From the Desk of Bob Barr

Townhall

By extending the jurisdiction of newly appointed Special Counsel John Smith beyond the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation back to the events of January 6, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland is making the same mistake House Republicans appear poised to make by declaring their intent to conduct oversight of Hunter Biden as soon as the GOP majority is seated in early January 2023.

Republicans and Democrats alike are set to use the powers within their jurisdiction – oversight by the Congress and prosecutorial power by the Executive Branch – to look backward for partisan political gain, rather than forward to solve real problems in behalf of the American people.

Allow me to explain.

Almost immediately after the midterm election results confirmed that the 118^th Congress would be led in the House by the GOP, Party leaders stated that a primary focus of their oversight power would be to launch investigations of Hunter Biden. In this, the Party made clear its priority would be to investigate the past instead of focusing on ongoing abuses of executive branch power, which not only would increase its chances for victory in 2024, but also lay the foundation for correcting those abuses after winning the presidency.

Days later, Garland decided that — rather than appoint a special counsel only to investigate possible violations of federal law in the current matter of the so-called “Mar-a-Lago” classified documents dump – the new Special Counsel’s jurisdiction would extendbackward to the far broader, and no longer current matters surrounding the January 6^th violence on Capitol Hill and efforts by to impede the certification of the November 2020 election.

Garland’s decision to thus expand the jurisdiction of the new Special Counsel makes no sense other than as a political move to wound Trump.

For one thing, the same Department of Justice within which Smith will be operating, already is engaged in hundreds of ongoing prosecutions of those January 2021 events.

Moreover, Democrats in the House already had spent many months investigating events surrounding January 6^th, and last year impeached Trump precisely for his alleged role in those events. Talk about duplicating effort.

If the decision to add a special counsel to the January 6^th mix was made by the Attorney General as a way to avoid any appearance of partisanship, that ship sailed long ago.

The matter of the Mar-a-Lago document dump presents a very different case for the Justice Department. Regardless of whether one accepts or questions Trump’s actions in handling these documents, the issues raised are extremely significant from a national security perspective.

Additionally, the circumstances surrounding the investigation clearly fit within the purpose and intent of the special counsel law which, for more than four decades has provided a mechanism for investigating politically “hot” matters.

If an investigation of a former president who lost his reelection to the current president, and who already has declared himself a candidate to oppose the sitting president in the next election, is not a case presenting the appearance of partisanship, then there is no such case.

The Mar-a-Lago investigation now in the lap of Special Counsel Smith is one that is serious, is timely, and deserves to be followed through, regardless of whether indictments result.

The core of this investigation involves the question whether a president can unilaterally and without limitation, declassify sensitive government documents to which he had access in his capacity as president, and then retain them after he leaves office. This question has never been conclusively addressed. It needs to be.

Furthermore, based on evidence already in the public domain, it appears the former president may have directed or himself taken steps to hamper, hinder, delay, or otherwise obstruct the FBI’s investigation surrounding the conditions under which the classified materials were taken to and maintained at Mar-a-Lago.

Obstruction of justice under federal law is a serious charge; one that, incidentally, formed the basis for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton. Failure by the Department of Justice to investigate it thoroughly would be a serious dereliction of duty.

Muddying the waters of the special counsel’s appointment by directing that he extend his investigation into January 6^th, however, detracts from what is a legitimate and timely application of the special counsel law to answer a politically thorny but legally significant constitutional question involving presidential powers and national security.

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

Many of the compliments being heaped on Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the wake of her announcement that she is stepping way from leading the Democrat Party are well-deserved, including the fact that throughout her tenure as Speaker, she maintained a high degree of intra-party discipline.

Republicans should take heed as they prepare to assume the majority in the House when the 118th Congress convenes in January, but if recent history is a guide, they probably will not.

The fact that Pelosi was able to keep her at-times very small majority marching in the same direction, is a testament to her skills and leadership style. Often overlooked in analyses of Pelosi’s successes in the Congress, however, is the fact that, unlike Republicans, there is broad agreement among congressional Democrats that Party and individual Member discipline is essential if the goal is to achieve meaningful results.

