From the Desk of Bob Barr

Daily Caller

Calls for a national police force — a concept deeply in conflict with our very form of constitutional governance — are becoming, if not commonplace, more troublingly recurrent. Of particular concern is the idea that America needs such a force not to defend against widespread lawlessness, but rather to defend against the ideology reflected in what the Left describes as “MAGA.” The real target of this movement is in fact political conservatism.

A recent essay by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson published on April 21st as a “Big Idea” in Politico, strongly suggests such a move. The main title of the piece, “The Threat of Civil Breakdown Is Real,” might appear to the reader who reads no further, as a timely warning against rioting and other mass lawlessness our country has suffered in recent years, including the George Floyd-inspired riots that rocked major cities in 2020.

Not so.

The subtitle of the Politico essay —“National security officials are still not prepared for a far-right revolt” — makes clear the authors are worried solely about “right-wing” violence. They make no mention, much less express concern about violence-prone groups such as Antifa, Black Lives Matters, or  the eco-terrorists opposing construction of a police training center in Atlanta, Georgia.

On the other hand, the “Big Idea” is replete with what the authors perceive as the real threats our country faces:

• “hyperbolic reactions of far-right Republican figures and media commentators”
• “bellicose conservative agendas”
• “white supremacist groups”
• “far-right groups” generally
• “the MAGA movement”
• “Radicalized Republicans”
• “high-powered weapons like the AR-15s”
•  and, of course, “Trump” and “Trumpism”

The authors of this call to action lament that the United States, “unlike the United Kingdom …  has no nationwide government agency authorized and equipped to counter radicalization.” In this, they are correct, but it misses the point widely.  The government structure established by our Constitution, as secured by a bloody revolt against the tyranny of the English system, was designed explicitly not to be national in form or nature.

I do not know if either of the authors of Politico’s “Big Idea” are acquainted in any degree with the Federalist Papers authored in the late 1780s by such phenomenally learned men as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Had Politico’s pair of  21st Century academicians been thus familiar, they would understand that central to the government structure outlined in the Federalist Papers, is the principle that the universe of powers that can be exercised by governments rests not with the national government, but with those of the states.

Furthermore, as Madison eloquently describes in Federalist Nos. 45, 46, 49, and 51, the national government’s powers, unlike those of the states, are few and limited; nowhere is the notion of a national police force even hinted at, including as a “necessary and proper” power in Article I, Section 8.

Moreover, fresh from escaping a tyrannical British government that used soldiers as domestic police officers against American citizens, our Framers wanted no part of such a national force in the new United States (hence the Third Amendment).

Now, more than two centuries later (and after the first police “department” in the country was formed in 1838), we have nearly one million law enforcement officers and employees in communities in every state. Additionally, there are 90 federal agencies with law enforcement powers that employ nearly 137,000 law enforcement officers. The list of agencies with intelligence, investigative, and law enforcement powers goes on and on and on.

Simon and Stevenson, and their fellow travelers on the Left  who wish to expand federal law enforcement beyond its current vast reach, accurately note that coordination among all these hundreds of agencies at all levels is lacking. But the solution cannot seriously be to expand federal powers even further; revamping and reducing federal law enforcement would help greatly, but that’s a story for another day.

The ideologic lens through which the Left considers the problem of crime in 21st Century America, however, admits of no historic reality, and the partisan political blinders they wear allow them to see only the crimes they want to see.

The solution of a national police force for which they yearn would take us back to the future, to a place we rejected long ago, and which we must again if we are to preserve our Republic.

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

From the east coast to the Pacific Northwest, the past week once again confirmed that Democrat political leaders prefer to address the serious problem of gun crime in America as a political rather than a law enforcement and mental health problem.

In Washington state, Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law outlawing the sale of AR-style rifles. Inslee wrongly but sanctimoniously stated that such “weapons of war” have as their “only purpose” murdering people. Conveniently ignored by the Governor is the fact that the AR is the most popular rifle in the country, used regularly by millions of law-abiding citizens for competition, hunting, and self-defense.

In the nearby, and also Democrat-led state of Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis lamented that he was not yet legislatively empowered to outlaw the same rifle, but pompously declared that by forcing citizens in the state to wait three days before being permitted to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to purchase a firearm, he was making it “safe” for them to go to the grocery store.

