From the Desk of Bob Barr

Townhall

Knee-jerk responses by government officials and legislators following incidents in which individuals have been killed by police can cause lasting harm to law-abiding citizens. One of these dangerous policies is something called the “Driving Equity Act,” which is now the law in Philadelphia.

The Driving Equity Act, known also as the “Driving Equality Act,” is an overreaction to isolated incidents of alleged police misconduct, and reflects a troubling trend going back nearly a decade.

For example, following the 2014 death of Michael Brown during a confrontation with police in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Justice Department launched a drive against a number of local police departments that resulted in “consent decrees” – mandatory edicts that made it demonstrably more difficult for those departments to carry out their mission of protecting the public.

Several years later, the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a nationwide backlash against law enforcement generally which led to policies that reduced or defunded law enforcement agencies, causing problems that resonate still today.

Early this year in Memphis, Tennessee, members of a “special” police unit beat Tyre Nichols to death, a tragedy that revived calls for state and local governments to defund and disband specialized anti-crime units.

Often camouflaged as “restorative justice” or “reimagined policing,” legislative and executive actions to curtail police funding and powers usually are premised on the notion that traditional police powers, including traffic stops, are inherently racially biased and thus have been abused as tools to target members of racial minorities, especially Black men. It is not, however, as if there are not ways to deal with such abuses.

At the federal level, and in every state and municipality across the country, there are regulations as well as civil and criminal laws available with which to hold accountable and punish police officers who violate a person’s civil rights. The conviction and lengthy prison sentence handed down against the Minneapolis police officer whose actions caused the death of George Floyd is the clearest example.

Holding individual officers accountable for unlawfully harming or killing an individual, however, takes time and hard work by investigators and prosecuting officials. Many government officials, especially those in liberal jurisdictions or those beholden to progressive supporters, find it easier and more politically rewarding to paint with a broader brush.

Responding to police misconduct incidents by characterizing an entire police unit, or the whole department as racist, to then justify new “progressive” policies to rein in such abuses, appears the solution of choice for many local and state legislators and executives.

Tossing aside long-standing law enforcement authorities rather than tackling specific incidents of police misbehavior, reflects the adage of throwing the baby out with the bathwater — leaving the law-abiding public at greater risk than were a more focused, incident-based solution implemented.

There is no better example of this endangering policy than the so-called Driving Equity (or “Equality”) Act signed into municipal law by Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney in late 2021.

The law took effect in March 2022 and prohibits city police from stopping vehicles for a number of alleged violations, including driving with an expired registration sticker or operating a vehicle with a missing headlight or taillight. These violations have been used for decades by police departments across the country to protect against unsafe drivers or vehicles endangering the public.

Certainly there have been incidents in which such traffic stops have served as a pretext for a stop not truly warranted, but the laws themselves are sound and do enable police to protect against unsafe vehicles, and at times lead to arrests for far more serious crimes (including murder).

No longer is this the case in Philadelphia (and perhaps soon in Memphis), thanks to Philadelphia Councilmember Isiah Thomas, who sponsored the Driving Equity Act simply because he saw “a history of oppression and institutional racism” in the city’s police department, predicated also on a previous incident in a different city involving a police shooting of a detained driver.

For Councilman Thomas and Mayor Kenney, thus handcuffing the police responsible for protecting the citizens of a major American city, is justified if it results in “reimagining” police behavior that will “reduce the likelihood of negative interactions between police officers and Black drivers.”

Police organizations including Philadelphia’s Fraternal Order of Police (which has challenged, thus far unsuccessfully, the Driving Equity Act), common sense, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analysis of traffic fatality rates on U.S. roadways resulting from limits on police enforcement powers, paint a far more sobering picture of such feel-good policies like Philadelphia’s.

Liberals in charge of “blue cities,” however, would rather traffic fatalities and injuries continue to rise rather than allow police to continue using tried-and-true methods to keep roadways and drivers safe for the rest of us.

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 Joe Biden claims regularly that his Administration is for the “middle class,” is there to help “American workers,” and is committed to support America’s families. The reality is otherwise, and it is not just “Bidenomics” that is to blame.