In today’s political environment, with the American electorate and its representatives in the Congress evenly divided, both aspects of discipline are essential in order to succeed at actually legislating.

Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy, with a bare-bones majority in the coming 118th Congress, already is finding this out, as the far-right Freedom Caucus and a few of the most conservative members of his caucus already are reducing his flexibility to manage not only his conference but the administration of the House generally.

For example, it appears that the Republican majority intends to strip several Democrat members of their committee assignments, in retaliation for the Democrats doing this to Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2021. When the Democrats inappropriately punished Taylor Greene in this way, they broke with long-standing House tradition that each Party decides which committees its members sit on, with the other party honoring those decisions.

Now, rather than return to that “regular order,” which ultimately benefits both parties, McCarthy is poised to deny certain of the GOP’s Democrat nemeses, such as California Rep. Adam Schiff, committee assignments as proposed by their caucus. This may feel good to Republicans in the short term, and it would be an understandable response to what the Democrats did to Taylor Greene. But continuing a game of procedural tit-for-tat, will simply result in an even higher degree of unproductive ill will than already infects proceedings in the House. More to the point, it will hamper the GOP from achieving broader goals down the road on close votes. (Besides, there are other ways to punish Members like Schiff and Ilhan Omar.)

History likewise should signal to Republican members as they prepare to assume the majority in January, that those times in which the Party had a majority and exhibited discipline, significant conservative legislation could be passed.

This was the “secret sauce” behind passage of a balanced budget legislative package that included welfare reform and tax reductions in 1997. Had the GOP behaved as more often than not it does, enough members would have refused to abide by the leadership’s requests for their votes, and doomed the seminal legislation because it might not have included every one of each individual Member’s demands.

Enactment of that Balanced Budget and Welfare Reform Act of 1997 provided a tangible platform on which Republican members could campaign in 1998, which helped it to hold its majority in that year’s midterm when it faced strong political headwinds.

It is axiomatic that discipline in the political arena cannot be as rigorously enforced as in the military. Each of the 435 members of the House is answerable ultimately to their constituents, not their party’s leaders. Still, in our two-party system when a candidate seeks and is then elected to office with the aid of the Republican or Democrat Party, even if only by virtue of running as a member of that party in order to qualify as a candidate, they owe a degree of allegiance to the party once sworn in, so long as doing so is not counter to their deeply held beliefs and will not cost them reelection. Members who even then refuse to support their Party’s requests for discipline, opting simply to further a personal agenda or as a way to retaliate against the other side, is a problem that often in the past has prevented the Republicans from accomplishing overarching goals. Early signs are that the GOP’s posture in the 118th Congress will fall into a similarly unproductive mode. 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 United States House of Representatives wields three great powers –to appropriate money, to legislate, and to conduct oversight of every function and component part of the federal government to ensure compliance with the Constitution and congressional intent.

While not express, Congress’ oversight power is universally recognized as implied through the “necessary and proper clause” in Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution. It is this power that is the least understood of Congress’ powers, and which has in recent decades been the least effectively employed.

In the coming 118th Congress that begins in early January 2023 with a Republican House majority, it is the oversight power that – if pursued seriously and effectively – will offer the Party the greatest opportunity to define itself in advance of the 2024 presidential election, and that will provide the key to reining in the disastrous policies of the Biden Administration.

Continued Democrat control of the Senate effectively neuters the power of the Republican Party to pass legislation reflecting the Party’s conservative values. This shortcoming means as well that it will be next to impossible to attach significant limits to federal spending for the remaining two years of the Biden Administration.

In the present environment, the only meaningful power remaining to Republicans is that of oversight, which can be employed regardless of what happens in the Senate.

If Republicans decide to conduct oversight as a way to rehash old grudges, to wreak vengeance on the other Party, or to grab headlines, they will have squandered a major opportunity to define and advance the Party’s agenda as well as the interests of the American people .

Headlines can, of course, be garnered and the GOP base energized if House Republicans use their new majority oversight power to pummel the already disgraced Hunter Biden, or to rehash the thoroughly discredited 2016 Russia hoax. The conservative base may cheer if the House rushes forward with impeachment proceedings against President Biden as payback for Democrats’ farcical impeachments of former President Trump.

