From the Desk of Bob Barr

Daily Caller

While there is no definitive, scientific definition of “Generation Z,” or “Zoomers” as they also are known, in general they share much in common with what in the last decade of the 20th century became known as “Snowflakes” — individuals who are overly sensitive, timid, and self-centered.

In contradistinction to this timorous façade, however, the sense of Snowflakes’ high self-worth leads them often to be extremely intolerant, mean and nasty, especially when in a group.

Emory University English Professor Mark Bauerlein noted this in The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, his most recent book analyzing today’s young adults who, while being led to consider their internet-filled lives a path to “utopia,” morph into a “fury” when threatened with ideas and circumstances not in accord with their worldview.

This Snowflake fury was on display just last week at Stanford University Law School, when a federal appeals court judge, who had been invited by the Federalist Society to speak at Stanford Law School, was rudely heckled by students upset that he did not share the disrupters’ views on abortion, the Second Amendment, and other controversial topics.

Unlike other similar disruptive scenarios, the Stanford wannabe lawyer-hecklers were egged on by one of the law school’s top administrators – the associate dean responsible for ensuring “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Once the heckling and calls for the “racist” judge to shut up began, this “adult” in the room, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, usurped the lectern reserved for the speaker and bloviated at length about how the mere presence of such a jurist was “threatening” to her and some of the students in the room.

“Threatening,” indeed, simply to hear from a judge who might even indirectly challenge the Snowflakes’ heartfelt support for abortion and their equally vociferous opposition to the Second Amendment.

In Bizarro Snowflake universe, a federal judge whom a law school dean prevents from engaging in civil discourse on the law with law students is accused of exhibiting intolerance for politely attempting to regain the lectern to which he had been invited.

Yet this is what many so-called “elite” law schools now consider an appropriate environment in which to prepare Generation Z-ers for adulthood.

It was displayed last summer on the East Coast, where the student body at The George Washington University — or at least some 12,500 of that group who signed a petition — told Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas he was no longer welcome at the school where he had for more than a decade volunteered his time to lead seminars on Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Justice Thomas’ unforgivable “sin” was being a member of the five-justice majority that in a June 2022 opinion, returned to the people of the states the power to decide the legality of abortion procedures — a principle of federalism obviously foreign to the Zoomers’ warped notion of “democracy.”

Snowflake fear of COVID and subsequent support for all manner of short and long term restrictions imposed by governing bodies from the United States Congress down to public schools across the country, showcased the liberty-snuffing milieu in which Generation Z youth wander. A law student at another of America’s top universities – Georgetown – was suspended for doing nothing more subversive than questioning the efficacy of the draconian COVID restrictions imposed on him and other students during the pandemic.

While the Georgetown law student subsequently was allowed back into the school, it was not because the Snowflake student bar association changed its stripes from meanness to reconciliation or from ignorance to understanding. Fear of bad publicity alone appears to have precipitated their capitulation.

Despite having access to all manner of information through their ubiquitous use of “smart” devices, Zoomers are notoriously poorly informed and, again as noted by Prof. Bauerlein, unmoored from any understanding of history or culture.

These intellectual “drifters,” including the likes of the “threatened” Stanford law students, tend to make up for their shortcomings by engaging in the mass bullying that has become commonplace on college campuses.

Worse still, however, is the fact that, due to their intellectual vacuity, Gen-Z snowflakes appear easily manipulated by others, including those who do engage violently. This is the case with the ongoing construction of a police training center just outside the city of Atlanta, where outside agitators have joined with Snowflake tree huggers to destroy equipment, threaten construction crews, and engage in gun fights with police.

There is indeed a very mean underbelly to this Snowflake Generation.

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.

FoxNews.com

Markets are more flexible, more innovative, and move faster than the government. Still, repeatedly over the years we have seen the government decide to take antitrust action against innovative private companies, only to realize years later, as the markets in question matured, just how costly and counterproductive such moves truly were.

Now, as Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once said, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”

In the 1960s, government antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice targeted IBM. “Big Blue” was sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, with the feds claiming it attempted to monopolize the market for “general-purpose digital computers.”

Embarrassingly, a cottage industry of personal computers was coming into the computer market at the time, making IBM far from the only game in town. The case, however, lingered for more than a dozen years until, on January 8, 1982, the Department decided it lacked merit.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration targeted Microsoft for offering its Internet Explorer browser as part of its operating system, a move the Justice Department found unfair to Netscape, which at the time was its leading competitor. Today, neither browser exists. The market moved on despite government efforts to constrain it.