Although little known to the average consumer, it is the legal and regulatory policies of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that demonstrate most clearly this Administration’s commitment to anti-free market policies that ultimately harm rather than help consumers.

For more than a century and a quarter, one of the sharpest arrows in Uncle Sam’s quiver with which to target alleged uncompetitive forces in the marketplace has been antitrust laws, most enacted in the late 19th and early 20th Century to dismantle large monopolies such John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. To better enforce these laws, in 1919 the U.S. Justice Department grew a new enforcement arm – the Antitrust Division.

It was not until 1968, however, that the Department set clear guidelines by which U.S. companies would be measured if they sought to consolidate. The touchstone was “consumer welfare,” and unlike many (perhaps most) policies designed and implemented by the federal government, this standard made sense. Mergers between companies would be measured by their effect on consumers in the marketplace.

Dan Mitchell, a noted libertarian economist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, described the “consumer welfare” metric best, when he wrote just last month, that the policy limits the damage that can be wrought on the marketplace because it “create[es] a presumption that mergers are okay if prices go down.”

Of course, as with any government policy, even one that is purposefully sound, sooner or later Congress and Executive Branch lawyers cannot resist monkeying with it and causing distortions. The government’s infamous antitrust litigation against IBM — which began in 1969 and ended 13 years later when Antitrust Division lawyers finally decided the case was “without merit” — is a prime, but by no means isolated example of the damage that results when the federal government attempts to overzealously enforce its statutory powers.

Nonetheless, over the decades and numerous administrations during which the consumer welfare policy remained largely intact, American consumers have benefitted greatly from marketplace competition. The myriad tech services available to consumers worldwide by U.S. entrepreneurial companies such as Apple and Microsoft, and more recently, Space X, attest to the value of a federal policy focused largely, if not totally, on the benefits to consumers of minimized marketplace meddling.

This all may be coming to a screeching halt if the proposed “Merger Guidelines” made public last month by the Biden Administration go into effect in September. These ill-advised guidelines muddy the long-standing, consumer-welfare based antitrust enforcement policy; replacing it with  proposals that will cause innovation to stutter and companies to shrink from completing or even attempting beneficial consolidation. The new policies will also, and not surprisingly, cause antitrust litigation to expand if not explode in coming years.

The document itself, drafted jointly by the Justice Department and the FTC (currently headed by well-known business-consolidation opponent Lina Khan), is gobbledygook from its “Overview” to its lengthy appendices. In this, it mirrors the confusing enforcement actions and inconsistent results achieved thus far by the Biden Administration’s antitrust litigation.

The current Antitrust Division, for example, had three bites at convicting poultry executives at Pilgrim’s Pride of violating federal criminal antitrust laws, and failed each time. That same division at the Justice Department currently is litigating against a proposed merger between Jet Blue and Spirit Airlines that would enhance competition against the “Big Four” airlines.

Unfortunately, the new Guidelines, should they be finalized in their current form, would open the door wide to significantly more antitrust mischief by these agencies.

Clearly in the gunsights of the proposed guidelines, for example, are tech platforms and supporting worker rights. The disturbing theme underlying the document appears to be that consolidation is presumed to be bad.

As Dan Mitchell appropriately describes the new Biden merger policies, by jettisoning the consumer welfare standard in favor of amorphous criteria designed to achieve equality, they will “make it easier for government officials to reward friendly companies and punish those who do not do the administration’s bidding even on matters unrelated to competition.” And that is something that should scare not only every business in America, but every consumer as well.

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

Townhall

Somewhat lost in the public’s fixation on the scandals surrounding President Biden and his prodigal son Hunter, and the lengthening string of indictments against former President Trump, is a revealing and disturbing survey published last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The poll released in July found that most Americans now favor government restrictions on their freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment – specifically, freedom of expression.

Until recently, the freedoms enunciated in the First Amendment, which was ratified in 1791 to stop government from restricting expression and publication of ideas, has been considered part of the essential fabric of our culture. Apparently, this is no longer the case, at least for 55% of Americans who now consider government – not the individual – to be the best and final arbiter of what information is worthy of expression or publication; a full 65 percent would turn to “tech companies” to make such decisions for them.

