Liberty Updates

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Magic acts have always been a popular draw in Las Vegas. These days, however, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could take their $5 Trillion Disappearing Budget Act show on the road, and give David Copperfield a real run for his money.

With one sleight of hand, these congressional charlatans can turn a $5 trillion budget to $3.5 trillion, and in the next wave of the political wand, make it disappear altogether.

We’ve come a long way downward from the late 1990s, when national leaders like then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and then-President Bill Clinton (not yet severely wounded by impeachment), could negotiate and pass through both parties’ membership in the Congress, a federal budget that actually was balanced. No black magic; only facts and transparency.

Today’s Congress under the leadership of the Democrat Party in both houses, has proven itself utterly unwilling or incapable of such effort, which explains their latest magic act. And, as magic acts go, it is certainly one for the ages.

There is no rabbit in this magician’s hat; just massive, historically high spending that will saddle future generations with the bill for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Rather than treating the public with enough respect to be honest about the true cost of their plans, Democrats instead are gaslighting Americans into believing it costs nothing at all.

President Joe Biden took to Twitter over the weekend to boast how his plan “costs zero dollars,” while House Budget Committee member Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D) ballyhooed the “zero-dollar” narrative to The Hill.

This, of course, is a flat-out lie, and an absurd one at that. Even the “lesser” $3.5 trillion estimate is a deliberate fabrication. In July, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated the true cost of Democrats’ plan to be between $5.0 and $5.5 trillion. When spending at this level, missing the mark by more than $1 trillion is not some innocent calculating mistake. It is an intentional effort to hide the truth from taxpayers, who are the ones on the hook for the final tab regardless of what Democrats promise.

The Wall Street Journal detailed some of the budget shenanigans used to cloud the real price tag. This legerdemain includes phasing-in future costs years down the road, so they are not fully factored into the bill’s 10-year estimate; it also shifts long-term costs onto states and off the federal tab. It is no wonder the WSJ called Biden’s plan “one of the greatest fiscal cons in history.”

Do Democrats they really believe Americans are so stupid as to buy this nonsense? The most disturbing aspect of this charade is that, yes, Democrats are counting on exactly that.

They believe Americans will overlook the difference between what normal people know as “cost” – that is, how much a person pays for something – and how Democrats are defining it here, as nothing more than the amount added to the national debt; in other words, no real “cost” to be concerned about.

In the real world, a $100 item at the store is not suddenly “free” if you find $100 on the ground; there is still a cost to the person who lost the $100. Democrat talking points identify this “someone else” as the “rich” and corporations (not including, of course, those corporations that contribute huge sums to help Democrats stay in power).

Also in the real world, all taxpayers – not just the “one percent” – will be tapped to pay for this boondoggle. Contrary to Democrats’ belief, you can “tax the rich” only so far before the principle of diminishing returns kicks in, and spiraling costs will require an illusory ever-expanding tax base to support them.

This is not a 10-year commitment either. History all but guarantees these programs will morph into permanent fixtures of federal policy, known as “entitlements.” As more funding is needed, Democrats will become ever more aggressive in finding new revenue streams.

What Americans must start asking, since the media will not, is if Democrats are so transparently dishonest about what is on the surface of their proposal, what is hiding in the details? We already fell once for Democrats’ “pass it so you can find out what’s in it” ploy. The cost of being fooled once again could very well wind up permanently wrecking our country’s economy.

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 Bob Barr

On Nov. 3, exactly one year from last year’s presidential election, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on a landmark Second Amendment case challenging New York’s century-old law making it next-to impossible for the average citizen to obtain a permit to lawfully possess a handgun outside their home.

To no one’s real surprise, the Biden administration last week filed a brief urging the High Court to dismiss the challenge to New York’s restrictive handgun law. What is interesting are the absurd, bordering on laughable, arguments the Biden Department of Justice makes in support of its position.

If one were to take the administration’s legal brief as historically correct, one would conclude that the United States is a nation founded on firearms restrictions rather than firearms freedom. Moreover, the Justice Department lawyers declare that New York’s highly prohibitory handgun permitting law is “most modest”!

