do not change.

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.