Regardless of the reasons behind this failure to grasp the fundamental principle that liberty is lost when ideas can be restricted by authorities, these findings are fundamentally far more troubling than past or current misdeeds by Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

The scope of the restrictions many Americans now appear willing to surrender on their expressive freedom, as revealed by the Pew survey, are breathtaking – extending broadly to information deemed “false” or  “violent.”

The degree to which a majority of Americans appear content allowing government and tech companies to censor information has increased significantly in just the past five years. As the Pew survey discovered, the percentage of adults who are ready to have their right to enjoy the free flow of information restricted to protect against “false information” ballooned from 39 percent in 2018 to 58 percent today.

To put these findings in a broader context, a 2021 Pew survey determined that more than eight in 10 Americans gather their news information from online sources, including “smart” phones, computers, or electronic tablets. Coupled with the revelations in the July 2023 survey, it becomes clear that only a small percentage of citizens would remain comfortable receiving unfiltered news.

Seventy percent of U.S. citizens now believe that tech companies should be the gatekeepers to restrict “violent content online,” and 60 percent expressed a willingness to let the government perform such public service.

The Pew survey also found that, “Democrats have become much more supportive than Republicans of the government restricting false information online.” Say what? Was it not Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt – surely the epitome of modern liberalism – who in his 1941 State of the Union address loudly championed “freedom of speech and expression” as one of the “Four Freedoms” considered universal human rights?

And, was it not John F. Kennedy, another iconic Democrat president, who echoed that clarion call for freedom of expression in a March 1962 speech?

These oft-repeated expressions by Democrat political leaders in support of robust freedom of speech and expression, however, turned decidedly murky during Barack Obama’s eight years in office. Our 44^th President made no effort to disguise his keen desire to restrict disfavored speech – openly pressing for federal regulatory agencies, including the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to gain lawful power to regulate such content.

Today’s Democrats do not even pretend to hide their disdain for unfettered expressive freedom; openly lecturing us on the essential need for government and social media companies to censor disfavored information so it does not “harm” us. Their contempt extends even to attacks on song lyrics expressing ideas at odds with theirs.

We are approaching the 232^nd anniversary of the ratification of the First Amendment, and the fourth anniversary of the civil liberties’ disaster foisted upon us by the government’s vast and unnecessary regulatory overreaction to the COVID pandemic.

The United States has morphed from a society unafraid of open expression, into a nation populated by fear-driven citizens who, by significant majorities, see a greater good in government and tech companies – not each individual – deciding what information is “false” or too “violent,” and therefore to be hidden from view.

In this environment, it is no longer as FDR declared in his first inaugural address in 1933, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The dark and present danger now is that for a majority of adult Americans, the power to express independent ideas is itself to be feared. Ominously, as we enter the brave new world of “AI,” this looming threat to liberty will become ever more dangerous.

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

Sunday, July 30 was our nation’s tenth “National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.” For those who may not care so much for whistleblowers these days, including perhaps Joe and Hunter Biden, July 30 also serves as “National Cheesecake Day.”

I like cheesecake and I have nothing against legitimate whistleblowers, but there are so many of them these days that it is becoming a bit difficult to sort them all out.

Whistleblowers long-predate formation of our country, going back many centuries to medieval England, when individuals who snitched on their fellow Brits for working on the Sabbath, were entitled to half the perpetrators’ ill-gotten profits.

Townhall

There remains but two months before the current federal fiscal year ends September 30th. Half of that remaining period will be spent by lawmakers in their home states and districts during the traditional August recess.

When the Congress reconvenes after Labor Day, the Republican Party will be in a position to either strengthen its currently slim majority in the House, or risk losing it.

Much depends on whether the GOP can discipline itself to stick to a strategy that is laser-focused on the 2024 election, rather than on passing bits of legislation playing largely, if not solely to its base for short-term gain.