To this Justice Department, giving state bureaucrats near-absolute power to decide whether a law-abiding citizen may exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to possess a handgun for self-defense “fits comfortably” within what the Department considers the long “history and tradition” of government regulation of weaponry, going all the way back to at least 1285. That was the year, according to our Justice Department, when the British Parliament prohibited Englishmen from “wandering” around London after curfew carrying swords or other arms “for doing mischief.”

British royals prohibiting the carrying of weaponry, as cited by Biden’s legal eagles, include King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and others. With a pedigree such as these rulers preventing their subjects from carrying “little short handguns” and “pocket daggers,” it would be easy to consider New York’s restrictions “modest.”

Seemingly lost on Biden’s team of crack attorneys, is the historic fact that citizens in these United States are not and never have been “subjects” such as those in historic England, and none of these rulers in the country from which we fought for, and achieved, independence, had to contend with the inconvenience of a constitutional guarantee of the right to possess a firearm.

Both New York state and New York City are breeding grounds for ultra-liberal mayors and governors with a lust for controlling citizens’ lives (a predisposition on full display over the past year-and-a-half of the COVID pandemic). To them, and to the Biden administration, placing into the hands of government officials the near-absolute power to decide whether to grant a citizen permission to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home is not only “modest” but downright beneficent.

To be sure, the New York criminal law does not absolutely ban the issuance of a handgun permit for a citizen’s self-defense. The state is too clever for that. Instead, the law dictates that a citizen may be granted such a carry permit if he or she convinces the issuing official that they have “an actual and articulable …  need for self-defense.” This vague and arbitrary burden on the free exercise of a constitutionally guaranteed right is seen by the state of New York and Biden’s Justice Department as entirely proper and “modest,” despite presenting a demonstrably near-insurmountable legal obstacle to overcome.

In furtherance of its support for New York’s restrictive handgun law, the Justice Department lawyers argue accurately that guns carried in public “can be used for murder, rape, robbery, assault, and more.” In fact, criminals do just that regularly in New York City especially. What does not follow, by logic, reason, or history, is that restricting the ability of law-abiding citizens to possess handguns outside their home to protect themselves against those very sorts of crimes, is a “reasonable” restriction on the Second Amendment.

In virtually every other constitutional context, permitting bureaucrats to exercise arbitrary and capricious power such as officials in New York (and several other states) now possess under this challenged law, would be deemed unconstitutional on its face.

It may have been considered perfectly okay for Henry VIII to arbitrarily and capriciously deny his subjects the ability to protect themselves in public, but not the governor of New York or the President of the United States. Hopefully a majority of Supreme Court Justices will make that point when it renders a decision in this case next year.

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

by Bob Barr

As Charles Dickens wrote many years ago, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Oh, how true it is today, as we watch Western culture crumble around us — toddlers being forcefully removed from airplanes for not wearing a mask, as Hollywood celebrities and socialist U.S. Representatives gleefully hobnob without such encumbrances. A time when a California mayor decries the “fun police” even as real police crack the skulls of those commoners who defy her mask orders.

To label this the age of foolishness would be a gross understatement.

Americans already were close to a boiling point over vexatious COVID mandates and rules, but last week’s flagrant parading of Leftist Elites’ disdain for the same rules may turn out to be the final straw. When caught violating her own rules, San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s response was precisely what you would expect of someone not only oblivious to her hypocrisy, but resentful of being publicly outed for it.

People are tired of being told to “follow the science” or “do our part,” when such diktat clearly serves as a smokescreen for policies that directly contradict the science, or to protect elites who have no interest in sharing the burden with the rest of us. Then again, as I wrote recently, it was never about science or sacrifice for Democrats. They have their pandemic, and we have ours, each with its set of very distinct — and very different — rules.

It is and always has been about control, and it is hardly a new phenomenon.

Hollywood elites have long lectured us about global warming all while jet setting across the globe in private planes, because their “busy schedules” leave them so little time for standing in line at TSA airport checkpoints. Marxist Black Lives Matter leaders buy million-dollar homes, because “they’ve earned it.” And it has become clear that “#MeToo #BelieveHer” applies, unless of course, the perp is an influential Democrat. The list goes on and on.