Last week also, on Capitol Hill testimony by the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) made clear that today’s ATF remains more concerned with finding ways to limit the lawful ownership of firearms and accessories, than in meeting its avowed mission “to protect communities from violent criminals, criminal organizations, [and] acts of terrorism.”

For example, during his April 26th appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, ATF Director Steve Dettlebach was asked how the agency intended in the future to enforce the agency’s new, self-dictated regulation on so-called arm or “stabilizing” braces, which as of May 31st will become illegal to possess. Such questions made perfect sense considering that ATF had previously and quite publicly flip-flopped when asked whether attaching a brace to a pistol transformed it into a regulated “short barrel rifle.”

Pistol stabilizing braces had been developed in 2012 primarily to help disabled shooters fire a pistol accurately with one arm. When ATF was asked whether the pistols thus outfitted would be considered by the government to still be lawful to possess without a federal permit, ATF said they would be considered pistols and not short-barrel rifles.

Notwithstanding this record of inconsistency and the failure to articulate any meaningful reason why a stabilizing brace has suddenly been deemed so dangerous as to outlaw, the Biden Administration now has made it a priority to criminalize the mere possession of such a pistol; and Dettlebach refused to provide clarity as to exactly how it will enforce such a confusing edict.

Nearly 200 Members of Congress have lent their name as cosponsors to a measure, H. J. Res. 44, that would prevent the ATF’s self-made rule on stabilizing pistol braces from taking effect, but the Biden Administration remains committed to doing everything it can through executive actions including ATF rulemaking, to limit the ability of law-abiding citizens, including disabled veterans, to own and use firearms.

ATF, and its parent agency the U.S. Department of Justice, has employed regulatory legerdemain in other recent moves to limit firearms accessories. In 2019, for example, when the Congress failed to pass legislation making “bump stocks” illegal, rule makers at ATF simply revised the definition of a “machine gun” to include a bump stock (which is a piece of molded plastic polymer). That clever, but ridiculous maneuver was struck down in January by a federal appeals court; a ruling the Biden Administration is appealing.

ATF has existed in some form since the late 19th Century, and in fact counts many highly trained firearms experts among its personnel and who can, and do assist law enforcement agencies at all levels in solving many serious crimes involving guns. The agency’s ballistics and firearms identification technology is cutting-edge.

However, when ATF allows itself to be used as a vehicle to further political agendas targeting exercise of Americans’ Second Amendment rights, it loses the confidence of the American people and the firearms industry it regulates.

Similarly, if Blue-State governors such as Inslee and Polis focused on improving law enforcement and mental health facilities in their states, rather than restricting the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, communities in those and other states would be far safer.

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

Daily Caller

The battle over whether, how, and when to raise the national debt ceiling rages on Capitol Hill and at the White House. While political leaders tussle over the “Big Picture” balance between debt and spending, we must ensure that none of the key elements of our defense budget suffer collateral damage in the confusion.

Considering today’s threatening global environment in which we are sending billions of dollars in military munitions to Ukraine in a proxy war with Russia, and as we face an increasing bellicose China in regions from the Taiwan Strait to west Africa, it is more important than ever that no key components of our defense strategy be overlooked or short-changed.

The ongoing and complex budget/debt battle creates the “perfect storm” in which defense doves and special interest groups might be able to chip away at certain defense programs. They must not be allowed to succeed, especially when it comes to such often overlooked factors as military logistics and supply lines.

While last week’s proposal by Speaker McCarthy to link debt ceiling relief to cuts in several of Biden’s favored spending programs will never be supported in toto by Democrats, budget cuts or caps for some programs may yet emerge as a price those on the other side of the aisle may be willing to accept in return for the overarching goal of increasing the debt ceiling. This is where the details matter.

Mid-air refueling capability for our fleet of aircraft  rarely makes the evening news. Without it, however, combat readiness and effective warfighting capability come to a standstill, especially in the vast Pacific theater across which the United States and China face each other.

A battle already is brewing within the Air Force, and between competing major defense contractors, including Boeing and the European Union’s Airbus. Here is where Republican negotiators must be especially sensitive to and focused on ensuring that there is no gap in the development of a needed, next generation refueling aircraft.

This tanker dispute is not something new. A dozen years ago, Boeing’s KC-46 “Pegasus” refueling tanker/transport won a contract to produce some 56 of the planes, to replace the venerable but aging KC-135 “Stratotankers” also built by Boeing. In an exceptionally rare finding, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined in 2019 that the KC-46 program, while not perfect, was proceeding under cost.