A key factor in this equation is whether the appropriations process — which even in the most nonpartisan of times presents a messy picture to the American electorate – can be managed by Speaker McCarthy in such a way as to avoid a government “shutdown,” which already is being whispered in the corridors under the Capitol dome.

Some Republican budget hardliners claim to not “fear a government shutdown,” and others look to “stare down” Democrats. The fact of the matter is that in recent decades, so-called “shutdowns” rarely benefit the Party orchestrating them.

Forcing a shutdown over specific issues (even very important ones), such as spending on abortion or constructing a few more feet of a border wall, may reap short-term political gain, but likely will come with long-term political harm.

Historically, pushing the budgetary process to a stand-off with a president of the other political party rarely has demonstrably helped the party driving the process in the Congress; and then only if it is part of a coherent and consistent longer-term strategy.

The best example of this is in the late 1995-early 1996 budget showdown between the then-new GOP House majority led by Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton, who at the time was still licking his wounds after a historic shellacking in the 1994 mid-terms.

At the time, that three-week long “shutdown” was a public relations nightmare for the House GOP majority (I know, I was there as a freshman Member from Georgia). But the long-term benefit was historic.

The goal of the stand-off was not simply to pass a fiscal year budget or to force Clinton to accept as part of that budget bill a particular appropriations rider. Rather, the plan was to draw a bright line in the sand that told Clinton and the American electorate that the new Republican majority was serious about balancing the budget and putting the nation’s fiscal house back in order.

The strategy worked wonderfully, and by the middle of the very next year (1997) both the House and the Senate had passed, and Clinton had signed legislation that in fact balanced the federal budget for the first time in nearly three decades.

Contrast that strategically planned budget showdown with the much longer (at 34 days) December 2018-January 2019 stare-down between the Democrat-controlled House and Republican President Donald Trump. At the time, Trump was demanding funds for his preferred border and immigration policy initiatives. The resulting impasse was part of a tactical skirmish, not of a strategic plan.

In the end, the 2018-2019 shutdown, despite being the longest in our history, achieved little if anything of lasting importance for either political party or for the country.

Whether the American people will witness yet another “shutdown” this Fall (or next year even as voters will be casting early ballots in many states) remains uncertain. It is not clear if McCarthy will agree to even a partial omnibus “reconciliation” spending bill this year if there remain one or more of the dozen appropriations bills that could not win a majority of votes before the end of September. Whether the far-right Freedom Caucus insists absolutely that favored abortion or immigration limitations be included in certain of the spending measures also remains to be seen, but the signs already are indicating moves in that direction.

Becoming bogged down in a shutdown slugfest may please former President Trump cheering from the sidelines, but it would be a strategic blunder for the Party; signaling to the electorate beyond the GOP base that the current leadership lacks the strength and the vision to effectively govern, and perhaps even to be awarded a second, two-year term in the majority.

Governing is a serious game, and maintaining and projecting a clear and consistent strategy is far more important than any short-term tactical achievements. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions in recent years, the GOP seems not to understand that principle.

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

At least three of our military services – Army, Navy, and Air Force – are on track to miss their 2023 recruiting goals; not just by a little, but by many thousands. While these shortfalls pose a serious risk to our nation’s military readiness, the problems in our armed services go far deeper, and suggest serious issues with the type of individuals we are allowing to serve.

Calls to prioritize diversity in recruitment and promotions, including by the Air Force general President Biden is pushing for the post of his top military advisor are not helping, nor are the lingering aftereffects of forcing thousands of active duty personnel out of the services because they refused to take the COVID inoculation as mandated in 2021.

Broadly, the shortcomings in military recruitment and retention reflect a series of fundamental changes in our nation’s culture, with fewer and fewer recruitment-age young people growing up in households in which close relatives served in the military, and a recent dramatic decline in the percent of Americans who trust and have confidence in the military, now at a disconcerting 45%.

Addressing these myriad problems by lowering recruitment standards further, however, risks making some matters worse,. For example, the Pentagon apparently has been considering discarding or at least waiving a long-standing health barrier for entry into the military – individuals who suffer from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

In another potentially problematic maneuver designed to boost recruitment and retention, military leaders may decide that it is acceptable after all for active and reserve duty service members to use the Communist Chinese-controlled social media platform Tik Tok, overturning a ban on such use imposed by the Trump Administration.