What, however, will such actions accomplish for the country? How will such undertakings slow or stop the damage to the American economy and our national security by the current administration?

Instead of using oversight as a political tool to punish Democrats, House Republicans should use the power to draw serious and sustained attention to the actual damage Biden’s policies are doing to our borders, our economy, our justice system, our energy sector, and our military. In so doing they will provide a blueprint for implementing solutions in the next Republican administration.

How these oversight hearings are conducted is crucial.

Oversight hearings cannot be haphazard. They must be coordinated and follow a set plan, not only with and by the Oversight Committee, but by every other House committee, each of which has substantive investigative power over the federal agencies and officials within its defined jurisdiction.

The oversight agenda should begin with substantive reform of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies as well as the Justice Department itself, focusing not on personalities but on the documented, systemic abuse of those agencies’ powers by the current administration.

The oversight needs to extend to every other department and agency that has had a hand in implementing the destructive Biden Administration policies that are undermining our sovereignty, decimating our country’s energy infrastructure, destroying its public schools, and impairing military readiness and recruitment.

Repeated hearings are essential, not one-off sessions. Officials should be called back repeatedly if necessary, not allowed to slip-slide away after a single day’s session.

Importantly, GOP leadership must be prepared to enforce discipline on its members in conducting oversight, to prevent straying into the short-sighted, sound-bite oriented, headline-grabbing mode that has characterized so many oversight initiatives in recent years.

Real oversight is tough. It takes discipline and hard work, which is perhaps why we have seen little of it by either Party in years past. However, if conducted properly in 2023-2024, it will help ensure that a Republican president is sworn in on January 20, 2025.

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

As much trouble as Republican leaders in the Congress might have accepting the brutal fact of their candidates’ poor performances in last week’s mid-term elections, “fixing” the problem will take more than post-election tinkering.

Sure, there were major problems affecting the outcomes of last week’s results that were unique to this cycle – foremost among them, the quality of several Republican Senate candidates, and the barrage of early votes by Democrats – but there are far more consequential problems facing the GOP.

Even accounting for such problems as candidate quality, uneven funding, and questionable polling, the failure of the Republican Party to develop and communicate a coherent and positive message to the electorate stands as a major shortcoming now and moving forward. History shows it need not be that way.

In the 1994 mid-term election, the White House occupant was the widely unpopular President Bill Clinton. The House of Representatives had been under Democrat control  for 40 years. The stage was set for change. To take advantage of that momentum, then-Minority Whip (and future Speaker) Newt Gingrich broke with Republican tradition, and articulated a substantive, specific, and positive message to the electorate.

The 1994 Contract With America did not mention, much less attack Bill Clinton, though he was vulnerable to such charges. That would have been the politically easier course.

Instead, the Contract listed ten pieces of legislation the GOP promised to bring to the floor of the House for a vote within the first 100 days of being awarded a majority. Importantly, it did not overpromise. The widely publicized document promised only what we could guarantee. It worked.

By running on a program of specific, positive issues — each of which was in accord with basic, widely accepted principles of the Republican Party and a majority of voters – the field of GOP challengers broke the mold of generic, feel-good campaign talking points and presented to the voters an actual agenda. The voters responded by giving the Republicans their first House majority in four decades.

Contrast that experience with the less-than-inspirational Commitment to America presented publicly to the electorate in late September 2022 by the current Republican leadership. The document articulated “themes” that could provide an election agenda for the GOP in any year — 2022, 2024, 1994, or whenever. Such “evergreen” ideas have a place in a political Party’s agenda, perhaps as a convention platform, but as a vehicle with which to win a hard-fought mid-term election, unsurprisingly it proved virtually worthless.

The GOP’s Commitment reflects a problem beyond a missed opportunity. It suggests that the Party remains unsure of itself, has become overly dependent on polling rather than substance, and fails to understand the contemporary American electorate.

