Liberty Updates

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Underlying virtually every policy of the Left is the notion that, with enough laws, society will be ordered, and that from order will emerge safety, security, and happiness. The problem is, the well-ordered utopia long sought by leftists over the centuries, including our own, is a pipe dream that always comes at the cost of individual freedom. Still, social engineers from Washington, DC to Canberra, Australia continue their drive to force socialism upon us.

The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has provided an endless supply of excuses for Big Brothers of all stripes to find new ways to control our lives – a situation that in many respects is worse than the virus itself – and the results can be bizarre.

In Australia, for example, government officials are shooting rescue dogs as a way of preventing people from traveling during COVID to adopt them. Closer to home, elementary school children in districts across America are being forced to wear masks (even outdoors) that restrict their own breathing, despite the overwhelming data that the COVID risk facing these youngsters is virtually nil.

The illusion of ordered safety has come to trump facts, common sense, and even basic human decency.

Over the course of our nearly two-year long COVID journey, we have moved from temporary measures designed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, to myriad legal mandates and economic restrictions wielded, rescinded, and then reimposed by public officials whenever they feel the situation warrants.

It is only our Constitution — and the fact that there remain Americans who still understand and defend its guarantees of individual liberty — that has thus far protected us from suffering Australia’s version of what amounts to COVID martial law. But officials here are trying mightily to change that.

The many absurd COVID mandates that are troubling in and of themselves. But it also is the way in which the deception practiced by government officials is undermining the “social contract” between the citizenry and the government. This includes the credibility of government policies and actions that is essential for the proper functioning of any democratic society.

Throughout the current pandemic, we have seen these problems on full display. It began with the onset of COVID, when Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC intentionally misled the public about the need for masks, presumably to conserve the limited supply of the paraphernalia for frontline healthcare workers. While this “little white lie” may have been considered at the time to be harmless and necessary, it quickly undermined the public’s trust in the CDC. Subsequent government recommendations became increasingly difficult to enforce, which in turn justified transitioning from “recommendations” to “mandates” so as to ensure compliance.

Fauci now looks down from his Ivory Tower and mocks those who might say they would rather take dangerous livestock medicine than a proven, safe vaccine, but this is a situation he and his government cohorts created. It was their lies that undermined the credibility of the CDC at the outset; their punitive rules and excuses that turned a public health crisis into a political football; and their irrational drive to attain the elusive goal of complete and total “public safety” that led to an ever-widening rift between the people and the government.

Public health policy now has devolved into repetitive shows of force by the government pursuing the delusion of perfect order.

Rather than forcing more mandates, more laws, and stricter punishment on a society barely holding it together after a year of fear and restrictions, the country should be asking itself, why is it that, after spending trillions of dollars on COVID relief since early 2020, is it deemed necessary to feed American citizens the same pap about masks and “social distancing” that constituted the knee-jerk solution to a then-unknown virus almost two years ago?

In some ways, the government’s response to COVID-19 feels much like the parable about the scorpion and the frog. Successfully handling a health pandemic requires trust and transparency between citizens and government, or else chaos ensues. Could it be that the absence of those essential factors of trust and transparency simply provides the justification for further government control – to bring order to the chaos it birthed? Is one to be viewed as a conspiratorialist for considering such a scenario? Or do what we know about the facts, history, and the nature of the Left provide plausibility?

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

In the aftermath of the Taliban’s victory over the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks is close upon us, one would think that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might be more worried about Islamic extremist attacks than about COVID lockdown opponents and critics of Biden’s 2020 election victory. Not so.

According to a DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin that is effective until Nov. 11, extremists who “may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks” are a significant terror threat. The department also warned of “calls for violence on multiple online platforms associated with … perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement.”

According to this analysis, “racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs)” and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” extremists are some of the nation’s top terrorism threats at this time.

While DHS also considers “foreign terrorist organizations” a potential threat, it appears to be lower priority than threats posed by domestic extremist groups that are ideologically motivated and prone to “conspiracy theories.” DHS reaches this conclusion despite, in its own words, there being “no credible or imminent threats identified.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley belatedly seems to have realized and spoken about the danger that “terrorist groups” will “reconstitute” in Afghanistan, but his conclusion seems not to have registered meaningfully with the head of the Homeland Security Department, Alejandro Mayorkas. A review of the DHS website’s public information releases in the days since the fall of Kabul reflects little such concern.

The Department’s press releases instead focus on political matters such as Mayorkas’ meetings with families that reportedly were reunited after having been “separated under the previous administration’s “Zero-Tolerance policy.”

