From the Desk of Bob Barr

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.

Townhall

Governments love to tax. It matters little if it is your local county commission looking to raise the millage rate on property taxes, or the federal government searching for new ways to tax income pursuant to the authority granted it by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution – the default for government is to increase revenue.

There may, however, be a bit of light at the end of the tax tunnel.

Predictably, of course, the Biden Administration and its cohorts on Capitol Hill and in lobbyist offices on the K Street Corridor remain adamantly opposed to any talk of tax “cuts.”

The cautious optimism many experts see on the tax horizon, is thanks to the reality that Republicans maintain majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and in state governorships and legislatures. Tax policies that are supportive of both families and businesses are reasons why states including my home state of Georgia attract jobs, while high-tax states such as California are losing both people and businesses.

Even at the international level, where President Biden two years ago embraced a G-7 plan for a global minimum tax of 15%, recent pushback by the GOP-controlled House has thrown a monkey wrench into Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s plan to move the United States closer to that competition-killing policy.

Few public policy issues define more clearly the divide between Democrats and Republicans than taxes, and thankfully the GOP by and large remains the party that understands if you reduce the tax burdens on individuals and on businesses that create jobs, sufficient funds will still flow into government coffers with which to provide essential services. Democrats, on the other hand, consider tax-cuts such as those implemented by former President Trump and which now are being implemented at the state level by many “Red State” governors, to be inherently “regressive” — a “worrisome trend” symptomatic of a “fever” that must be broken before it does more harm to the citizenry.

The degree to which Biden’s party abhors tax cuts was displayed starkly in 2021 when Senate Democrats included a provision in the President’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that actually would have prohibited states from cutting taxes if they accepted funds made available through the Plan. This absurd restriction finally was struck down by the federal appellate courts early this year, but it serves to illustrate just how far Democrats will go in their drive to keep taxes high.

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam is being hoisted on his own petard. By pushing consumers to buy electric vehicles rather than gas-powered cars and trucks, fuel tax revenues have dropped noticeably. This has caused Biden and several states to turn their greedy eyes at taxing vehicles based on miles driven rather than the amount of gas purchased at the pump.

Biden’s predilection for a gas mileage tax was evident in his 2022 infrastructure spending bill, which included $125 million for a pilot program. As gas tax revenues diminish, the lure of increased taxes that could be reaped by way of a mileage tax is becoming ever more desirable

Speaking of taxes, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case in its 2023-24 term that may determine whether it is constitutionally permissible for the IRS to continue taxing unrealized gains on investments. In other words, whether the government can force an individual to pay taxes on income based solely on profits earned by a company in which an individual has invested but never themself received any income.

A professor at Chapman University has noted that this tax case, which will test the limits of the federal government’s 16th Amendment power to tax income, is the most important to be decided by the High Court in a century.

If the Supreme Court in fact places such a common sense limit on the reach of the government’s power to tax income; if the House continues to resist opening new tax avenues for the executive branch, such as taxing corporations by way of a global minimum tax; and if Red State governors continue to reduce state income taxes, that faint light at the end of the tax tunnel could grow considerably brighter by the time next year’s elections arrive.

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

Daily Caller

In 1959, a young screenwriter named Rod Serling created what would become one of the 20th Century’s most iconic television series. “The Twilight Zone” has become so much a part of our culture that contemporary dictionaries include the term “twilight zone” as a defined noun, meaning “an area just beyond ordinary legal and ethical limits.”

Considering recent cultural changes, America’s political system quite easily can fit within that very definition, insofar as “ordinary legal and ethical limits” seem no longer to apply.

In one of the most recent examples of this phenomenon, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, declared something that historically, ethically, and legally would in the past have been considered laughable — erasing official actions taken previously by the Congress of the United States.

Townhall

The ubiquitous term “smart device” often is employed without seriously considering the implications of devices that are, in the context of the Internet of Things, “a wired or wireless context-aware electronic device capable of performing autonomous computing and connecting to other devices for data exchange,” with the key phrases being “autonomous” and “connecting.”

Writing his dystopian novel, 1984 nearly 75 years ago, George Orwell could only dream of such technology. Today, however, governments and companies that make and use “smart” devices, fully understand the power of such technology and eagerly embrace its use by individuals in the real world.

First, there are companies that develop, manufacture, sell, and maintain “smart” devices – everything from “smart” phones to “smart” homes and numerous “linked” devices inside the dwellings. There is now a market for wearable, “smart” clothes.

There are the tech companies that develop the software that enables the “smart” devices to communicate with the owners and users, with other “smart” devices, and most importantly, with the really “smart” people associated with companies that monitor the myriad devices.

Then there are the government entities with wide-ranging interests in “smart” devices. This universe includes federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, from the FBI and 50 state bureaus of investigation to thousands of county and municipal police and sheriffs offices across the country.

Beyond all those law enforcement agencies keenly interested in having access to such “smart” information to assist in preventing and solving crimes, there are agencies with interests in the devices for reasons other than law enforcement; interests that relate to such goals as reducing energy or water usage or changing consumer habits.

All these entities – from the FBI to the Atlanta Police Department (which maintains one of the largest and most pervasive camera surveillance systems in the country), and from Amazon  to Bosch and other major companies involved in the “smart” manufacturing market – share one thing in common: the unquenchable thirst for data.