Poll after poll taken in the weeks leading to November 8th showed the electorate in a sour mood and a country led by a highly unpopular president. Apparently deciding that these polls provided a roadmap for victory, the GOP message became simply, “Biden and the Democrats are bad, so vote for us.” By implication, it deferred the details until after the voters would give Republicans majorities in both houses. Voters declined the invitation.

The results – a net loss of at least one Senate seat, and a far slimmer House majority than polling “promised” – speaks volumes about whether it is better to present voters with a positive, substantive plan or a campaign devoid of real substance but long on negativity.

Unfortunately, the GOP has been presented with this lesson in the not-distant past, but has failed to learn it.

Beyond the lack of a coherent, consistent message, the Party seems not to have yet grasped that the American electorate has changed dramatically over recent cycles. Gone are the days when we could count on an informed and morally cognizant majority of voters. Today, a majority of voters in all age groups, some by nearly 75%, consider abortion a “right” to be protected by law.  A majority of voters support the “right” to health care. At the same time, Americans are increasingly ignorant about our country and its history.

Threading that needle takes more than well-worn talking points.

The Republican Party had best do a far better job than in the recent past of presenting a coherent platform to voters if it hopes to achieve better results in 2024 and beyond.

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

Uncle Sam’s benevolent, prying eyes are everywhere, especially on matters concerning medicine and health. Now, a little-known federal bureaucracy, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), is recommending that virtually every man, woman, and child over the age of eight be screened for anxiety. This will be an unnecessary and very expensive recommendation.

Unlike recommendations made by other government task forces, those by this agency can have costly consequences. Under federal law, when the USPSTF recommends certain health care screening procedures, they must be covered by health insurers at no cost to the insured, regardless of how expensive or how little benefit results.

Since it was established by the Congress in 1984, the USPSTF has amassed an uneven record when it comes to medical screening recommendations; alternatively recommended and then not recommended screening for breast cancer in women of a certain age and screening for prostate cancer in men.

Notwithstanding this mixed record, the USPSTF has decided that Americans are such a fretful and anxious people, that health care providers should screen them for anxiety and depression, even in the absence of symptoms.

Forcing insurers to cover such asymptomatic procedures at no cost to the insured, simply means that the cost would be passed on to the larger pool of people in those plans by way of increased premiums or reduced reimbursements to the health care providers.

This is but the most recent example of the sleight-of-hand by which Uncle Sam tells a gullible electorate that they are getting something for free or at a reduced cost when the government is simply shifting the cost to be shared more widely. The Biden administration’s college loan forgiveness plan is a similar fraud.

Is Uncle Sam himself the cause of our national anxiety?

After all, we have a president who tells us we are on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon or planetary incineration due to “climate change.” If that is not enough to make you anxious, I’m not sure what will. At the same time, we have governments at all levels constantly berating white Americans as irredeemably racist. Could be cause for anxiety there.

With violent crime levels increasing in cities across the country, it should come as no surprise that residents are justifiably anxious, even perhaps fearful. Forty-year high inflation is yet another government-created reason why Americans might be anxious. Then there is the grand-daddy of all anxiety-creating episodes – COVID.

The continuing overreaction to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic by governments from Washington, D.C. to every corner of the nation, fairly shouted “Be Anxious!” “Be Worried!” “Do What We Say, or You Will Die!” Schools closed, learning (such as it was) transmogrified from in-person to online, masks became ubiquitous, businesses closed, restaurants shuttered, friendships faltered, trips were cancelled, and control over our lives was ceded to the government to a degree never before seen.

On top of all that, young students are being prodded into worrying about their gender as young as third grade, along with the media hounding them to be concerned about whether they are LGBTQ+ (or, alternatively, LGBTQ+-phobic).  It never ends.

So, let’s get this straight. Government policies, programs, and statements create ever increasing levels of anxiety among children and adults, which in turn prompts a powerful panel of government “experts” to recommend that everyone be screened for “anxiety,” regardless of the presence of any symptoms, and to be paid for by insurance companies whether they choose to or not.

It therefore should surprise no one if in the years ahead we see significantly increased levels of anxiety in the population. Signs of “anxiety” such as eating too much, poorer grades in school, and increased irritability will be especially easy to find among teenagers, for whom anxiety has been a normal part of growing up for centuries. The difference now will be a monetary incentive to find anxiety, followed by Big Pharma supplying the meds to cure our national High Anxiety.