Notwithstanding this benefit to American taxpayers, Boeing’s proposal to build the follow-on, next generation refueler, known as the “KC-Z,” has been met with pushback by European-based Airbus and some of its cheerleaders in the U.S. Congress and our own defense industry.

The “LMXT” tanker is designed by Airbus, in which France is a major partner and is an aircraft manufacturer with a significant commercial relationship with China.

Aside from these important political factors against outsourcing development and production of our next generation refueling tanker aircraft, there are other significant, practical reasons to stay with domestic producer Boeing.

For one thing, while the proposed LMXT is larger than Boeing’s proposed KC-Z, that size comes with significant drawbacks, including the inability to land on many shorter military runways that often are found in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Also of concern is the LMXT’s higher fuel consumption than the Boeing transport, and the fact that its larger footprint means fewer planes of any sort can be maintained on many airfields across the globe.

As a stopgap measure, some in the military acquisition sector are recommending that a temporary “bridge” tanker be built while the long-term decision is made to go with either the American-produced KC-Z or the European Union-based LMXT. Such a move would be costly and time-consuming, just when time truly is of the essence to make sure the United States is fully able to meet current and expected threats from China in far-flung regions across vast distances.

As Air Force Military Command chief General Mike Minihan has stated, the KC-46A currently meets all military needs and Air Force requirements for all aircraft in our nation’s inventory and in all theaters of operation. Building on it to build the next generation of tanker/transports rather than shifting to an entirely new and unproven, European-based tanker platform, is unnecessary and costly.

In a conflict with a major adversary, especially China, such delays and operational shortcomings could prove detrimental, if not disastrous.

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

A report on criminal law published last month by the International Commission of Jurists in collaboration with the United Nations, could easily serve as a handbook for the looting, filth, and general lawlessness now infecting many U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

Typical of virtually every report drafted by the United Nations and related international organizations, this one was long in the drafting, taking a full five years to compose. Also, like other U.N.-created reports, it has a ridiculously long and convoluted title:  The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty. A shorter and more accurate title would be How To Destroy Civil Society By Abandoning the Rule of Law.

Central to the Report’s thesis is the notion that a society’s criminal laws must in every instance yield to and be secondary to “human rights.” In this approach, no criminal law should be permitted to “restrict the exercise of any human right” unless such a law is itself “consistent with other rights recognized under international human rights law.” To cement this circular thesis, the Report declares that if there might ever arise any question about the reach of a country’s criminal law, it must never be construed “to an accused person’s disadvantage.”

To further undercut any legal system that might still employ a criminal code, the Report asserts that “international law” trumps any system of “domestic law,” which would include, for example, our Constitution. And, borrowing a phrase employed often by liberals here in the United States to justify whatever “rights” they desire to paint with a constitutional patina, this latest U.N.-endorsed Report declares that the human rights code on which it is based must be considered a “living document.”

If the reader can wend his or her way through the repetitive declarations about the evils of criminal laws and the primacy of international “human rights,” they still have to seek the assistance of a dictionary to discern the meaning of such words and phrases as “heteronormative,” “non-exploitative surrogacy,” and “non-derogable,” inserted to disguise the Report’s vacuity.

However, if the reader does emerge au courant from the Report’s initial 13 “Principles of Criminal Law,”  he or she quickly discovers why the Report is likely in the future to be found on the desks of the many woke, George Soros-supported district attorneys and their compatriot mayors, such as those in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, who coddle rather than punish lawbreakers.

The remaining eight “principles” in the Report are a laundry list of public policies designed to ensure a filthy and crime-ridden – but “equitable” –environment such as we are seeing infect many Democrat-led cities today. For example:

• “Custodial sentences” (jail) is to be used only “as a measure of  last resort.”

• Abortion, or, as the Report terms the practice, “pregnancy loss,” must not be limited to any degree.

•  “Consensual sex” cannot be criminalized, regardless of the age of the participants because an individual “below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent” who engages in some form of sex, might in fact “be consensual.” In such a libertine society, pederasty would be considered a “human right” and therefore beyond the reach of domestic criminal law.

• There would be no drug laws, even for minors under the age of 18.

• Prostitution, pimping, and houses of prostitution likewise could not be criminalized or restricted.