More recently, a federal court in 2018 threw out the government’s case against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, reflecting the reality that the idea of a cable company having a viewer monopoly was laughable, considering that YouTube, satellite TV, Netflix, Roku, and others were all competing for the attention of the viewing public.

Today, we are witnessing this same antitrust folly repeating itself, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, attacking the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, and now, Attorney General Merrick Garland filing a lawsuit to stop the proposed business deal.

In a recent letter to the Department of Transportation, Warren declared her opposition to the merger, because “the four largest airlines—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—control 80% of the domestic market, more than at any point in the modern history of commercial aviation” and the “proposed JetBlue-Spirit merger is just the latest threat to consumers in this long string of mergers.”

On Tuesday, March 7, Garland brought the full weight of the Justice Department to bear in support of Warren’s misguided position.

It is difficult to look at all this without concluding that their approach, if successful, will simply protect the four largest airlines from competition by lower-cost carriers.

JetBlue’s proposed acquisition of Spirit, which will give the new company less than 10% of the industry’s market share, is designed to provide the company with the added scale it needs to better compete against the Big Four. It will increase the number of flights in JetBlue and Spirit’s current routes and add more flights in areas that the legacy carriers currently hold, thereby increasing choice and lowering prices.

And there’s a factual history here.

Over the last two decades, airline customers have watched JetBlue, which is always near the top of the pack for airline customer satisfaction, successfully do both things – increase choice and lower prices.

An MIT study found that JetBlue’s initial foray into the market had reduced airline fees by an average of $32. Even the Justice Department has conceded that “JetBlue’s reputation for lowering fares is so well known in the airline industry that it has earned a name: the ‘JetBlue Effect.’”

Warren’s credo, and now the policy of the Biden administration, that the federal government must stop every company from becoming bigger is a relic of the so-called “Progressive Era” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The notion that “big is bad” as a principle of governance should have died with that anti-free market era.

Back then, politicians began demonizing the trusts for increasing their market shares. While there clearly were some problem actors, in many cases the so-called “trusts” brought market prices down to record lows. Government regulators targeted them anyway, with a hammer they continue to wield a century later against companies for the mere act of growing larger.

Today, we are witnessing this same antitrust folly repeating itself, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, attacking the proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, and now, Attorney General Merrick Garland filing a lawsuit to stop the proposed business deal.

While serving as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the litmus test I used when analyzing antitrust matters was simple – if the merger benefited consumers, it deserved support it, and if it jeopardized their welfare, it did not.

Sadly, the Justice Department has decided not to employ this same equation in concluding that JetBlue should not be allowed to increase its market share to a modest 9% so it can more efficiently compete with the big boys that control 80% of the airline industry.

If Garland succeeds in this anti-free market move, it will be the traveling public that will pay the price in higher airfares and diminished service.

Former Rep. Bob Barr was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1995 to 2003.

Townhall

For more than five decades, the degree to which the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to “keep and bear arms,” and the extent to which that right may be “infringed,” have been among the most hotly debated issues demanding the attention of courts and governments at all levels.

Now, two months into 2023 (and 232 years since the Second Amendment’s ratification) things have not changed a bit. In fact, the battle between gun control advocates and Second Amendment supporters is hotter than ever, especially with banks and credit card companies moving toward monitoring firearms purchases.

The U.S. Supreme Court threw down the gauntlet to gun control advocates last June, when it ruled in a New York case that arbitrary and absolute government restrictions on an individual’s right to possess a firearm must be evaluated based on the meaning and history of the Second Amendment. Accordingly, only those government-imposed restrictions consistent with such analysis would henceforth be deemed constitutional.

Not surprisingly, the Bruen decision has met with fervent pushback from New York and several other states where gun control proponents wield the levers of government power.

Immediately following that decision, New York openly thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court, enacting a new anti-carry law even more restrictive than the one shot down by the Court. It has become clear the High Court will again be forced to tackle the underlying and fundamental questions surrounding how individuals in 2023 and beyond may possess firearms for self-defense in the real world.