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 

President Biden’s prime time address to the nation on November 2nd, less than a week before today’s midterm election, was billed by the White House as a major speech about saving “democracy.” In reality, it was as pointless a presidential speech as America has heard in decades.

It was doom and gloom delivered in Biden’s signature unfriendly, if not downright threatening tone, through clenched teeth. The speech was so bad, in fact, that a CNN commentator labeled it “head-scratching.”

From a practical political perspective, Biden’s speech was about a far as one could possibly stray from the issue — as in election cycle after election cycle — that tends to drag voters from their couches to the polling place: the economy. Whatever the reason or whoever the author of the speech, it epitomizes the gulf between the real world and how the President appears to view it.

Even as Biden was telling his countrymen that “democracy” is at stake because of “extreme MAGA Republicans’” subversive efforts, record numbers of voters already had already voted – hardly evidence of voter “suppression.”

Biden tried his best to cast the nation’s situation in the most dire terms possible. Ignoring the clear fact that the economy is on the ballot this year, he claimed repeatedly that “Democracy is on the ballot”; and not only on the ballot, but “at risk” because of “dark forces” working against our freedom to vote in a true “moment of generational importance.”

The President spoke of “election deniers” as the harbingers of democracy’s doom. Even were election “deniers” running for offices up and down the ballot and in every one of the fifty states, the question then becomes, so what? If there are candidates who claim they will “deny” the results of their elections if they are shown to have lost, the reality of vote counts and recounts will in the end, as in 2020, carry the day.

And if those candidates remain obstinate in their refusals to accept that reality, they will join the ranks of sour losers that includes Georgia’s governor wannabe, Stacey Abrams, and former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the Left, and former President Donald Trump on the Right.

Moreover, if this vast army of election deniers the President sees on the horizon were then to move their minions to violence, they will be arrested and prosecuted, as well they should be. The sky will not fall.

Predictably, of course, Biden took the opportunity of the presidential bully pulpit to again focus the nation’s attention on the 2020 election and the disgraceful Capitol Hill riots the following January 6th. In doing this rather than focusing on public policies designed to actually solve our nation’s many and serious problems, from record high inflation to massive unlawful inward immigration, Biden simply reinforced the public’s well-documented view of him as a truly terrible President.

Sadly, however, in focusing on the past, he is not alone.

Many congressional Republicans, tasting the almost certain sweetness of victory this week, already are girding to refight the past rather than lead for the future. This would be a serious mistake.

If the GOP succumbs to calls to launch its own January 6th investigation, or to reopen the already thoroughly discredited 2016 “Russia hoax,” or to spend two more years beating up on the disgraced Hunter Biden, they may win points from their base and the former president. Such agenda, however, is not what American needs, and will not provide the fuel for victory in the 2024 presidential election. What will, or at least should fuel that effort, is showing American voters the GOP takes seriously the mantle of majority leadership, as we did for three years after the 1994 electoral wave.

Even without owning the White House, Republican majorities in the Congress can – if they so choose – pass meaningful substantive budgets that, eventually, a Democrat president will have to sign. Those in such majority can conduct meaningful oversight of myriad federal agencies run amok under this President, including of the FBI which desperately needs it. And a congressional majority under firm, adult Republican leadership, can slow, even stop, Biden’s hell-bent programs that already threaten to ruin America’s energy sector and that have rent asunder our southern border.

This is the future we can have with Republican majorities. Whether we will have it remains to be seen.

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

According to recent media accounts, scientists in China have developed “high-tech” face masks that warn the individual wearing the mask that they have come into contact with the dreaded coronavirus. This is but the most recent chapter in the now nearly three-year long global overreaction to COVID-19. It is also perhaps one of the silliest, even though it presents interesting future applications.