• Finally, if the above-enumerated “principles” and listing of legally permissible activities were insufficient to obliterate any remaining semblance of civil society, the international “jurists” authoring this Report conclude that no activity undertaken by an individual out of necessity could be prohibited, including panhandling, sleeping or bathing in public, or “urinating and defecating” in public places – all examples of protected “human rights.”

The society thus emerging would be filthy, chaotic, dangerous, and lawless .  .  .  come to think of it, a bit like today’s San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.

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

Growing up in such far-flung locations as Baghdad, Iraq, Lima, Peru, and Tehran, Iran, did not present me and my five siblings with what might be considered a typical, traditional childhood. We overcame the challenges with which we had to cope in those varied environments by employing skills learned from our parents.

Probably the most valuable tool in that oft-changing journey was the fact that we were permitted a great deal of freedom and flexibility within which to take risks, exercise judgment, experiment, make mistakes, and eventually, learn; all steps taken long before the advent of the internet and social media.

The political environments in which I grew from a third-grader at the only American school in Baghdad in the late 1950s to a senior in an international school in Tehran a decade later, were such that neither Muslim extremism nor violent drug cartels were factors with which we had to deal. Since then, of course, such dangers present themselves in ways that cannot be ignored for Americans living or raising families in many of the countries in which I roamed as a teenager.

However, the fundamental skills with which my parents armed me and which allowed me to not only survive but thrive in such diverse settings, are those that still today should be among the most basic that parents should be affording their children. Teaching children to gain, understand, and use knowledge equips them with the power to assess situations they face, assume and assess risks, make reasoned judgments, and undertake courses of conduct that will, more often than not, allow them to mature and achieve success as adults.

Unfortunately, in a culture now fixated on “non-traditional” lifestyles, regulatory edicts, and the internet world of social media groups, blogs, and “answers” for everything from potty training to drug abuse, parenting appears to have diminished significantly in quality, and with it the parameters for happy childhood severely circumscribed.

Parents, for example, are being investigated as child abusers or charged with unlawful neglect for doing nothing more than allowing their grade school children to walk home from school. Ph.D.-level counselors are recommending that white parents teach their toddler children about “white privilege.”

In this environment, is it any wonder that, according to a recent analysis by Caitlin Gibson in the Washington Post, the fun of a sleepover at a friend’s home has become a stressful and multi-faceted decision-making process for parents; one that often results in shielding the kids from such a “dangerous” activity?  According to Gibson, there is even a hashtag, #NoSleepovers, along with “influencers” aplenty and online groups to help guide fearful parents through the decision-making process.

Parents so demonstrably afraid as to afford their children even that small degree of fun and freedom of spending a night at a friend’s home, or to trick-or-treat after dark without being directly monitored by their parents, robs the youngsters of some of the simple but important joys of being a child. Moreover, with parents so unsure of themselves that they have to consult online blogs and “influencers” before being able to even make such decisions about their kids, it indeed is no wonder that we have children growing into young adults who are themselves so fearful of the world around them they are hesitant to even apply for a driver’s license.

In the internet-driven world of today’s millennial parents, virtually everything is fodder for a Tweet or other social media posting, from “gender-reveal” parties before the baby is born, to posting an online picture of a toddler’s “first poop.”

Parents look to the internet for guidance prior to every meaningful decision on how to rear their children. Many of those same children turn to the internet for their interaction with the “outside” world. Every perceived “milestone” is posted to the world on Facebook or another social media platform. This concoction has led one researcher at the University of Michigan to express concern that our children are growing up with “multiple identities.”

Rather than turn to a well-qualified source such as Dr. Benjamin Spock for general guidance, parents today turn to the internet for instructions from internet “influencers.” At the same time they are paying less attention to what their children are actually doing, thereby increasing the possibility that another Audrey Hale or Connor Sturgeon will arise to commit another horrible act, as each did within just the last month in Nashville and Louisville.

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

America clearly is in the throes of a cultural campaign for transgender rights, privileges, and immunities. It is a multi-faceted movement at once entertaining and dangerous.

The handwriting was on the wall six years ago, when the August 2017 National Geographic cover depicted a transgendered child and devoted its contents to the “Gender Revolution.” Now, in early 2023, we have Dylan Mulvaney, a well-known transgender “influencer,” as the new face of corporate giants Nike and Anheuser Busch. Soon we may see Mulvaney grace the cover of Popular Mechanics.