Precisely when the Supreme Court will decide to again weigh in on the Second Amendment (and hopefully slap down the arrogance and insulting manner by which New York and other states are flouting its decision) is unclear. In the meantime, however, many lower federal court judges are demonstrating that they in fact do understand what the Court said and meant in Bruen.

In one of the most recent examples of a federal appeals court interpreting Bruen correctly, a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Texas and Louisiana, ruled that a 1996 amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibiting a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm, violated the Second Amendment and therefore is unconstitutional. Not surprisingly, the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has indicated it will appeal the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

Prior to the June 2022 Bruen decision, restrictions on possession of firearms such as that considered in last month’s Fifth Circuit decision (United States v. Zackey Rahimi), were widely if not routinely found to be constitutional. As noted correctly by the judges in that case, however, and consistent with Bruen, even if a federal law restricting a person’s right to possess a firearm reflects a “laudable policy goal,” to pass constitutional muster it must also be in accord with the reasoned and historical foundation of the Second Amendment.

Elsewhere, federal courts in more liberal districts such as Chicago continue to uphold other constitutionally suspect firearm restrictions, such as those on AR-15 type semi-automatic rifles and “high-capacity magazines,” simply because governments have decided that they accomplish laudable policy goals. These are decisions that hopefully will soon find their way to the High Court to strike down under the Bruen analysis.

While the Fifth Circuit decision certainly will not be the final word on the matter, it is a refreshing example of consistency and respect for the rule of law within the arena of Second Amendment law.

Not so refreshing are moves by banks and credit card companies to begin implementing a new “merchant category code” to track credit card purchases of merchandise at retail businesses selling firearms and ammunition. The obvious goal of such a plan, despite hollow claims to the contrary by its advocates, is to be able to identify likely firearms owners for law enforcement, and to eventually build a database of such information.

As I noted last September in this publication, congressional Democrats are on record supporting this new tracking policy, and now Discover Financial Services, which handles Discover card purchases, proudly has jumped to the head of the line in announcing plans to gather and aggregate such purchases.

American Express, Visa, and Mastercard are likely to soon follow Discover’s lead, thereby teeing up the next major battle over gun rights in America.

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 a 46-page opinion ordering the national and state-level powerlifting organizations to allow men who have “transitioned” to female to compete as women, a Minnesota judge illustrates everything one needs to know about the contemporary leftist culture, which elevates subjective feelings above objective, scientific fact.

The controversy between transgendered female powerlifter JayCee Cooper (nee, Joel Cooper, a biological male) had been percolating for some five years when, on Feb. 28th, Minnesota District Judge Patrick Diamond ordered USA Powerlifting and Powerlifting Minnesota to change their policies prohibiting participants born as male from competing as women, and to permit Cooper, who  “in 2015 or 2016” had begun “a process of transitioning to a female identity,” to compete as a female.

At its core, the judge’s ruling reflects the contemporary, liberal notion that the science of biology has no place regarding an individual’s “sexual orientation” to determine either their legal rights (in this instance, pursuant to the Minnesota Human Rights Act), or their rights to participate in organized sports. To Judge Diamond, all that matters is the individual’s “self-identity.”

Thus, it matters not a whit what “sex” appears on an individual’s birth certificate – the document might as well no longer carry any significance. The only factor that, in this case a sporting organization, may legally employ to decide the category in which a member may compete, is what the individual “self-declares” at the time they wish to compete.

The statutory underpinning for the court’s order is the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which defines “sexual orientation” as a person “having or being perceived as having a self-image or identity not traditionally associated with one’s biological maleness or femaleness.” If, as here, an individual’s “self-image” is at odds with their biological sex, then it is the self-image not the biological fact that prevails.

Throughout the judge’s often repetitive opinion, he pointedly places the term “biological” in quotes, as a not-so-subtle way to emphasize his view that it is a subjective and transitory notion, secondary to however a person identifies themself.

The judge “restated” the key issue at page 15 of his order, noting that the Powerlifting organizations’ “perception of another’s maleness or femaleness, often based on the notion of ‘biological’ sex or what someone responsible for a birth certificate believes they observed, is incongruent with the other’s self-image or identity.” This gobbledygook is deemed by Judge Diamond to be a bona fide “theory” – the “incongruence theory of sex discrimination.”