Chinese researchers proudly claim that the masks not only will alert the wearer if he or she is in the presence of airborne coronavirus pathogens, but will likewise warn the individual if nearby swine flu or bird flu particles pose an imminent danger. The state-of-the-art masks, however, have one serious drawback – it takes 10 minutes for the mask to alert the wearer’s cell phone app that they are in the presence of the dread, disease-bearing molecules. The mask’s developers, however, “hope to shorten the detection time” even as they work to enable the detection mechanisms in the mask to alert to other “health conditions including cancers and cardiovascular diseases.”

While the scientists working on this project convey great hope for the future of such high-tech masks, there remain significant questions about the usefulness of the devices. For example, if you are wearing one of these masks in the future, it is unclear what would be the benefit of alerting you that you are near someone with cancer or heart failure (other than perhaps to console them).

Still, the mere idea that wearing a high-tech mask can allow you to take swift (or not-yet-so-swift) evasive action to avoid dangerously long exposure to a virus or other ailment, is an interesting one. The concept is certain to find special appeal for a generation of young people weaned on fear of virtually everything, but especially afraid of becoming even moderately ill. For them, wearing a mask is just a part of getting dressed.

This recent and ongoing development and availability of high-tech masks for persons ever fearful of coming into contact with another person who might sneeze or cough in their vicinity, presents us with a number of possibilities that researchers and scientists could pursue in expanding the technology’s reach.

For example, consider the marketability of really high-tech masks that could alert the wearer’s cell phone if they are in the presence of a person harboring unacceptable political beliefs. A red high-tech mask could warn the wearer if an individual holding unacceptably Democrat political beliefs is near, and afford him or her time to take evasive, other defensive or perhaps even offensive action. A blue mask would similarly allow the Democrat donning the mask to avoid contact with Republican partisans, and, depending on the sensitivity rating of the particular mask, issue a perhaps even higher warning if a feared “MAGA” supporter is near.

Businesses likely would be drawn to the masks as a marketing tool, whereby shoppers or potential customers wearing masks could be warned away from competitors’ products or cheaper alternatives.

And consider how such high-tech masks could greatly improve the efficiency of law enforcement, as police and other investigators constantly are looking for ways to expand the use of technology to take the place of old-fashioned policing.

FBI agents, for example, could wear masks that would alert them to the presence of a “lone wolf” perpetrator, or that would allow them to quickly (or at least within 10 minutes if that is the delay time) arrest suspects who slough off warning signs of criminally evasive behavior (akin to the “drug courier profile” developed in the last decades of the 20th Century to assist DEA agents and other law enforcement teams in identifying such scofflaws at major airports and on interstate highways).

Masks tailored for use by foreign intelligence experts would provide a similar boon for detecting spies in their midst.

Truly, the possibilities of these high-tech masks are myriad, even for use by moms and dads who, for centuries, have faced the problem of figuring out if their offspring are lying to them. No longer would this be a 50-50 conundrum for the parent sporting a lie-detecting high-tech mask.

We can only hope that the Chinese scientists who are developing COVID-detecting high-tech masks (probably some of the same scientists who unleashed the coronavirus to begin with) accelerate their research to lay the groundwork for entrepreneurs and bureaucrats here in the West to apply the technology in all manner of privacy-invasive ways.

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

New York is the state many conservatives love to hate because of its stridently anti-Second Amendment laws and public policies (most recently, reflected in a new law undermining the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen decision that declared unconstitutional the state’s century-old Sullivan Law that made it next to impossible for a law-abiding citizen to obtain a concealed carry permit).

However, an Oct. 21 decision from Saratoga County trial court Judge Dianne Freestone, reminds us that even in the dark “blue” state of New York, reason can prevail, despite the overwhelmingly Democrat state legislature, the ultra-liberal governor, and the far-left wing state attorney general.

The judge’s decision resulted from a constitutional challenge to an absentee voting law passed by the legislature in Jan. 2022. That legislation extended and expanded statewide absentee voting far beyond existing provisions in the New York Constitution — even though New Yorkers had overwhelmingly rejected this proposal in a Nov. 2021 referendum. The legislature was not content to stop there.

Section 7(j) of the January 2022 legislation, for example, arrogantly robs the courts of their fundamental power to hear and decide challenges to improperly cast votes: “In no event may a court order a ballot that has been counted to be uncounted.”