When that same biological male – Dylan Mulvaney – is hawking not only Bud Light and sports bras but Tampax tampons, the question legitimately needs to be asked, “just what is going on here?”

It is not only major corporations, including Nike, Proctor & Gamble, and Anheuser Busch that have jumped aboard the transgender bandwagon. Universities and now, the federal government and the judiciary are all in.

Just last week, President Biden decreed that any education institution receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars (which is most every school in the country) cannot stop biological males who “identify” as female from competing against biological females. Even the Supreme Court seems to be intimidated — refusing to consider putting the brake on the practice even after state legislation declares it unfair.

While videos of Dylan Mulvaney prancing around in a Nike bra or guzzling Bud Light in a bathtub full of soapsuds may seem comical on its face, with the feds now waiting in the wings to sue schools that consider it unfair for biological men to compete against biological women, the transgender glorification movement truly has transitioned into high gear.

The cultural shift, especially in corporate marketing, has been nothing short of seismic.

Where once Jack Daniels whiskey was presented as a sophisticated spirit, with ads depicting entertainment icon Frank Sinatra, the Tennessee-made alcoholic beverage now is branded by drag queens, in a timid genuflect to the LGBTQ+ movement.

Wheaties, the “Breakfast of Champions,” has been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution as an iconic American brand for its nearly century-long practice of placing pictures of outstanding athletes on its boxes, from baseball greats Lou Gehrig and Hank Aaron to Olympic gold medalists Mary Lou Retton and Allyson Felix.

The cereal, however, has been under pressure for several years to have transgendered athlete Chris Mosier grace one of its orange-themed boxes. The fact that General Mills, the cereal’s manufacturer, has resisted taking such a step for so long is surprising, but the company’s hesitancy likely will not last much longer considering the momentum behind the LGBTQ+ juggernaut.

One of the strangest kowtows to the LGBTQ+ campaign has been Hershey’s chocolate. During WWII, Hershey’s was one of a number of products that became closely identified with the American armed forces, especially the Army GI. Eight decades later, the universally recognized brown Hershey’s milk chocolate candy bar wrapper markets itself as a  “HER-SHE’s” treat and advertises yet another biological male transgendered to female.

Not only are biological men who claim to be female allowed to compete against biological women in various sports from swimming to power lifting, they are being hailed as “Women of the Year” in other fields, including by such formerly mainstream and respected publications as USA Today.

With “Drag Queen Story Hours” being pushed on the youngest of school children, with the president and vice president of the United States gushing over Dylan Mulvaney, and with top-level corporate executives like Bud Light’s Alissa Heinerscheid extolling the Mulvaney ad campaign as the “future,” the transgender circus obviously has not yet run its course. But it will.

Signs of discord are already showing, with some of Mulvaney’s fellow transgender influencers considering him a “grifter.”

Sooner or later, the fun will end and violence will set in. In fact, it already has.

Although all the writings of transgendered 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who late last month murdered six victims at the Covenant School in Memphis, have not yet been made public, evidence suggests the hate in her heart centered on transgenderism. A “Trans Day of Vengeance” was scheduled right after Hale’s rampage.

Last week, female swimmer Riley Gaines was violently assaulted at San Francisco State University for daring to speak about the unfairness of male athletes competing against females.

The dark underbelly of the transgender movement is now emerging.

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

It takes just two words to drive liberals to their corner and conservatives to theirs: “Second Amendment.” The mere mention will send liberals into conniptions and conservatives into code red defense mode. Lost in this repetitive exercise is any opportunity to solve a serious problem facing 21st Century America – young people so alienated and detached from any moral or ethical moorings that murdering young school children presents itself as appropriate behavior.

The problem is not that we as a society are bereft of solutions. The problem is that a partisan political curtain descends whenever there is a mass shooting, effectively blocking us from taking meaningful steps to reduce the chance for a recurrence of such tragedy.

A recent opinion piece by C. Joshua Villines, a certified threat manager and a board member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, addresses the problem and suggests realistic solutions, without ever using the words “gun control” or “Second Amendment.”

His recent essay, “We know how to prevent school violence [by] Adopting research-based, established procedures [that] can mitigate risk,” focuses not on partisan or political policies, but instead on the existing body of research about the “risks for a person to commit an act of targeted violence” and the known “strategies that can mitigate that risk.”