Such “incongruence” as to base a decision dis-allowing a male athlete to compete as a woman on nothing more than what “someone” (usually a medical professional) wrote on a birth certificate, is ipso facto insufficient to overcome a charge of sexual orientation discrimination.

Powerlift sought to offer expert testimony in support of its policy of not permitting biological males to compete in women’s powerlifting competitions, based on the fact that “persons identified as male at birth tend to be larger and tend to have a greater muscle mass,” and therefore “enjoy an athletic performance advantage, particularly in strength-dependent sports.”

Not surprisingly, such expert testimony, which the judge grudgingly noted might be admitted later in the proceedings but only in an extremely limited way, would not obviate the court’s finding that Powerlift unlawfully discriminated based on sexual orientation. Making matters worse, in denying Cooper the ability to compete in the women’s division, Powerlift improperly failed to consider the acute distress that is said to burden an individual like Cooper, who suffers from “gender dysphoria” due to their personal sense of gender mismatching with that “assigned” to them at birth.

Unfortunately also for Powerlift, their policy of not allowing competitors born as male to compete as female was not sufficiently detailed – it did not, for example, explicitly describe a “performance advantage” but instead relied on common sense and what used to be the scientific fact of biological gender. Experts supporting such an outdated and unenlightened notion would have, for Judge Diamond, “no relevant testimony to offer.”

Powerlift has not yet decided (publicly, at least) whether to appeal the court’s ruling, hailed as “historic” by Gender/Justice, which primarily represented Cooper in the litigation.

In an interview following the court’s ruling, Cooper declared that it would save her and other transgendered women competitors from further “isolation and othering” – whatever that means. Indeed, whatever all this means.

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

In a boon to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has afforded him exclusive access to tens of thousands of hours of heretofore unreleased Capitol Hill Police video of the turmoil surrounding and inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Pandora’s Box opened by this unusual move may not play out as smoothly as perhaps the Speaker hopes.

McCarthy did indicate last month that he favored public release of the vast trove of video footage that had been provided to House Democrats previously by the Hill police. His decision this month, however, to grant access not to the media generally but to a single commentator, surprised many on Capitol Hill.

House Democrats, especially those who served on the now-defunct January 6^th Select Committee in the last Congress, have decried the Speaker’s decision as one that endangers congressional security. Crocodile tears in this regard – as shed for example by South Carolina Democrat Bennie Thompson who chaired the Select Committee – are misplaced.

Thompson bemoaned the “significant security concerns” that will result from the Speaker’s actions, but provided no meaningful details to support those fears. The fact is that House Democrats maintained access to the 40,000-plus feet of the video footage for more than two years, while selectively releasing various portions during their extended and one-sided investigation.

Claims that release of the entire video trove will enable would-be “insurrectionists” to better plan future attacks on the Capitol – a public building open to the public – are laughable. Such “security” concerns already had been rejected by at least one federal judge in 2021 in response to media demands, and portions of the otherwise restricted videos have served as evidence in several of the hundreds of criminal cases being prosecuted by the Justice Department.

The only such conceivable sensitive footage could be video showing “secret” hallways or hidden doors through which congressional leaders escaped or hid during the January 6^th melee, but it is unlikely in the extreme that such footage exists. If in fact there are such secret passageways or doors – which during my eight years as a Member I never heard even vague reference to – it would be irresponsible in the extreme for the Capitol Hill Police to have positioned video cameras in such ways as to capture them being used.

Criticism of McCarthy’s move by other, non-Fox media outlets is simply hypocritical, considering that many of those very same news outlets, including CNN, had previously filed court suits to gain access to the video footage. Jealously is a far more likely motive for criticizing McCarthy than is “national security.”

Thus, releasing the video footage publicly makes sense and is in accord with the Speaker’s promise to bring a greater degree of transparency to the work of the House, and particularly regarding the one-sided January 6^th Select Committee’s work.

Releasing the massive tranche to a single media commentator, however, makes no strategic sense and is not in accord with similar practices in the past, including those with which I was involved as a member of the House Oversight Committee during my tenure.

The decision to outsource the review of the police videos may have been made because Carlson, as a top Fox News commentator with significant staff and technology resources at his disposal, could better and more quickly catalog the materials. If so, this would be a sharp rebuke of the extensive staff resources already available to McCarthy and the various House committees with jurisdiction over aspects of the January 6^th incidents.