Red flags abound, however, with regard to the security shortcomings in the quality of individuals — including civilian contractors as well as active duty and reserve military personnel — allowed access to sensitive information, locations, and activities.

Questionable practices in how the federal government protects national security information became front-page news in 2017 with the arrest of former National Security Agency contractor and Air Force veteran, Reality Winner, on espionage charges.

It was none other than former President Trump himself, however, who muddied the water about his own administration’s prosecution of Winner when he mused publicly in 2018 that her sentence after her guilty plea was “so unfair.” Such a signal emanating from the commander-in-chief makes it more difficult to pursue subsequent espionage prosecutions.

Winner now seems to have carved out a niche as an expert in her own right on the handling of national security materials, being interviewed last month by NBC News as a critic of Trump’s alleged mishandling of national security materials at his Mar-a-Lago hotel.

A more serious, and still unfolding case of mishandled national security materials and access thereto, is that involving Air National Guard reservist Jack Teixeira. The 21-year-old Massachusetts guardsman faces federal espionage charges for disclosing a massive amount of sensitive and classified national security and diplomatic material on social media. Despite obvious red flags in Teixeira’s background, he was allowed to serve as a Guardsman and afforded extensive access to highly classified materials with apparently little oversight.

Not surprisingly, and as with the Reality Winner case, Trump’s cavalier approach to national security classification procedures has surfaced in pleadings and statements by Teixeira’s attorneys, who are using the Mar-a-Lago case as a reason to have their client released pending his trial.

Troubling as are these cases involving the loose standards whereby the government recruits individuals to serve in the military and to be granted access to classified information, the most recent case of Army Private 2^nd Class Travis King, takes the cake in terms of questionable U.S. military recruitment and security criteria.

Private King had been stationed in South Korea. Local authorities arrested him on assault charges. He was being transferred back to the United States for discharge from the Army. Despite such circumstances, he was somehow able to join a group of tourists viewing the highly controlled border crossing at Panmunjom, and then run – laughing – into North Korea. Makes you wonder about not only his intelligence, but the Army’s lax security in such a sensitive area. Wonder, indeed.

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.

Slavery – a stain on our history by any reckoning – met its constitutional end in the late 1860s when the 13th and 14th Amendments to our Constitution were ratified. Additional constitutional amendments, in conjunction with numerous civil and criminal laws, especially those passed in the mid-20th Century, cemented the rights of African Americans into a meaningful legal system.

For advocates of race-based reparations, however, none of these corrective measures suffice; for them, taxpayers today must be forced to make monetary and other amends for the sins of their forebearers.

Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago with a population of  about 80,000 residents (and dealing with a sharp increase in crime), has put its taxpayers’ money where its political priorities lie, becoming the first municipality in the country to actually make cash payments to atone for past racial injustice in housing. The City in 2019 had earmarked $10 million for this project and recently began disbursing cash, with the first $25,000 payments going to 140 “elderly” residents.

Obviously in Evanston, atoning for sins of the past trumps concern for addressing problems of today.

New York City is moving slower but still aboard the reparations train. The Empire State’s legislature last month passed a bill creating a commission to study reparations for slavery (which ended in New York nearly two centuries ago, in 1827).

It is California, however, that has dived head-first into the racial reparations controversy. Late last month, the “California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” which was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom three years ago, sent the state legislature its “Final Report.”

If judged by its length alone, the Task Force’s report deserves an A+. It is well over 1,000 pages long, buttressed with hundreds upon hundreds of footnotes, and identifies just about every conceivable direct, indirect, or imagined aspect of racial discrimination.

The Final Report clearly is an extensive “look back” at harms to African Americans. It also “leans forward” in a big way into myriad ways to fix those injuries. As one writer noted, its list of remedies is so “far-reaching” they “have to be seen to be believed.”  Indeed.