Villines correctly notes that those who commit acts of “targeted violence” do so in ways that by and large are predictable, and that we know “from decades of work” the risk factors that can help us identify potential shooters. If followed, this process can lessen the chances that those factors will play themselves out in tragedies such as that which occurred last month at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The federal government has itself conducted significant and valuable research on these matters, much of which is publicly available in publications, including the FBI’s Making Prevention a Reality: Identifying, Assessing, and Managing the Threat of Targeted Attacks.

Despite having such resources readily available, following the most recent targeted school shooting at Covenant School, all President Biden did was to push his political proposal to “ban assault weapons.”

It has become a false hope that this or a future administration will shift from repeating partisan talking points to a meaningful focus on the body of knowledge we already have accumulated, and which is available right now to identify risk factors for mass shooters and to implement plans to mitigate those dangers.

Experts like Villines urge that rather than repetitive calls for “gun control,” political leaders should be taking steps to ensure that schools at all levels implement and keep updated actual plans for assessing their vulnerability to known and likely risks, including a coordinated Threat Assessment and Management Team (TAMT).

These procedures are not new. They have been recommended by the U.S. government ever since the Columbine shooting more than a generation ago. To be effective, however, these threat assessment plans cannot be left to gather dust on the shelves of police agencies or school administrators.

Every parent of every student, whether their child is in first grade or college, should acquaint themselves with such studies and recommendations, and demand they be implemented. It may be a sad reflection on our culture that parents need to make such inquiries along with acquainting themselves with reading lists and proposed curriculums, but it has become an essential component of responsible parenting.

Demands for “gun control” will do nothing to help in identifying the next potential shooter. Insisting on “Second Amendment rights” — as vital as this is to any policy debate about gun control — will not help to identify “perpetrators of targeted violence” in advance of such awful actions.

Parents themselves need as well to assume far more responsibility for, and awareness of the lives of their children than did those of the hate-filled 28-year old transgender living at her parent’s home before she murdered six individuals at Covenant School.

And finally, when a governor, such as Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee does the right thing in proposing to fund measures significantly strengthening school safety, he should receive broad bipartisan support from state legislators, and not be targeted by political opponents as an excuse to engage in raucous, partisan exhortations that accomplishes nothing except to further polarize an already deeply divisive issue.

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 Supreme Court has agreed to decide a case that, if at least five justices render a majority opinion based on common sense and a reasoned interpretation of federal law, will stop an abusive practice that for three decades has cost businesses and consumers untold millions, if not billions of dollars.

The law at the heart of the lawsuit (Acheson Hotels v. Deborah Laufer) is the 1990 “Americans With Disabilities Act,” commonly known as  “ADA.” The case itself arose in Maine, but the Court’s decision will have significant effects across the entire country.

ADA is a perfect example of a federal law with insufficient guardrails to prevent abuses, allowing lawsuits against businesses for even very minor technical violations, such as the height of a counter in a restaurant’s bathroom, then forcing businesses to defend themselves in court even if they desired to fix the problems without litigation.

Consequently, there has arisen over the past three decades a “cottage industry” of ADA “testers.” q

These “testers” hire lawyers to file lawsuits against businesses, usually small businesses, hoping – actually planning – that they will settle rather than engage in lengthy and costly litigation.

Often, the individuals threatening or actually filing these lawsuits have not suffered any actual harm, but rely on alleged technical violations of the ADA’s language and detailed implementing regulations. (In one noteworthy case, a tester sued a “pedicure station” at a spa in New York City for an alleged ADA shortcoming, even though the “victim” had no feet.)

Because of this costly pattern of ADA abuse, the “ADA Notification Act” was introduced in the House of Representatives in 2000 simply to require that before a person can sue a business for a violation of the ADA, they must first give the business notice and allow 90 days within which to remedy the defect and avoid litigation.

Clint Eastwood, who in 2000 owned the Mission Ranch Hotel in Carmel, California, testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee (on which I served at the time), urging support for this limited and reasonable amendment to the ADA. The famous actor testified how he and other similar business owners were being unfairly targeted by ADA testers.

Notwithstanding that the proposed amendment would in no way diminish the substance of the ADA, but would have simply required notice and opportunity to correct alleged defects, the Congress failed to act.