If McCarthy’s decision to release the video to a friendly media source reflects a tactic designed to quell controversies surrounding the GOP’s nascent investigations, it will be doomed to fail, as other media outlets and interested parties undoubtedly already are drafting lawsuits to challenge the move.

Finally, without knowing which other House Members or staff have access to the videos, it is not unlikely that others may decide to release some or all of the videos to other news outlets, in a game of dueling releases. While such a move could subject such individual(s) to sanctions by the Republican House majority, the perpetrators most likely would deem it worth the price. And there is the precedent that whoever prematurely released last year’s Supreme Court abortion opinion was never identified.

Whatever happens now, Carlson’s ratings will at least temporarily spike and the Republican base will cheer, but the American public will once again see that raw partisanship still reigns on Capitol Hill.

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

British and American sensitivities were properly offended when, in 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or death sentence against author Salman Rushdie for the religious content of his novel, “The Satanic Verses.” Now, three decades later, British publisher Puffin Books has engaged in a similar, though less pernicious course of action against author Roald Dahl.

Dahl’s sin, as it were, seems to be certain adverbs and adjectives used in his books, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” that in the woke publisher’s pinched perspective, might offend readers too immature to recognize the now-stricken words are simply descriptors in a work of fiction.

For example, in a news account of this absurdity, the character named Augustus Gloop, has morphed from being “enormously fat” (Dahl’s words) into simply, “enormous” – “enormous” in what sense is left unanswered, but this omission apparently is deemed a worthy price to protect readers from the agony of learning that an individual in a fictional work was very “fat.”

Authors employ words – especially adverbs and adjectives – to impart to the reader what they cannot see except in their mind’s eye, which is after all, the whole point of reading a book, as opposed to watching a film or a television show.

One might, however, worry that in future films of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Mr. Gloop will be photo-shopped into a more lithe, even perhaps dare I say, “skinny” character, in order to protect viewers being triggered by the sight of an “enormously fat” screen actor or cartoon character.

Where, indeed, will this nonsense end?

Consider, in the same vein as the de-fattening of Mr. Gloop, one of the notable characters in the 1930 mystery novel, “The Maltese Falcon,” later an extremely popular 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart. The character who comes to mind is Caspar Gutman, a villain to be sure, but even more upsetting for today’s woke police, is the very title given Mr. Gutman: “The Fat Man.”

In the movie, Gutman is played magnificently by a very large actor of British heritage named Sydney Greenstreet; played so well, in fact, that he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

It is, however, author Dashiell Hammett’s description of Gutman in the novel that would send today’s woke publishers into conniptions. The famed mystery novelist describes The Fat Man as not just “fat,” but “flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and necks, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.” According to the author, when Gutman walks, he does so in a manner that conjures “clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.”

It most definitely would lose something were the woke wordsmiths to get ahold of these passages (as well they might) from “The Maltese Falcon,” and render Gutman’s character nothing more than “The Large Man” (which of itself might be deemed too triggering).

One of the late nineteenth century’s most widely read female authors was Louisa May Alcott. Two of her most popular novels, “Little Women” and “Little Men,” described coming of age in the Victorian era. No doubt the woke police will soon chop both book titles down to “Women” and “Men” so as not to offend individuals of either sex who are small in stature.

Can you even imagine the black-line redactions that will accompany the description of the evil Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel about Hyde and his personality progenitor, Dr. Jekyll. No longer will readers know Hyde to be “pale and dwarfish” with “deformity” and “malformation,” and sporting a “displeasing smile,” but rather as just another “white man of unusual stature who was slow to smile.” Something – a lot, actually – is lost in the translation from author’s words to non-triggering pablum.

This modern-era excisive wordsmithing began in earnest about a dozen years ago, with censored versions of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” replacing original versions in libraries and school reading lists, to shield modern readers from the unpleasant realities of the era in which the characters (and their author) lived.

That slippery slope on which we now are embarked was understood perfectly by George Orwell: to obliterate history by sanitizing it and then to control society.

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

For every patient tired of filling out repetitive and privacy-invasive forms every time they visit a doctor, a medical facility, or a hospital, here is a questionnaire those patients should present to their doctor for him or her to answer and return to them:

Questionnaire To Be Filled Out By Physician and Returned To Patient* 

1. Your intake form asked me about whether I feel “stress.” I sure do and I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment. I also don’t consider that the fault is mine.  Unwanted stress comes to me from all sides in our polarized society.  I don’t know about you, Doc, but the loss of some of my longtime friends, simply because they see one another as too far left or too far to the right, is devastating.  Is this of concern to you as a physician? 