Although the state of New York has – unsurprisingly — appealed Judge Freestone’s ruling, the 28-page opinion is remarkable in its lucidity and boldness.

For example, the judge’s explanation of absentee voting in the state presents in sharp focus the arrogant manner by which former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature sought to expand absentee voting far beyond what was provided for in the prior law and existing constitutional provisions.

As detailed in the court’s opinion, the narrow 1955 New York law authorized absentee voting by individuals suffering from an illness or a physical disability which prevented them from voting on Election Day. Cuomo and his legislative cohorts expanded it during the COVID-19 pandemic “emergency” to allow any voter who claimed any undefined “illness” to vote absentee.

New York Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment in Nov. 2021 that would have opened the floodgates to virtually unlimited and unchecked absentee voting. As noted in Judge Freestone’s recent opinion, New York voters overwhelmingly shot down that measure. According to the judge, this correctly reflects the fundamental principle underlying the state Constitution, that “while there is a constitutional right to vote, there is no constitutional right to an absentee ballot.”

Undeterred by that 2021 electoral defeat, the Democrat-controlled legislature extended the COVID “emergency order,” allowing broad absentee balloting through the end of 2022 because of further, undefined “threats” to peoples’ health. The judge minces no words in her opinion, referring to the “alarmist statistics of rising incidences of COVID-19 infections and the collective phantom menaces of Monkey Pox and Polio looming.”

As Judge Freestone also notes poignantly, expanding absentee voting for “health” reasons, as New York did in the 2022 legislation, is disingenuous and hardly can be considered “temporary.” The state’s political leaders could consider the various health “menaces” in New York cites to be perpetual potential health dangers. The government’s actions are, according to Judge Freestone, “an Orwellian perpetual state of health emergency” that cannot stand.

The New York legislature and governor have attempted by these actions to expand voting far beyond what the law and the state Constitution provide; rendering their actions invalid as a matter of law according to Judge Freestone.

In trying to wall off the court’s power to review any challenge to any vote once “counted” according to their unconstitutional provisions, these New York Democrats have shown their true, corrupt colors and once again thumbed their nose at the rule of law and the will of the people.

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

Do economic problems experienced by Americans, such as recurring food shortages and projected rationing of heating oil in northeastern states this winter, mean that the United States has slipped to “Third World Country” status? Not really. The U.S. remains a strong country with a highly developed and stable economic system.

The problems we have been experiencing in recent years, however, represent a deeper, and in many respects more serious problem than being or becoming a Third World Country.

The United States is slipping into the uncharted territory of a highly developed country that is losing the basic bonds of civil society that protect it from degenerating into chaos.

The signs of this descent are everywhere, though the extreme politically partisan lenses through which many Americans view public policy hamper their ability or willingness to see it.

In no respect is this troubling phenomenon more obvious than the recurring images of individuals committing acts of senseless violence against strangers. While we regularly see also acts of robbery and rampant shoplifting, it is the images of people being pushed onto New York subway tracks or thugs beating up elderly passers by on city streets, that most starkly remind us – or should remind us – that something dark and alarming is happening in our society.

Stealing from another person or business as a means of gaining something the perpetrator could not otherwise obtain or afford, is neither a new problem nor one unique to our country or time. Organized shoplifting, or stealing to show off the perpetrator’s “chops” on social media, however, represents a newer problem – one that is far more difficult to address and correct.

Public schools, which in years past provided a structured, rules-driven environment dedicated to learning and to developing appropriate social behavior, are experiencing increased student violence. Many have morphed into laboratories for extreme social behavior, such as drag queen shows and trans-genderism displays, where the authorities appear unwilling or unable to staunch such degenerate and harmful activities.

Universities, which used to provide the next level of socialization and learning beyond high school, have themselves become breeding grounds for aberrant and intolerant behavior. Shouting down speakers or spitting on them in public, are today impliedly if not explicitly condoned by the adults supposed to be ensuring a mature and orderly environment in which civil society advances.