In an ironic twist, the scourge of COVID has made this hypocrisy impossible to ignore, as the consequences were no longer in the abstract, but instead are very real and very personal. It is not easy to shrug off losing one’s job because of COVID shutdowns, or to be ejected from an airplane because a child fails to understand how wearing a mask makes all of us “safe,” as Democrat politicians carry on without having to themselves abide by such inconveniences.

Democrats deserve scrutiny of the cruelty of their hypocrisy – and cruel it certainly is – but the more important story is what this behavior belies about the true nature of how Democrats view power, and the people subjected to it. If Democrats operate in one world, immune to the effects of their actions, how can they possibly represent the interests of those they serve in the other world? The answer is, they cannot.

Remember last year when the social justice marches turned into a broader “Defund the Police” movement, then championed by Democrats at all levels? Turns out that defunding the police has abysmal support among Democrats in general, and with black voters specifically. One reason for this disparity is that elitist Democrats, when not living on Twitter where anti-cop rhetoric wins them praise and notoriety, live in gated communities with private security; meanwhile, inner-city minorities who live in communities ravaged by drugs, gangs, and crime know there is but a thin blue line holding back the violence from their doorstep.

The same is true for the Second Amendment, which because of Democrats’ regulatory schemes with costly and time-intensive requirements, has become a privilege of the rich and near-rich, increasingly out of reach for many in the working class. The same can be said for education.

When Democrat politicians forced school closures last year because of COVID, rich Democrats could afford private alternatives and childcare, while working-class parents gave up jobs to stay home with kids (who were forced to sit in front of a computer screen for hours at a time pretending to “distance learn”).

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be able to tell herself that wearing an expensive dress emblazoned with “tax the rich” (designed, ironically, by a company with its own tax problems) is some sort of performance art disparaging the system. The reality is, however, that AOC is the system; a system with rules enacted by political elites and reinforced by the cultural elites, neither of whom are subject to the realities their policies create.

If this sounds familiar, it is because this is how every anarchist, socialist, and Communist system ended; with the elite living in luxury, while citizens eat their pets to stay alive. As history and those who objectively recount it tell us, sooner or later things will change.

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 Bob Barr

Recently disclosed actions by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley highlight a serious fraying of the civilian-military structure at the very core of our constitutional republic and also reveal a deep public misunderstanding of that relationship. Combined, these factors pose a danger the likes of which the country has not witnessed in modern times, if ever.

Our Constitution on this point is crystal clear. There is one commander-in-chief, and that person is the President of the United States. The decision to place the elected civilian leader of our country at the apex of the country’s armed forces was purposeful as a means of protecting the citizenry and the states from an overly-powerful national army that could undermine the constitutional order the Framers had so carefully constructed. Without this safeguard, the Constitution likely would not have been ratified in 1788.

Notwithstanding this constitutional clarity on military matters, inter-service rivalries and bureaucratic shenanigans have cropped up throughout our history. In modern times, these practical problems led Congress to pass two major reorganizations of the military command structure.

The first of these was the National Security Act of 1947, which clarified the chain of command from the president on down by establishing the Department of Defense headed by a cabinet-level Secretary.

Then, in 1986 to address problems that hampered the conduct of the Vietnam conflict, and serious inter-service rivalries thereafter, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. This law further clarified the lines of authority for military decision making, and made absolutely clear that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no operational control or command over any military units or individuals. His responsibility is advisory only — to the president, the secretary of defense and the National Security Council.

Any action by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to make or direct operational, military decisions is directly contrary to the law; in a word, unlawful.

Yet, to Milley and those who support him, which apparently includes Democrat leaders on Capitol Hill, many major journalists and even President Biden himself, these legal restrictions are trumped by their partisan hatred of Donald Trump. Thus, in the days immediately preceding the November 3, 2020 election, and continuing through Biden’s inauguration the following January, Milley took it upon himself to brazenly violate Article II of the Constitution, the National Security Act, the Goldwater-Nichols Act and his own oath of office.

Just days before the 2020 election, reflecting his personal concerns that President Trump’s behavior might cause China’s military to respond adversely, Milley apparently called his counterpart at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to assure him that he – Milley – would make sure no such actions by the United States took place.

Subsequently, according to published accounts that Milley has not denied, in early January he directed that subordinate officers (over who Milley has no lawful command authority) inform him if they became aware of any orders with which Milley might disagree that concerned nuclear weapons decisions by Trump, presumably so he could countermand them.