2. I and most patients are bothered that doctors and hospitals ask so many questions that seem like a waste of time to regular folks, and that they do this over and over again, as if each time is the very first time. Does this bother you as well? 

3. Do they really think that they are going to get an honest and useful answer to “Do you feel safe at home?” or “Are there any firearms in your home?” or “Do you think often of suicide and have a plan on how you would accomplish that?” I’d like to know how many times you have received a truly honest “yes” answer to those questions, but more importantly, what do you do with such information and who is it shared with?  

4. These days, doctors hardly have the time to deal with all the administrative forms required of them.  This clearly distracts from the medical issues that have brought me to see you.  Is this paperwork barrage the result of doctors being afraid they will be sued, or is the government forcing all of this paperwork down your throats and you also resent it?  Friends of mine in your profession tell me that this non-medical, paper-pushing work is causing physician “burnout” and early retirement from medicine at an alarming rate, which exacerbates the problems of doctor shortages and increases the cost of delivering medical care. Am I wrong in this view? 

5. For centuries, patients have taken comfort knowing that new doctors take the Hippocratic Oath and abide by it throughout their career.  I understand the Oath states that the most important responsibility for doctors is to do no harm and having a duty to treat every patient without regard to their ability to pay.  

It appears that, increasingly, healthcare today has morphed into big business rather than a sacred profession and has become subject to many of the same partisan political pressures, including abortion, euthanasia, and gun control that have infected so many other aspects of society. 

To top things off, we now learn of this new craze of folks wanting to be transgender, or “transition” from one sex to the other.  It is deeply concerning to think about doctors messing around giving hormones to early teenage kids in order to arrest their sexual development. Parents used to enjoy watching their children mature into healthy young adults, able to make responsible life choices on their own.  But it really is frightening to now read and see stories about doctors and medical facilities surgically castrating boys and removing the breasts from girls, in some cases before those kids are even mature enough to drive.  

Does this fit within any reasoned interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath? I mean, what is going on here?  It kind of blindsides people, when finally we become rightfully tolerant of gay rights and same sex marriage, and then, in short order we are asked to accept what reasonable people consider to be bodily mutilation on young people.  Does the medical community really endorse such practices, but even more importantly, Doc, do you? 

*NOTE: This questionnaire is not required by, nor will it be shared with any government entity. It will be considered as confidential patient-doctor information.

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 Concise Oxford English Dictionary I keep by my desk defines “conniption” as “a fit of rage or hysterics.” To illustrate more clearly what a “conniption” means in modern parlance, a picture of Gavin Newsom, the Democrat Governor of California, should accompany the definition. It is he and his anti-Second Amendment colleagues in other deep blue states who are having recurring conniptions over the June 2022 Supreme Court decision commonly known as Bruen.

That decision, which arose factually in New York but applies to the entire country, declared that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that it is to be interpreted according to the historical context in which it was written and ratified in the late 18th Century.

What exactly is it that sends these public officials, who regularly profess devotion to other civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, up the wall?

At its core, it’s all about control.

Under the century-old New York “Sullivan Act” law that the six-member Bruen majority struck down last June, local officials had enjoyed virtually absolute control to decide which citizens were deemed worthy to be permitted to carry a concealed firearm for self-defense. That power was deemed “arbitrary” by the High Court’s majority and therefore fatally defective as a limitation on an individual’s fundamental right to “keep and bear arms” expressly guaranteed by the Second Amendment against being thus “infringed.”

For decades California, New Jersey, Hawaii, and a handful of other firearms-averse states had permitted officials to exercise similar control over citizens within their jurisdiction.

Bruen swept away such noxious power and established – finally – what should have been obvious to public officials all along; namely, that playing word games, such as forcing a citizen to show “proper cause” and a “special need” before being allowed to exercise a fundamental right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, is not what our Founders intended and is not consistent with any reasoned and historically premised interpretation of the Second Amendment.

In clear defiance of the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, New York’s legislature quickly passed, and Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation that did precisely what the Supreme Court just days before had ruled unconstitutional. This left virtually every New Yorker desiring to be able to carry a firearm for self-defense still unable to do so.