As a result of that congressional timidity, this well-known pattern of ADA abuse has continued for 23 more years, forcing many small businesses to succumb to what is in effect legal blackmail – a practice may finally come to a well-deserved end if the High Court decides the Laufer case in favor of the small hotel in Maine.

As the hotel’s lawyers note in their petition to the Supreme Court, the facts of their case present an “ideal vehicle” by which to correct this longstanding and costly pattern of ADA abuse. Indeed it does.

The plaintiff in the case, Deborah Laufer, is wheelchair-bound and lives not in Maine but in Florida. She admittedly had no intention of visiting Maine, much less staying at the hotel she is suing, and had suffered no injury. No injury, that is, other than what she claimed were “downstream consequences” of “humiliation and frustration” solely because the hotel’s website failed to adequately describe that its rooms and cottages were ADA compliant as required by federal regulations.

You cannot make this stuff up.

In pressing her case, Laufer openly admitted she is a prolific professional ADA tester, who has filed more than 600 such cases in the past five years, including seven on the very same day in September 2020 that she targeted Acheson.

The federal trial court saw through Laufer’s charade, and dismissed her lawsuit for lack of standing. The Court of Appeals reversed the lower court, concluding that Laufer indeed suffered “sufficient stigmatic [and] informational injury” by virtue of the sole fact that the hotel’s website at the time did not adequately inform her whether it was fully ADA compliant.

If a Supreme Court majority fails to reverse this case, it will have enshrined one of the most blatant, costly, and, indeed, idiotic patterns of abuse of any federal law, and in so doing will open the floodgates for immense further abuse.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh Congressional 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 Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

Inflation has hit the corporate extortion market, for sure. Recent studies estimate that corporate America has been shamed into spending between $83 and $340 billion on various racial causes including Black Lives Matter (BLM) and related entities since the massive (“mostly peaceful”) riots protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020. BLM has made Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who reigned supreme as kings of the corporate shakedown movement from the 1980s into the early 2000s, look like amateurs.

In its analysis of the BLM shakedown record, the Claremont Institute for the American Way of Life, compiled a lengthy and well-documented database of more than 400 companies that have made pledges and contributions to numerous entities and causes favored, if not demanded by BLM. The list is quite interesting in what it reveals about the spending priorities of major U.S. corporations and other organizations. For example:

• The three major sports associations – the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and the National Football League — together anted up $700 million. No wonder ticket prices to attend their events are so expensive.
• Insurance companies are among the biggest spenders, with New York Life Insurance alone spending $1 billion, and Northwestern Mutual and State Farm each throwing in a cool $100 million.
• Uber, a company that has yet to turn a profit, is down for $61.0 million.
• Not surprisingly, Starbucks coffee is in the elite category of billion-plus pledgers, with more than $1.6 billion thrown into the pot.
• Tik Tok, much in the news these days, pledged $4.0 million to the cause.
• Silicon Valley Bank, which just enjoyed a taxpayer-funded bailout and is in the process of being bought by other banks, dedicated a whopping $70,650,000 to the BLM cause.
• Wayfair, also a company having trouble making ends meet, has gifted $30 million.
• Peloton Interactive, which has suffered a series of financial hits in recent years, nonetheless found $20.5 million lying around to donate.
• Another company appearing on recent lists of financially troubled corporations, Bed Bath & Beyond, nonetheless decided to donate $1.0 million.
• While the usual liberal suspects, such as Silicon Valley tech companies, media giants, and social media darlings are in the billion dollar-plus range, even “smaller” companies considered far less liberal in their corporate culture, appear on the shakedown list. This includes companies such as Chick-fil-A ($6.2 million), Caterpillar ($1.0 million), and AFLAC ($25.0 million). Even Tractor Supply slipped in $125,000. These illustrate the power of the racial guilt movement spearheaded by BLM.
• Banks, ever sensitive to charges of “racial redlining” and other indictments by government and non-government entities as well, appear throughout the list, with JP Morgan Chase & Co. kicking in more than $30 billion and Bank of America devoting some $18 billion of its depositors’ and investors’ monies to the cause.
• Major defense contractors are not absent from the list, with Boeing weighing in at a robust $15.6 million and Northrop Grumman a relatively paltry $2.0 million.
• The country’s two largest soft drink producers, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, of course are on the list, but surprisingly the latter has pledged ten times as much as its Atlanta-based rival — $400 million vs. $40 million.
• One of the country’s most dyed-in-the-wool liberal organizations – Planned Parenthood – got off lightly by tossing in a mere $160,000.