By thus placing himself directly between the president and the Secretary of Defense, which is the person to whom the president issues operational commands as commander-in-chief, Gen. Milley was acting unlawfully.

Milley has not expanded on these allegations, beyond suggesting they were approved by the Secretary of Defense (which they were not) and that they reflected historical precedent (which they do not). Milley is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill next week, but severe damage to the constitutional fabric of our country already has resulted.

In the immediate aftermath of these startling revelations, Biden not only declined to fire Milley, but actually expressed “confidence” in him.

A president who exhibits so little regard for the constitutional authority of the office he holds, not only demeans and undercuts his own presidency, but by his actions encourage further and possibly even more dangerous erosion of presidential authority by military leaders who may harbor policy disagreements with Biden’s successors. Journalists who deem such gross insubordination as practiced by Milley to be acceptable because it was predicated on action against Trump, exacerbate the constitutional divide.

Milley and Biden have opened a can of constitutional worms that truly will plague future presidents of both major political parties.

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

by Bob Barr

Always lurking inside gargantuan pieces of legislation like the $3.5 trillion spending bill President Biden wants congressional Democrats to send to him, are dangers far worse than the dollar price tag. Such bills invariably include measures that give to government powers it neither deserves nor to which it is entitled, and which wind up costing citizens dearly in loss of privacy and other freedoms.

Currently, it is the IRS salivating at the thought of gaining even greater power than it already enjoys to snoop into taxpayers’ private financial records. If in fact the tax agency gets what Biden wants to give it, the IRS will have before it any individual’s financial accounts with gross inflows and outflows of more than $600 (that’s just six hundred dollars, not six thousand).

The federal government’s power to monitor financial transactions is already vast, but apparently not enough for the folks at the IRS.

Thanks to Uncle Sam’s half-century old War on Drugs, and its junior partner, the 20-year-old War on Terror, the Treasury Department, of which IRS is a part, has the power already to monitor virtually all cash transactions of $10,000 or more. Moreover, if an individual tries to evade such reporting requirements by breaking the total amount into smaller packages, that is itself a federal felony (called “structuring”).

Figuring out whether a taxpayer has crossed the line from lawful financial activities to illegal financial transactions like “structuring,” however, has been difficult for the IRS.

Americans for Tax Reform, a non-partisan, Washington, D.C.-based non-profit discovered that only eight percent of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division’s investigations into allegations of structuring uncovered actual violations of federal tax law. ATR’s research also revealed that this pitiful rate of return on investigative resources was because investigators simply “had not considered reasonable explanations” for the activities by those it targeted, leading the watchdog group to conclude that most investigations were “merely IRS-CI fishing expeditions.”

These financial transaction laws and accompanying regulations easily can become snares for the unwary, and there are numerous reported cases in which individuals and small business owners have found themselves on the wrong end of a federal felony prosecution for failing to be fully aware of the complexities of the laws.

One of the simplest ways for Uncle Sam to snoop on citizens’ banking transactions is the notorious “Suspicious Activity Report” (SAR). The Bank Secrecy Act mandates that employees at banks, credit unions, and even car financing companies, file such a report with the federal government for any transaction by one of its customers, if it appears “unusual” or out of the ordinary. The SAR is to be filed in every such instance, even if there is no evidence the transaction is illegal; only that it “might signal criminal activity” to the teller or other bank employee.

Biden now reportedly wants to make it even easier for the IRS to monitor individuals’ financial dealings by requiring financial institutions report any accounts where transactions over the year total more than a paltry $600, without further justification.

That many Democrats in Congress appear ready to grant such power to the IRS tells us how far the Party has diverged from its roots of protecting individuals from abusive government snooping. Republicans who would acquiesce to this provision will be confirming they remain blind to individual privacy in the face of government claims to be “making us safer.”

This move expanding the power of the IRS to gain access at will to virtually every bank account in America, may be justified by Biden and Democrats as necessary to access monies hidden in accounts the government wants to seize, and by so doing, help pay for the multi-trillion-dollar spending bill. This is an argument that cannot honestly be made with a straight face, but also one that rarely causes Democrats to hesitate spending the money anyway.