Lack of consequences for these and other forms of violent and anti-social behavior, exacerbates the problems. Civil libertarians have long sought to place severe restraints on legislative, law enforcement, and prosecutorial powers to stem criminal behavior as well as behavior that, while not violent, has the effect of undercutting civil authority. Those boundaries now have loosened considerably, to the degree of permitting people to pitch tents on private and public property, or to defecate and do drugs in public areas (including near schools).

One of the primary defenses employed by society to protect against criminal behavior dismantling civil norms, are its prosecutors. Tragically, in a number of major American cities, including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and others, elected prosecutors who until the recent past enforced those laws to ensure that law-abiding citizens and businesses could live and operate without fear of violence, are refusing as a matter of public policy to enforce those boundaries. The unsurprising result of such policies is more violence, more fear, and greater lasting harm to society.

Bryan Burroughs’ book, Days of Rage – America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, describes in detail the extreme violence that took place in our country from the late 1960s through the 1970s – bombings and other violent acts committed by numerous leftist organizations such as The Weathermen, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN, and others.

America survived those years of violence because we maintained a widely understood foundation of civil norms that rejected such actions. Now, half a century later, that civil foundation has become so severely shredded that recovery from today’s widespread violence and intolerance is far less certain.

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.

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A number of sheriffs in upstate New York are declaring that their officers will not prioritize or “aggressively enforce” the state’s recently enacted, highly restrictive gun control law. These elected sheriffs have concluded quite correctly that the state’s new law is at odds with both the Constitution of the United States and with the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared New York’s previous and long-standing gun control law – the Sullivan Act – unconstitutional.

The sheriffs’ actions have rekindled a recurring debate about the powers of the more than three thousand local sheriffs serving in every state except Alaska and Connecticut.

The United States has had elected sheriffs long before there was a “United States of America,” with the first one taking office in Virginia in 1652. Police departments, on the other hand, are a relatively new phenomenon. The first municipal police department not established until 1838 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Unlike most county sheriffs, who hold their positions under their state constitutions, police chiefs answer only to local office holders who appointed them, not to the voters. It is this distinction that has caused a number of sheriffs in “Blue States” to earn the ire of the Left.

Two factors have exacerbated this enmity in recent years – increasingly restrictive gun control measures and abusive COVID mandates by Blue State governors and legislatures. Sheriffs who decline to prioritize enforcing such laws find themselves increasingly maligned by the Left, notwithstanding the fact that they are carrying out their sworn duty to support the federal and state constitutions, and in accord with the wishes of the voters they represent.

Consider Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who declared in 2021 that he would not force officers under his command to be vaccinated against COVID, as mandated by that county’s liberal Board of Supervisors.

Even more vexing to liberals, however, is the number of sheriffs who in recent years have refused to enforce what they consider unconstitutional infringements on the rights of citizens in their jurisdictions to exercise their Second Amendment rights in the face of Blue State gun control laws.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) berates these sheriffs who follow the Constitution of the United States as “radicalized” officials who do not themselves understand the Constitution. The recently discredited SPLC simply cannot bring itself to accept that elected law enforcement officials should be permitted to resist such government overreach.

However, these “constitutional sheriffs” are not alone in their views. Since the Supreme Court’s seminal Bruen decision in June that tossed New York’s Sullivan Act, similarly restrictive laws in other states have fallen. Even more to the point, some of the very restrictions in the legislation signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul just days after the Supreme Court rendered its opinion, as part of her attempt to undercut the High Court’s directive, were blocked last week by a federal judge in New York City.

With state and federal courts seeming to agree with sheriffs who decline to vigorously enforce laws they view as inconsistent with their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, especially as related to Second Amendment rights of citizens in their jurisdictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult for their detractors on the Left to argue with a straight face that the sheriffs are the outliers.

Three years ago, the gun control group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — “Everytown for Gun Safety” — published a paper highly critical of sheriffs who declined to prioritize the gun control measures the organization championed. The title of the piece was, When Sheriffs Refuse to Follow the Law.

It is, however, becoming increasingly clear to citizens across the country that it is liberal, anti-gun public officials like Hochul who are not following the law, and that it is constitutional sheriffs who are the ones following it.

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.