Even more irksome to the likes of Newsom and other anti-gun Democrat governors and legislators, is the fact that the language and reasoning in Bruen provide valid arguments with which to successfully challenge other restrictive gun control laws, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and so-called “assault rifles.” Myriad challenges to these gun control laws are pending in courts in California and across the country.

Defending such restrictive laws against these constitutional challenges perfectly reflects Newsom’s well-known disdain for judicial decisions not comporting with his liberal philosophy.

Thankfully, most federal judges have a sounder view of judicial precedent and understand that when the United States Supreme Court speaks – especially when, as in Bruen, it does so clearly and pointedly – political and personal views must take a backseat to the Court’s decisions. Interestingly, even some Democrats in the California legislature appear to understand this.

Last Fall, for example, Newsom and his cohorts in the state legislature attempted to pass legislation similar to New York’s defiant response to Bruen, that would continue to make it virtually impossible for Californians to obtain carry permits. In what must have been a shock to Newsom, a handful of “moderate” Democrat members joined with the GOP minority and defeated the legislation – forcing the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times to blast such turncoats and join the ongoing, anti-Bruen conniption sweeping across blue states.

There also are blue-city sheriffs, such as San Francisco’s Paul Miyamoto, who may not like the Bruen decision but understand their oaths of office require them to follow it, and now are approving carry permits that previously were routinely denied.

Since Bruen, law-abiding citizens, including those in Democrat-controlled states like Maryland, are eagerly lining up by the tens of thousands to obtain formerly unattainable carry permits. These Americans exhibit no conniption, simply a yearning to freely exercise a God-given and constitutionally guaranteed right to self-defense.

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

First things first. The Biden administration is weak, ineffective, and indecisive in its handling of America’s foreign and national security affairs. Based on its record so far, it would be easy, and likely accurate, to conclude that in handling the Great China Spy Balloon Caper of 2023, Team Biden showed itself to be weak, ineffective, and indecisive.

Simply criticizing the administration for failing to shoot down the Chinese balloon earlier during the course of the wind-borne vehicle’s leisurely trek across America, however, misses important policy aspects of this episode.

First, we do not know everything about the capabilities, intent, and purpose(s) behind either the Chinese operators of the clumsy balloon and its clunky cargo, or of precisely what our country’s capabilities were or are in defending against and neutralizing whatever threat it posed.

Figuring out why China’s communist leaders do what they do, is no easier than deciphering decision-making inside the Kremlin, which, as Winston Churchill said, is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Did Beijing send this almost amateurish balloon device cruising over our sovereign territory simply to see what we would do? Was it actually equipped with listening devices of sufficient capability to pick up communications that are not collectable by other means, notably, satellites? Was China’s President Xi Jinping hoping that the Americans would take action to neutralize its capabilities in order to gauge our jamming abilities? Was it a ploy to accomplish a diplomatic goal, having no real intelligence purpose at the outset?

What actually did our defense and intelligence agencies know about the balloon, and what in fact did we do about it? If our government is to be believed (something that is neither always the case nor never the case), and we had neutralized the balloon’s ability to gather sensitive or meaningful intelligence as it passed over various facilities on the ground, why not continue tracking and monitoring it so long as it did not pose any meaningful threat; thereby enabling our foreign intelligence agencies to gain additional intelligence about what it was transmitting?

While some pundits were highly critical of the administration for failing to let the American people, or at least some of us, in on the balloon’s existence and travel itinerary, that is of little actual concern. The civilian population at large does enjoy some absolute or constitutional right to know everything that is known to our foreign intelligence or national defense agencies in real time, absent a situation posing an immediate and serious risk to civilian populations or individuals – something that appears not to have been the case here.

Unquestionably, the public side to this incident could have been handled far more professionally and intelligibly than it was. The Pentagon’s public explanation about why action was not taken sooner bordered on nonsensical. Why not simply tell the American people the facts: “we have neutralized the device’s ability to gather meaningful intelligence, it poses no danger to any individuals or facilities on the ground, and we will take it down if and when it does so”? Does it really require an Air Force brigadier general to make such a statement (presuming it was in fact the case)?

I am neither a regular reader of nor avid fan of Max Boot, but he is correct in noting the unfortunate “hysteria” with which many conservative politicians blasted the administration for failing to have more quickly or perhaps more belligerently “shot down” the Chinese spy balloon.