Unlike the earlier phase of the corporate shakedown movement, focused largely if not solely on racial “equity,” and led in the 1990s and early 2000s by the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, today’s operatives have many more arrows in their quiver. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) compiles and publishes annually a “Corporate Equality Index” to rate corporations on a range of criteria, including LGBTQ factors.

Shaking down corporations has itself become Big Business. Organizations like BLM and its earlier and smaller cousin, the Rainbow Coalition, obviously have found it is much easier to make massive sums of money in this way than the more traditional route of hard work and producing a product in the competitive marketplace. In this regard, racial shakedown players reflect what a recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found: today only 14% of Americans value hard work. Clearly, BLM is not part of that 14%.

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

Townhall

In a stunning, but not altogether surprising statement, America’s top Navy official declared that “fighting climate change” is a “top priority” for the U.S. Navy. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced this last week not at the Pentagon or the U.S. Naval Academy, but at a conference in the Bahamas.

It is likely that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting this week in Moscow to discuss closer military cooperation, shared a high five on hearing the Navy Secretary’s declaration.

Del Toro’s admission that strengthening America’s dwindling fleet of naval ships is no higher a priority than is “embracing climate-focused technologies” was not totally unexpected.

Since taking office two years ago, President Biden repeatedly has stated that “fighting climate change” is and will remain his top national security priority. This was made crystal clear in an October 2021 presidential “Fact Sheet” directed to our nation’s military, foreign policy, and national intelligence leaders.

Rather than resist such a priority directive, the Navy Secretary joined other top Defense officials and saluted their Commander-in-Chief’s warped policy decision; one that will further weaken our country’s defenses. Making matters worse, Biden’s latest defense budget submission to the Congress proposes a 40 percent increase in “climate spending” and a net decrease in the number of operational ships in our Navy’s fleet, continuing a troubling trend highlighted in the Administration’s FY 2023 budget proposal.

Such cuts reflect what one military expert refers to as “seablindness” — a short-sighted policy accounting for America’s shrinking dominance of the world’s oceans, a strength on which we and the entire Free World have relied since World War II.

In an insightful analysis just published in The Atlantic (“The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over”), former Navy officer Jerry Hendrix chronicles the many shortcomings in our country’s civilian and naval shipbuilding capabilities, even as Russia and China aggressively continue to expand theirs.

In one striking example, Hendrix notes that Russia maintains a robust fleet of Arctic ships and has been moving in the direction of unilaterally declaring parts of the Arctic Ocean within its territorial waters, while the U.S. “has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s.”

Also questionable is our capability to quickly or timely build needed ships, considering the small number of U.S. shipyards capable of constructing such massive and complex vessels (as Hendrix notes, there remain only one dozen such “graving docks” certified to build or work on Navy ships).

Elsewhere, China has embarked on a massive, multi-year expansion of its Navy and is asserting claims to large swaths of the East and South China Seas.

Currently, neither of our two adversaries’ navies come near to matching our overall naval capabilities, especially when it comes to our premier warship the aircraft carrier. But our failure to expand, much less retain, a commitment to domestic maritime and naval shipbuilding, has created a long-term weakness in being able to protect oceanic trade routes on which we and almost all other nations increasingly rely.

Budget cuts by the current and prior administrations of both political parties, especially the Clinton administration, purposefully reduced the number of defense contractors able to build modern naval vessels, and policies have favored development and modernization of air power over naval power. The resulting slippage in the number of operational naval vessels in our fleet, now down to 293, imperils our ability to project power in the decades ahead and also to maintain the freedom of the oceans for commercial purposes.

One facet of naval power in which the United States maintains a clear advantage over every other maritime power is in the number of foreign bases and port facilities available to our ships; but even here, China is moving to close that gap. While China has a long way to go in this regard, it is aggressively expanding its reach on the west coast of Africa, and continues to use its “civilian” shipping company, Cosco, to build and operate container port facilities in areas long allied with the United States, including Israel, western Europe, and South and Central America.

If the United States continues the folly of focusing on “climate change” rather than taking concrete short and long-term steps to counter Chinese and Russian moves to assert sea power interests adverse to ours, we and the entire Free World will pay a heavy price in the decades ahead.

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.