Central to the Report’s call for numerous “reparatory” measures, is the “wealth gap” between African Americans and “other racial groups.” But the Report identifies and discusses many other “gaps,” including divergences in health, education, food, politics, environment, criminal law, entrepreneurship, and housing. Reparatory measures are recommended for each identified gap.

The Report’s formulaic solution for these racially imposed gaps, appears to be to calculate the percentage of African Americans who fall in an identified gap measured against the percent of African Americans in the state.

Thus, for example, as the above-cited writer notes, “child support” in the state has discriminated against African Americans because, “although African Americans are less than seven percent of California’s population, they represent around 18  percent of the parents who owe child support debt.” Ipso facto, legislation is needed “to eliminate interest on past-due child support and back child support debt.”

Predictably, the Report pans “barriers” to voting by African Americans, such as voter identification. It calls for a complete end to cash bail in criminal cases. To solve other perceived racial disparities in criminal law, the Report also recommends stopping “consent-only searches” by police. An even more dramatic recommendation, one that would lead to unfathomable chaos in California law enforcement, is to close prisons throughout the state.

The Report even recommends outlawing police procedures that already are illegal, such as “pre-textual traffic stops.”

Although in a way less serious than recommendations that would effectively dismantle California’s entire criminal justice system, but which still would be problematic, are the Report’s calls for mandatory “anti-racist” and “sensitivity” training programs, including in schools.

California students, for example, would be taught “cultural humility” in order to avoid even the slight chance that a student would inadvertently offend a fellow student who might be LGBTQ.

The many fanciful, but serious recommendations in this Reparations Task Force Report, as far-reaching as they are, still are not enough for some of the state’s Democrat lawmakers, who are now pushing a bill to force judges to explicitly factor race into sentencing. If this proposal is implemented, it would force judges to violate not only their oath of office but the Constitution of the United States. The nonsense is never ending.

Daily Caller

Privacy, or at least the yearning for privacy is a funny thing. When asked whether they support “privacy,” historically most individuals have said “sure.” In a recent survey, however, “security” trumped “privacy” among nearly 30% of Americans under the age of 30, who declared support for government surveillance inside households as a way to improve the security of those living within those homes.

That 3 in 10 group of young American adults may be the leading edge of an anti-privacy movement that clearly has taken hold in France, where that country’s parliament just passed legislation permitting police to not only access data contained in individuals’ electronic devices, but to turn on such devices in order to record conversations and videos without the knowledge or consent of the devices’ owners. French President Macron has signaled his approval of the privacy-invasive measure.

American Generation Z-ers would feel right at home visiting France.

Much has changed since 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was engaged in an extensive surveillance program gathering cell phone records on American citizens without warrants. At the time, according to a CBS News poll, “nearly 6 in 10 Americans said they disapproved” of the program.

What has not changed here in America, is the language of the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution, which broadly protects us from government surveillance of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” without a warrant, or at a bare minimum absent “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been committed. In fact, a seminal 2018 Supreme Court decision explicitly held that law enforcement could not access an individual’s cell phone records without first obtaining a search warrant.

Things are somewhat different in France.

As a member state of the European Union, French citizens do enjoy fairly broad protection for their private data in the hands of private companies, including social media.  Unfortunately for those same citizens, and unlike here in the United States, France does not have constitutionally enshrined protection for private personal information as against law enforcement agencies.

But in both countries, privacy is taking a beating at the hands of government, and here the Fourth Amendment has not appeared to slow the security juggernaut that prompts government agencies at all levels to constantly push for greater and greater access to information heretofore considered protected against such disclosure.

That thirst for information is being slaked in part by the millions of so-called “smart” devices installed voluntarily in Americans’ homes, most visibly by the prevalence of Amazon’s Ring Doorbell devices. Local law enforcement agencies eagerly and often gain access to data gathered by such seemingly innocuous devices, regardless of whether the homeowner desires to share such information (though many willingly grant police access to their cameras’ viewings).

It is, after  all – and of course, only – about criminal activity, so no one should worry about the data being abused by either law enforcement or the private companies that gather and actually own the data gathered. Right.