A more accurate, if unspoken reason some Democrats would support expanding the snooping powers of the IRS, is that it would facilitate uncovering details about financial accounts held by political enemies.

Intense pushback from Republicans may be enough to keep this proposal from the final markup of the budget as it goes through the reconciliation process; however, if this IRS-backed provision actually makes it to Biden’s desk, where he surely would sign it, one of the very last vestiges of financial privacy heretofore enjoyed by Americans, will have been swept aside by the stroke of a president’s pen.

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 Bob Barr

If ever there was a federal agency supposed to be nonpartisan and apolitical, it would be the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), established in 1934 and with a current budget of nearly $370 million and more than 3,000 employees. During its existence, the Archives has been overseen by four presidentially appointed acting and ten Senate-confirmed archivists, many of whom served under successive presidents of both major political parties, reflecting the nonpartisan nature of its work.

No more.

The current Archivist of the United States is David Ferriero, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. Under his leadership, this once-apolitical entity designated to preserve the vital historic documents and exhibits of the United States has become a flashpoint for the same left-wing, racism-based ideology now coursing throughout the Biden administration.

The prime catalyst for this ideological crusade by President Joe Biden was Executive Order 13985, the very first order he issued on his very first day in office. The document declared that systemic racism permeates the entire federal government, and directed every Executive Branch agency to develop a plan to address it.

Some five months prior, however, in September 2020, Ferriero on his own had directed that a 35-member “Internal Task Force on Racism,” comprised mostly of Archives employees, would advance a plan to identify evidence of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy” that he apparently believes undergirds not only the work of the National Archives, but the “vast majority of institutions in the United States.” The Task Force was directed also to recommend ways to address current and future racism. Ferriero’s group accomplished this mission with a vengeance, as detailed in a 105-page report presented internally in April, released this Summer, and which recommendations now are being implemented.

The bizarre findings of this Archives Task Force included declaring that the magnificent paintings adorning the main floor of the Capitol Rotunda are deeply problematic and require “reimagining” because, as now presented, they “laud wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], women, and other communities.”

Even more disturbing, however, are the numerous findings and recommendations of the Task Force on Racism relating to the National Archives Catalog. The Catalog is the vast digital compendium of millions of documents and other materials which the agency is charged by law with protecting; it is how citizens and non-citizens access and view our nation’s important records.

The Catalog includes such founding documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Task Force found that “[r]acism is embedded in the history and current practices of NARA .  .  .  at every level,” and that “white supremacy is present in all American institutions and culture.” It therefore concluded that steps must be undertaken to ensure that current and future customers of this treasury of historical material be given fair warning of such dangers by use of mechanisms such as “content” and “trigger warnings,” along with “removable covers for sensitive content.”

Recommendations for future steps to ensure Archives Catalog items are to be viewed only through the racial lenses employed by Ferriero and his Task Force, include a state-of-the-art “find-and-replace feature” so that replacement or additional appropriate language could be inserted.

These practices constitute censorship by camouflage.

The truly Orwellian nature of this project, however, is perhaps best illustrated in Appendix VII where, among other things, the authors “recommend addressing not only harmful language that is present in the Catalog, but also the language that is not there.” You cannot make this nonsense up; it is there in actual printed words.

The insidious nature of this project lies in the fact that by declaring our founding documents and exhibits to be systemically racist and reflective of white supremacy, and by placing explicit and directive “warnings” impliedly probative of such perceived content, the Archivist and his Task Force obviously — and intentionally — are reaffirming their opinion that America is and always has been a systemically racist society.

What they are doing is deplorable and is an affront to our nation’s history and culture.

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

by Bob Barr

New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana of which the city is a part, does not have a global warming problem. It has a political-cultural problem that not only resists progress, but appears to revel in doing so. The state is captive to a crony political system that has changed little since the days of Huey Long in the 1930s.

Now, after Hurricane Ida’s visit, federal taxpayers once again will be on the hook for the Pelican State’s failure to prepare.

If Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was supposed to have been a wakeup call for the Crescent City, its leaders refused to answer the phone. On August 29, Hurricane Ida ripped past the city, taking out critical electrical grid infrastructure that plunged the entire city into darkness (some areas remain without electricity even now).