The closest that DHS appears to have come to recognize the dangers posed by the crisis in Afghanistan (at least as reflected in its public statements) are phone calls between the secretary and several of his foreign government counterparts, in which they agreed on the importance of cooperating in any efforts to secure passage out of Afghanistan of their respective national citizens and refugees.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to target domestic “extremists” such as those the Department has concluded are poised to commit violent acts of terrorism because they disagree with government-mandated COVID restrictions. This policy, which focuses resources not so much on foreign adversaries as on domestic, reflects a troubling perspective found throughout this administration, including the Defense Department and the FBI.

It is this mindset that led Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to declare an armed forces-wide “stand down” earlier this year. This highly unusual measure was not mandated to ensure military readiness to meet external threats such as those posed by China, Iran, the Taliban and others. Instead, the stand down was designed to weed out “white extremism” and “racism” perceived by this administration to be deeply embedded in our armed forces.

It is this mindset also that has led the FBI and the Justice Department to continue a massive investigative and prosecutorial drive against virtually anyone who entered the U.S. Capitol building during the demonstrations last Jan. 6. As part of this vindictive effort, the government has demanded that judges deny bail to demonstrators even in the absence of evidence that they engaged in violent acts.

Perhaps if this administration had expended a bit of the energy it devotes to running down individuals who disagree with mask and vaccination mandates, or to ferreting out individuals who may disagree with the priorities reflected in recent Army and CIA recruitment videos stressing adherence to the LGBTQ movement, then maybe, just maybe, our nation would be better prepared to prevent and defend against real national security threats such as a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

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

Like most Americans, the debacle surrounding the fall of Afghanistan’s capital city to the Taliban caused me great concern. In fact, we are witnessing failures of leadership decision-making and foreign intelligence analysis worse than any in modern history; certainly, worse than the failures that lead to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

To a degree, this conclusion is based on my personal experiences of having lived in that part of the world in my youth (I graduated from high school in Tehran, for example), having worked at the CIA for eight years in the 1970s, and having served in the Congress before, during, and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even without this background, however, the many negative short and long-term ramifications of this debacle cannot be overestimated.

Broadly speaking, there is more than enough blame to go around leading to the dismal situation in Afghanistan that President Biden inherited on January 20th, including mistakes by all three of his immediate predecessors (one Democrat and two Republican). But the final series of decisions – or non-decisions – leading directly to this fiasco, were made by this administration, and efforts by Biden to shift blame to others is an act of cowardice.

The lenses through which this administration viewed events in Afghanistan were deep rose-colored. This caused them to overlook the otherwise obvious weaknesses in both the Afghan military and its civilian government. They persisted in the narrative that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was only a “possibility,” and certainly not an “inevitability.” Even worse, they concluded that this possibility was months away, and therefore we had adequate time to arrange for an orderly exit.

Last weekend’s collapse of both the Afghan civilian leadership and its military was either not foreseen at all by Biden, or even worse its fact was presented to him and ignored.

Regardless of which of these two horrible options prevailed over the past several weeks, during the course of 20 years, 2,300 military lives lost, and two trillion dollars, it appears that the Intelligence Community screwed up so badly as to make the pre-9/11 intelligence failure pale by comparison.

Whether our military leadership tried to save face after failing to mold the Afghan army into some semblance of a fighting force after two decades of tutorial, or whether civilian intelligence is simply that ineffective in the Middle East (even inside a country the U.S. government effectively ran), there is no legitimate way to attribute the gulf between expectations and reality in Afghanistan to a “miscommunication” or “bad intel.”

What appears to have happened is beyond fundamentally incompetent, and borders on intentional and deceptive.

The intelligence shortcomings resulting in our failure to stop the 9/11 terror attacks were devastating, but for the most part played out behind the scenes. Also, the 9/11 attacks were an American tragedy; they did not undercut our reputation with allies, or adversaries. If anything, the attacks engendered a rare bit of empathy from the international community, while providing an opportunity to remind the world the dangers of awakening the “sleeping giant filled with terrible resolve.”

Afghanistan’s fall is far different. The intelligence failures here happened in real-time, on live television, across the world. Worse, rather than being exclusively an American blunder, the international coalition of allies who helped with the U.S. effort means the decades of blood and treasure lost this week are theirs to share as well. There is no question their anger and distrust will reverberate years down the road if the United States seeks future coalitions.

America’s adversaries will be emboldened at our stunning defeat in Afghanistan. Already China is looking to move into the vacuum left in America’s wake, and seizing the opportunity to escalate saber-rattling over Taiwan. Their enhanced foothold in the Middle East will be employed to weaken ours. Had policy makers in Washington – Republican and Democrat – cared to read the long history of China and the so-called “Silk Road,” some in Washington might have seen this coming; but apparently not.

American citizens and the rest of the freedom-loving world, deserve better than what our Intelligence Community has become – a dangerous hive of self-serving bureaucrats.

As with the 9/11 Commission, Congress owes it to us all to find the truth behind the fall of Afghanistan, and the role America’s civilian and military intelligence services played in the government’s decision-making. If answers and learning do not then follow, the damage to our national security will be brutal and long-lasting.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Republican Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs introduced House Resolution 582 on August 10. If passed by the House of Representatives, this measure would impeach President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

The safety and security of our country requires passage of H. Res. 582.