Failure to shoot down a balloon that appears to have posed no meaningful threat to our nation’s security at the moment it crossed into our air space, does not prove we have “surrendered American airspace to Communist China” as former President Trump declared; nor does it establish America as a second-rate power, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) bemoaned.

If subsequent information establishes that our government was not able to have neutralized the spy balloon’s ability to gather intelligence as it traversed our airspace, or that the device in fact did pose a serious danger to those on the ground or to our nation’s military readiness, then serious criticism of the administration’s failure to have acted sooner is clearly warranted. In the meantime, there is hardly a shortage of very real, very serious, and very timely national security problems on which to take Biden to task.

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

In 1971, left wing provocateur Saul Alinsky published Rules For Radicals, which remains even today, a half century later, a favored handbook for extremists intent on undermining our nation’s economic, civic, and legal foundation and rebuilding it in the image of a socialist society.

For the radical disruptor in Alinsky’s worldview, “everything is relative and changing”; in other words, to succeed as a revolutionary, existing values and norms must attacked and unanchored. Only by so doing can the new, radical ideas take hold and replace existing principles. This is precisely what the “woke” movement is doing,  most disturbingly to our legal system.

At the most fundamental level, the “anchor” for our legal system is the Bill of Rights, which provides a set of substantive and procedural guarantees designed to ensure that fairness and objectivity attach to all aspects of the civil and criminal justice processes.

These well-known standards include among many others, the right to counsel, the right to be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to be considered innocent unless and until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. These are not “relative and changing” standards, and if they were thus unmoored, legal chaos would prevail. Yet this is precisely what the “woke” movement is attempting to do to our judicial system and the legal profession.

How about the right to have a lawyer to represent you? The idea that even hated defendants have a right to be represented by competent legal counsel to ensure their rights are protected, predates the incorporation of that principle in the Bill of Rights. John Adams, one of our Founders and our second president, declared it was an important duty for him to have represented British soldiers accused of murder in the 1770 Boston Massacre.

Now, two and-a-half centuries later, times and perspectives have changed dramatically. The woke crowd objects to a prominent lawyer like David Boies representing the unpopular and distasteful Harvey Weinstein. Law school deans demand that lawyers associated in some manner with former President Donald Trump be disbarred, refused employment, or not welcome at law schools.

More fundamentally, top-tier law schools such as that at Georgetown University are demanding as part of their curriculum that students consider whether the law should any longer be considered and enforced neutrally. A law professor at Boston College of Law urges students to consider “scrapping” the Constitution.

Self-censorship is the order of the day. Nadine Strossen, a highly respected lawyer and constitutional law professor with the ACLU, has stated publicly that she “self-censors” due to wokeness “shutting down unpopular views.” Damage to our legal system resulting from such intolerance is cancerous and lasting.

Juries rendering verdicts contrary to the sensibilities of the woke movement, such as the acquittal in 2021 of Kyle Rittenhouse based on self-defense, are no longer accepted as evidence the “system” is working to deliver justice, but criticized as proof of “systemic racism.” Some lawyers now call for the principle of self-defense to be redefined and scaled back because of such verdicts. In a similar vein, many lawyers are suggesting that the burden of proof, always heretofore properly on the accuser in sexual assault cases, be shifted to the accused.

Such posturing turns the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.

This woke nihilism is infecting our regulatory processes. A member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, has decided that anti-trust enforcement should no longer be handled objectively or according to neutral standards. Rather, the criteria on which a commercial merger is allowed or dis-allowed should be based no longer on traditional elements of “anti-trust,” but on “anti-racism.” Thus would some monopolies be permitted and others not, premised on subjective criteria.

Judges and prosecutors are no longer exempt from this slide toward subjectivism in legal proceedings, with sentencing now being based on whether a convicted defendant was engaged in socially acceptable pursuits when committing a crime. Thus, when a 2020 Minneapolis rioter pleaded guilty to arson that left an innocent person dead, the federal judge and prosecutor decided he had been legitimately “protesting” not “rioting,” and therefore deserved and was granted a far more lenient sentence.

These are but a few of the slippery slopes now in store for us when woke chaos takes hold of our legal system and the legal profession. A legal system unmoored from principles becomes a danger to us all.

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.