Despite having failed repeatedly over the years to upgrade their power system to standards beyond those of the 1970s, government officials and energy company representatives continue to blame the “unforeseeable” ferocity of the storm for the extensive damage it caused to the power grid.

In New Orleans, “unforeseeable” means “eyes closed.”

Louisiana’s deplorable infrastructure is neither a time issue, nor a money one. The same officials responsible for lagging infrastructure upgrades will be the first lining up to beg Uncle Sam for billions in taxpayer relief. Of course, this plea is more like a strong-arm ransom. Presidents and members of Congress know that refusing, or even hesitating to open the federal checkbook will incur calls of racism (as happened during the Katrina relief effort 15 years before). Billions will be spent; billions will disappear; and, history will repeat itself.

Not surprisingly, New Orleans played a pivotal role in the federal government initially assuming responsibility for natural disasters many decades ago. The federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi delta region, was the first time significant federal resources were expended for a specific geographic area recovering from a serious natural disaster.

Prior to the 1927 flood, costs of disaster recovery and other assistance was seen primarily as the responsibility of those affected, charitable organizations, and local governments. Grover Cleveland best summarized this approach when vetoing a federal relief bill in 1887, saying the “friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune,” while warning “federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government.” Prescience, indeed.

What incentive is there for New Orleans to expedite infrastructure improvements when federal taxpayers can be tapped year after year for rebuilding but without demanding verifiable modernization in return?

Also hampering New Orleans’ recovery is a broader sentiment among global warming-minded Leftists that focuses exclusively on the future, and what can be done to change it, as opposed to the more difficult task of fixing the present. It is far easier to sit back on one’s self-proclaimed laurels and bark about global warming being the cause of New Orleans’ disaster loop, as doing so shifts blame to external actors and “global efforts for change,” over which they have no control.

For lazy and corrupt government officials, this cop-out provides the perfect cover to respond to the consequences of their incompetence. After all, when you blame Mother Nature, there is no rebuttal to defend against.

This has been the strategy employed by state and local officials for the last 15 years. However, as any visitor to New Orleans knows, the stench of garbage and sewage, and the painful visages of poverty are a constant presence in the French Quarter and elsewhere, not the temporary inconvenience of another disruptive disaster.

Such unpleasantries reflect the perpetual incompetence and corruption of a government that wrings its hands and surrenders to whatever comes next, instead of actually preparing for it. So long as federal dollars keep feeding this delusion of colorful grit and decay, residents, visitors, and taxpayers alike will be forced to continue filling the coffers of a corrupt system.

The expensive aftermath after Hurricane Ida is certain to illustrate once again the political system described to me by a fellow United States Attorney in the late 1980s — a system where “people don’t just expect corruption on the part of their elected officials, they demand it.” In the Big Easy, it comes rolling back in.

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 Bob Barr

After causing Americans to suffer whiplash over the past year and a half with conflicting and at times openly contradictory statements on how to deal with COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), seems now to have shifted focus to issues that more easily fit within the overarching themes driving the Biden-Harris administration: Racism, guns and climate change.

Not coincidentally, for an agency that urges everyone except itself to “follow the science,” there is far less need to do so when pontificating on racism, guns and the climate, because there really is no “science” involved.

In April, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared that “racism is a serious public health threat” that has become an “epidemic impacting public health.” As overseer of the 13,000 employees at CDC, Walensky directed that every component of the agency, which has been headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia since its founding 75 years ago, must consider racism as a top priority.

In late August, Walensky explained in a CNN interview that “preventing gun violence and gun deaths” has shot to the top tier of priorities at the CDC, which has been chomping at the bit to jump back into the “gun violence” business after having been prevented from using taxpayer money to do so since the late 1990s.

As for climate change, or the climate crisis as this administration has now rebranded the issue, the creation of a new “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” within the Department of health and Human Services, of which CDC is a part, will provide many new avenues for Dr. Walensky and her cohorts to save the world.

The executive order that prompted the establishment of this particular new bureaucracy was one of the many President Joe Biden issued during his first days in the White House. The 21-page “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” called on virtually every federal department and top-level presidential adviser, including CDC’s parent agency, Health and Human Services, to tackle climate crisis-related issues. These offices were also directed to address the amorphous problems of “environmental injustice” and “equity.”