So it is in France, where the government is assuring citizens concerned about the scope of the new electronic device collection law, that the power will only be used sparingly and infrequently (the same arguments voiced by our government in 2001 when passing the USA PATRIOT Act). The language of the measure, however, belies such assurances, extending, as it does, to being able to access the devices’ monitoring capabilities not only for investigations of terrorism and organized crime, but also for individuals suspected of “delinquency.”

Closer to home, a number of major U.S. cities are now forcing private businesses to install surveillance devices at their businesses, at the owners’ expense, and to grant police access whenever they demand. Local governments in DeKalb County, Georgia in the Atlanta metropolitan area, and Houston, Texas are among cities making such demands on private businesses; demands that in years past would have been considered an intolerable overreach. In this age of heightened worry about crime, however, such breaches of privacy and property rights crumble.

As with so many liberty-reducing measures that make their way to our shores, they first take hold in Europe. As it was in 2010 when then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gushed over London’s then-newly installed traffic surveillance system, it likely will not be long before officials in U.S. cities and states will begin pressing to access individuals’ electronic devices’ cameras and microphones as “necessary” to prevent crime and terrorism. Mark my words.

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 more than a decade, China has been carefully and strategically making commercial, diplomatic, and even military inroads in Latin America and the Caribbean. Now, Beijing reportedly is building a military facility on the northern coast of Cuba, less than 100 miles from the United States. Our response has been less than impressive.

It is not as if Beijing’s multi-pronged strategy to increase its presence in the Western Hemisphere has escaped Washington’s attention. Even in the late 1990s, I and several other Members of Congress expressed concern that Chinese companies (all of which ultimately answer to the governing Chinese Communist Party) were establishing commercial beachheads at both entrances to the Panama Canal, just as Panama gained control of the strategic waterway pursuant to the treaty signed with the Carter Administration in 1977. Our concerns fell on deaf ears.

In 2018, a smiling President Xi Jinping was photographed next to Panama’s president, alongside the Panama Canal.

Chinese trade with countries in the region has soared in recent years, ballooning from $180 billion in 2002 to $450 billion last year. China’s investments have included everything from mining and agriculture projects to infrastructure and communications technology that has surveillance capabilities.

China’s diplomatic gains in the region have been no less significant, with Paraguay the only South American country that still recognizes Taiwan.

Even in the Bahamas, a one-hour flight from Miami, China’s presence is far larger than ours. Not coincidentally, the U.S. Navy maintains a major test and training facility in the Bahamas.

While there is little the United States can do to directly thwart China’s commercial and diplomatic moves in the region, our failure to articulate and maintain anything approaching a coherent strategic policy for the Western Hemisphere in the decades since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, has made it easy for China to make inroads.

Moreover, the relations Beijing has established in the area can negatively impact our interests.

For example, two years ago a U.S. Coast Guard cutter was refused permission to dock at a facility in Argentina. Argentina has been a long-time ally of the United States, but now maintains strong political and economic ties with China.

Of far more immediate concern than the lengthening list of Chinese economic and political moves throughout the region, is Beijing’s growing presence in Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the southernmost tip of Florida.

President Obama giddily reestablished relations with Cuba in 2015, but appears to have secured nothing in return that might have provided some assurances that our adversaries, including China and Iran, would not be permitted to use the island nation for their own nefarious purposes.

In a move that reportedly started in 2019 but which now appears to be gathering speed, China is constructing a military facility on Cuba’s northern coastline; one that reportedly incorporates training and intelligence gathering capabilities.

U.S. military leaders, especially Army General Laura Richardson who heads the U.S. Southern Command, appear clearly to understand the gravity of these Chinese moves. In remarks during her 2021 Senate confirmation hearings, Richardson echoed her predecessor’s concerns, in telling Senators that China’s plans in the region are “very sophisticated” and clearly are designed to project “sustain[ed] military power.”

Unfortunately, the red flags raised by our own military leaders do not appear to have had a discernible impact on congressional leaders or the White House in terms of articulating any meaningful policy initiatives.

The Biden Administration does little more than repeatedly express “concern” about China’s burgeoning influence in the area.