It is that drive for information harvested from “smart” devices that runs headlong against the privacy rights of Americans. Here is where the contradiction between privacy concerns and convenience manifests itself. While a significant majority of Americans – as high as 84% in a recent survey – express some level of “concern” about the privacy of their personal data, the market for information-hungry “smart” devices controlled by third parties keeps expanding.

Convenience and fear of crime drive much of the civilian market for “smart” devices, and there perhaps is no better example of this than the exploding market for “smart” doorbells, such the Amazon-owned Ring devices. It is that fear of crime and the yearning for a sense of security that appears clearly to be driving the sale of Ring doorbells; a policy that has for the past several years been reinforced by law enforcement agencies that encourage homeowners to install “smart” doorbells and allow police to have access to the information they gather.

It is that sense of fear that overrides individuals’ privacy concerns that might otherwise augur against installing such devices in one’s home.

Few Ring customers are likely to be familiar with the company’s poor record for protecting the security of users’ data, a history that precipitated the filing of a lawsuit against the company by the Federal Trade Commission last month. Even fewer customers would likely have any awareness that the doorbell camera company maintained an apparently unsecured manufacturing company in Ukraine, known as “Ring Ukraine.”

Despite problems of hacking, company misuse of customers’ supposedly private data, and sharing of private data with innumerable police agencies, sales of “smart” doorbells and other devices continues to climb.

Interestingly in this regard — and as a perfect example of what Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein has described as “the dumbest generation” — a recent poll shows that nearly 30% of Americans under the age of 30 would have no problem with the government directly surveilling the interior of their homes with “smart” devices.

All things considered, it truly should surprise no customer of such devices when a device and the company that monitors them, decides to punish a user by shutting down all their “smart” devices, even if the vindictive action is premised on a mistake. After all, every one of those “smart” devices is made, monitored, and ultimately controlled not by the “smart” customer, but by other , far “smarter” persons and entities whose interests may not coincide with the customer’s.

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

Daily Caller

By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles.

—“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley (1932)

“’Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. ‘It’s what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love.’”

— Harriet de Wit, quoted in “How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist,” by Rachel Nuwer, BBC (June 14, 2023)

Some things don’t change, as they say. So it is with attempts to alter human behavior. For millennia, people of various cultures and for various reasons — some good, some evil — have experimented with ways to alter human perception and behavior as a way to improve society. This was the premise of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, published in 1932 and which described a society uniformly and purposefully addicted to and controlled by the drug “soma.”

Now, almost a century later, there still are those trying to accomplish what Huxley wrote about as fiction.

A recent study conducted by Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Harriet de Wit at the University of Chicago used not the fictitious soma but a real drug — MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – in a study to determine its usefulness for increasing the “pleasantness of social touch.”

MDMA has been around for quite some time, having been discovered early in the 20th Century by German chemists for possible pharmaceutical purposes. Decades later, the CIA conducted experiments with the drug, known commonly as “Molly” or “Ecstasy” rather than its lengthy scientific name. The experiments were part of the Agency’s notorious, top secret “MK-Ultra” program to discover the limits of humans to withstand torture and other forms of pressure.

After the CIA’s program became public knowledge in the 1970s, and knowing the serious and potentially fatal side effects of the drug, the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985 placed MDMA on the list of Controlled Substances, with criminal penalties for its unprescribed possession or use.

As with many activities prohibited by the government, declaring MDMA a Schedule I Controlled Substances did not diminish its attractiveness for individuals desiring the “high” it offers. Since the 1990s, ecstasy has remained a drug of choice for many young people and celebrities, especially at “raves” featuring loud, electronic music and crowds of dancers. Users crave the sense of euphoria it provides, along with the burst of energy it brings.

While the drug appears to have some therapeutic potential for those suffering PTSD and other serious anxiety disorders, the federal government has not yet downgraded MDMA from a Schedule I Controlled Substance, largely because of its many serious side effects, which includes hallucinations, distorted perception, memory loss, impaired ability to engage in motor skills such as driving a vehicle, and potentially fatally high body temperature.

The 2020 study of MDMA’s effects on social behavior by Prof. de Wit is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the optimism recently expressed by BBC author Rachel Nuwer when she wrote about it and interviewed one individual who had volunteered to take the drug as part of the study.

The individual, identified only as “Brendan,” came to the study as an avowed white nationalist and left it as someone who reportedly now sees the world not through a racial lens but through the eyes of “love” as “the most important thing.” As related in her account of de Wit’s work, Brendan’s perceived world morphed into one where he had “connection” with everyone, including even the Antifa activist who had previously outed him and caused him to lose his job.

While author Nuwer admits that the example of Brendan’s conversion from white nationalist to flower child does not establish our readiness for the government to begin the mass distribution of MDMA as with soma in Brave New World, she seems clearly to hope this is the direction in which the studies by de Wit and others take us.

Nuwer and de Wit correctly lament the absence of qualities such as “compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation” in today’s society. The absence of these attributes, however, reflects deep, negative changes in our culture, and cannot be resuscitated by soma, MDMA, or any other mind-altering drug; thinking otherwise would seem to be a side effect of viewing the world through a soma lens.

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.