These tasks alone are sufficient to keep HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Walensky busy for the remainder of Biden’s term, notwithstanding that none of it has anything to do with disease control and prevention, which happens to define the jurisdiction of CDC since it was established in 1946 to direct the fight to eradicate malaria, which at the time was rampant in the southeastern United States.

Going off on such a tangent, however, never has given CDC pause to expand its mission to include all manner of non-disease problems. It is, indeed, the poster child as an example of “mission creep,” notwithstanding it has not always been successful in taking on new issues outside its defined jurisdiction.

Late last month, for example, the Supreme Court shot down the eviction moratorium mandate that CDC had been pressing.

Also, the agency’s previous, repeated moves to involve itself in the highly political subject of gun control led the Congress in 1996 to slap the agency’s hands and declare that none of its appropriated funds could be used for such activities. The ban was partially lifted in 2019, which paved the way for congressional Democrats to now start pouring millions into CDC’s budget so it could once again engage in “gun violence prevention.” Dr. Walensky has enthusiastically embraced this windfall.

Shortly after taking the reins at CDC, Walensky identified all three of these issues – racism, gun violence and climate change — as top priorities for her tenure as America’s “Top Doc.” She has not disappointed her supporters.

In her Aug. 27 interview with CNN, Walensky offered as justification for pulling CDC directly into the ongoing and highly political gun violence policy debate, the fact that she “swore to the president and to this country” to protect our health. Seems she has already forgotten the oath she took upon becoming CDC director was actually to the Constitution and laws of the United States, not to Biden.

Pledging allegiance to Biden, however, makes it easier to justify engaging in activities and policies bearing little, if any, relationship to the Constitution or the legal jurisdiction of the CDC.

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

by Bob Barr

Gender unicorns. “Social justice” physics. Math and reading skills deemed no longer necessary. College grads multiple thousands of dollars in debt but unemployable in the marketplace. America’s once world-class education system is crumbling around us, rotting from within.

Measured by money spent, our education system should be working magnificently. At more than $14,000 per student, the U.S. spends the fifth-most of any country in the world educating children, in a highly managed system overseen by officials from local school boards to the presidential cabinet.

Despite all this – actually because of it – the return on our investment in education has never been worse.

Decades ago, liberals realized educational institutions were a crucial tool by which to push their radical agenda into American culture; first covertly, but now openly, even proudly. The result is a system far less concerned with the actual, objective education of students, than with consolidating power by the adults who oversee it. Students suffer, but teachers’ unions, public school officials, bureaucrats at all levels of government, and well-funded special interest groups gain ever greater control.

Students barely able to read and write are being taught about gender unicorns. White students are demeaned as being “racist” simply for being white. All the while, students are being emotionally scarred and taught to be afraid of everything around them, thanks to masking mandates, social distancing, plexiglass barriers, and constant “active shooter” drills.

Sadly, private schools are not immune to these destructive shenanigans. As John Sailer writes at City Journal, plans by a Washington, D.C. private school for “anti-racist” education  includes “discussions of social justice such as kneeling during the national anthem, Title IX, and paying college athletes while learning about concepts such as Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

Linking physics to the social justice movement would be laughable, were it not part and parcel of the Left’s scheme to destroy rational thinking and replace it with mind-numbing groupthink.

This problem has been simmering for years, as far back as the late 1960s, but it is only recently that parents, students, and citizen groups have awakened fully to what two generations of indoctrination fueled by trillions in taxpayer spending has wrought. Government mandates directed at schools and students as justified by the COVID pandemic, suddenly have exposed the evil scheme by those in control of education.

This revelation sparked by governments’ COVID mandates, has been aided by the way in which the education elite has openly and aggressively pushed its “woke” agenda in the classroom.

In a sense (and thankfully), the Left’s own hubris and its irresistible urge to overreach, has put its insidious agenda at risk.

Whereas the push of Common Core a decade ago began to stoke the ire of parents, today’s onslaught of progressive politics disguised as educational curriculum – best personified by “critical race theory” – coupled with the absurd and debilitating COVID mandates in schools nationwide, is moving these parents from simply being upset to becoming angry and, more important, actively so.