Although some Members of Congress have raised red flags over China’s surveillance capabilities in Cuba, on the broader level little is happening on Capitol Hill. The Senate, for example, has failed even to pass a bill (S.1519, the “Western Hemisphere Security Strategy Act of 2023”) that would simply direct the Departments of State and Defense to develop a “multi-year strategy” for our “diplomatic and security” policies in the hemisphere.

Meanwhile, the GOP-led select committee charged with examining strategic competition with China appears more concerned with narrow, partisan issues than with understanding and proposing measures to counter China’s aggressive moves in our own backyard.

Mention has been made recently about the “Monroe Doctrine” as a possible tool with which to address the problem. It will, however, take far more than a policy articulated in 1823 designed to thwart further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, to address the extremely serious threats now facing us in the region, especially from Communist China.

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

Last week the Supreme Court declared President Biden’s plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan repayments unconstitutional. The President’s  response was to immediately announce that his Administration would find a way to circumvent the decision —  thereby further undermining respect for our courts and the judges who serve in them.

Indeed, the previous day the President dismissed another ruling by the Court, this one on affirmative action, by disdainfully calling the Supreme Court of the United States “not a normal court” and impliedly unworthy of respect.

It was no surprise, then, that the President’s challenge to the Court’s decisions prompted calls for those who would have had their debts wiped out by his plan, to simply refuse to make further payments. Who can blame them?

Long gone are the days when political leaders would respond to a court ruling with which they disagreed by stating, “we disagree with the court’s decision but will of course abide by it.” Former Vice President Al Gore’s respectful acceptance of the December 2000 Supreme Court decision awarding the presidency to his rival George W. Bush, today would earn him the sobriquet of “wimp” by his Democrat colleagues.

This latest round of disparaging judges and courts generally did not start with the current administration. Former President Trump was well-known for attacking judges who issued opinions with which he disagreed during his term in office.

Few, however, have gone so far as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), when he threatened Associate Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name in 2020 at a pro-abortion rally on the steps of the Supreme Court.

It is noteworthy also that Biden’s most recent disdainful response to the Supreme Court mirrors the aftermath of last year’s Supreme Court Bruen decision, which struck down New York’s century-old Sullivan Law that had made it virtually impossible for New Yorkers to lawfully carry handguns for self-defense.

In that instance, it was not Biden but Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul who blasted the Court’s decision and immediately urged the state legislature to pass new legislation directly and purposefully undermining the Bruen decision(which it quickly did).

In both of those instances, high government officials signaled directly and openly that decisions by the highest court in the land are not to be afforded respect or deference. Not only that, but such decisions are fair targets to be undercut by executive and legislative action when the holdings are not in accord with the liberal philosophy of its critics.

It therefore should come as no surprise that outside groups — whether those advocating against repayment of student loan obligations, or gun control organizations urging states to circumvent court decisions supporting the Second Amendment — are fostering similar disrespect for the rule of law.

While some of the published criticisms directed to the Court’s June 30th student loan decision are founded on legal arguments, others have been visceral, even stupid, in their analysis. One Twitter user, for example, declared that the decision was part of a plan to “uneducate young people.”

There actually exists an anti-student loan repayment organization, “Student Loan Justice,” whose director opined long before last week’s court decision that contractual student loans “ha[d] become weaponized.” 

The silliness of such individual responses aside, having high government officials, from governors to Members of Congress and sitting presidents openly disparaging our federal courts seriously undermines confidence in not only the court system but the government as a whole, regardless of the partisan political lens through which such institutions might be viewed.

To be sure, criticism of the Supreme Court, even by presidents as esteemed as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, is nothing new over the course of our nation’s history. However, with trust in the High Court already at a disturbingly low ebb, attacks such as those by Biden, Schumer, and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) who declared it a “cesspool of corruption,” can be especially damaging to the public’s confidence in courts at all levels.

John Adams described the representative democracy he helped form as “a government of laws, and not of men.” If our political leaders fail to quickly reverse the trend of directly and openly undermining the courts and the judges who define the limits of those laws, our ongoing descent into systemic chaos will only accelerate.

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.