Democrats consider contentious school board meetings taking place in communities across the country as manufactured conservative outrage, and they publicly belittle parents choosing to stand up vocally against arrogant school board members. The anger manifested by these parents, however, is very real; more important, it is well-founded.

In many instances, the confrontations at these school board meetings focus on political issues, but at its core, the fight is about who should control the education of America’s children – parents, or progressive bureaucrats and union officials in swanky offices with well-connected friends in Congress and the Department of Education.

Parents moving to seize control of school districts from the hands of bullying officials serving their overlords in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, California, Chicago, Illinois, and other liberal enclaves, are fighting not only for their children, but for America’s future.

It is a battle long in the making but now existential in importance. The Left senses this and will continue to use every tool in its power to thwart it, from withholding grant monies, to ordering police to arrest and jail protesting parents. For the sake of our children and our country, these liberal bullies cannot be allowed to prevail.

Daily Caller 

by Bob Barr

President Gerald Ford often was disparagingly and unfairly said to be “unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.” Recent comments by U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley responding to questions about the decision to evacuate Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan tells us that our nation’s leaders appear to have lost the will to take on more than one mission at the same time.

During a news conference on Aug. 18, as the scope of the disastrous exit from Afghanistan was beginning to manifest itself, Milley was asked why the Bagram Airfield was prematurely evacuated. The four star general declared that of the two tactical missions demanding decisions by he and other top military leaders — specifically, to protect the American Embassy in Kabul and the Bagram Airfield — the United States could only do one or the other, but not both. Thus, the decision  to “collapse” (not “evacuate”) Bagram.

The toll in lives and resources resulting directly from this decision to close the only secure airfield in Afghanistan has been enormous. More important from a strategic national security perspective, however, is that it reveals that as a country our leaders no longer possess the will to carry out more than a single military operation at a time.

America’s post-9/11 military involvement in and exit from Afghanistan will be the source of debate for years to come; as was our involvement in and exit from Vietnam a half century earlier. In many respects, the more recent conflict mirrors the manner by which military historian Andrew Bacevich described how the U.S. military fought in Vietnam — not as a decade-long war with a specific goal, but as a “one-year war [fought] ten times over.” Bacevich rendered this assessment in the preface to his 2005 book, “The New American Militarism,” but it precisely fits the obvious lack of a strategic goal and of consistent tactics to achieve a goal in Afghanistan.

More recent and objective analyses of America’s military strengths have revealed troubling deficiencies, not only in our declining ability to engage militarily in two major theaters of conflict simultaneously (a view that used to be a defining benchmark for the United States as a global superpower), but also in our national will to fight.

The Heritage Foundation in recent years has published an annual assessment of our country’s military – the “Index of U.S. Military Strength.” Unlike the periodic assessments issued by the Department of Defense and by various presidents, which tend to serve as support for an administration’s policy and budgetary priorities, the Heritage studies each year objectively assess America’s military strength, effectiveness and readiness. Its “2021 Index” (prepared late in 2020) does not present an encouraging assessment, even before the recent Afghanistan exit debacle.

The Heritage Foundation panel of experts concluded that, based on an analysis of our military “capability, capacity, and readiness,” none of the four operational branches – Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines – scored higher than “marginal.” Making this assessment even more troubling is the fact that its conclusions were based only, and appropriately, on detailed assessment of “hard” factors capable of quantifiable analysis — budgets, unit strengths, equipment modernization, logistics, etc.

Not incorporated in the Heritage Foundation’s analysis, however, is what many experts consider perhaps the single most important factor determining our, or indeed any country’s war-fighting ability and its likelihood of battlefield success, the “will to fight.”

A 2019 study on “The Will to Fight” by the RAND Corporation concluded that, “[w]ith very few exceptions, all wars and almost all battles are decided by matters of human will.” This reflects a principle long known to our country’s top wartime generals, who, like Douglas MacArthur, understood that “it is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it.”

Our current military leaders, hand-in-hand with their civilian cohorts, fail or refuse to recognize this foundational military principle, even when facing a decision to carry out two limited wartime missions at the same time in the same theater of operation. Heaven help us if and when these same decision-makers face such predicaments on a larger scale.

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.