Unlike the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump by the same House Democrat majority now in control, the impeachment resolution directed against Mayorkas is based on real substance and, considering the Biden-manufactured crisis still unfolding at our southern border, is extremely timely.

Over the course of our nation’s history, numerous federal judges have been impeached, as have three presidents – Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. Only a single cabinet-level official has suffered this fate; Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached in 1876 for bribery.

The lack of precedent for impeaching high Executive Branch officers, however, should not deter representatives from proceeding against Mayorkas, who has presided over the Biden administration’s disastrous and dangerous open border policy since his confirmation Feb. 2.

Res. 582, as authored by Biggs and co-sponsored by a dozen of his fellow Republicans, describes the clear and disturbingly factual basis for which Mayorkas should be impeached.

On paper, Mayorkas’ qualifications and background should have made him an outstanding leader of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2002 to consolidate in a single executive department myriad responsibilities of the federal government relating to all aspects of border security, from customs and immigration to anti-terrorism, but most importantly, protection of our nation’s borders. The Cuban-born Mayorkas served previously as a federal prosecutor and then as a top official in DHS itself, including deputy director during the final three years of the Obama administration.

On his current watch, upwards of 800,000 aliens have poured across our border with Mexico into the arms of waiting U.S. Border Protection officers. Add to this number the estimated 1,000 aliens per day who cross the same border but “get away,” and the number balloons to one million or more; larger than the population of Wyoming and Alaska combined.

It is not simply the huge number of non-citizens that have been permitted to walk into our country from Mexico during the past half-year that is alarming. What truly justifies Mayorkas’ impeachment is the fact that, as secretary, he deliberately has allowed this massive breach in violation of federal laws that clearly direct him to stop it. These violations of federal law are set forth in H. Res. 582, and include charges that Mayorkas:

• “willfully refused to maintain operational control of the border as required by the Secure Fence Act of 2006:”
• refused to contract for additional border wall construction even though the Congress appropriated funds expressly directing his Department to do so;
• unlawfully released aliens into the interior of the country without detaining them for inspection and processing, as required by the Immigration and Nationality Act;
• unlawfully released hundreds of thousands of aliens into the interior of the country, relying solely on them to self-report to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices even though federal law prohibits such practice; and
• exposed numerous federal employees and countless American citizens to COVID-19 by permitting aliens to enter the United States and be transferred to locations across the country without subjecting them to screening for the virus as required by the Public Health Service Act.

None of the articles of impeachment set forth in the pair of resolutions lodged against Trump in December 2019 and January 2021  were based on any specific violations of federal laws. To the contrary, the two articles against Mayorkas contained in H. Res. 582 include extensive evidence supporting the allegations that he willfully violated several specific federal laws.

Permitting Mayorkas to continue his lawless and irresponsible tenure at the helm of DHS necessarily will endanger even more millions of American citizens than his reckless leadership already has. He richly deserves to be impeached.

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

From the onset of COVID, the World Health Organization (WHO) proved itself unfit for the task of managing a global pandemic. This was not for lack of funding or of access to international experts on virology and disease; the organization had plenty of both.

The WHO’s abject failure stemmed from its decision at the very start that its most important mission was to help Beijing save face over China’s role in the outbreak. With this goal in mind, the leadership intentionally downplayed any critical information about the virus that might be damaging to China’s international reputation.

It is impossible for us to ever really know what China’s actions cost the international community, by both initially hiding the COVID-19 outbreak and then interfering with efforts to study the virus during its early spread. A safe guess, however, would be millions of lives and trillions of dollars. As for WHO, it simply watched China set the house on fire, then blocked fire fighters from getting to the scene.

WHO’s role in helping China with this cover-up earned it a long-overdue rebuke by the Trump administration, which promised to pull U.S. funding from yet another international forum for anti-Americanism. Predictably, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s efforts to defund WHO, but not because the organization has finally got its act together. In fact, with a recent announcement from WHO supporting a moratorium on COVID-19 vaccine boosters in the United States, the interests of WHO and those of the United States could not be more divergent.

Were WHO a neutral, public health-focused agency not controlled by outside bad actors, the call for a booster moratorium could be viewed as a misguided but earnest attempt to expand vaccine access to other, underserved countries.  Considering WHO’s history, however, especially during COVID, the moratorium appears as an intentional effort to stymie the vaccination efforts being undertaken by wealthier nations, even as the international health agency expects to enjoy access to the product of American work and ingenuity.

Instead of requesting help with reaching nations that have not yet received initial doses of vaccines, such as seeking support for logistics, increased funding, or even supplementing vaccine supply (all of which would be reasonable to ask of the United States), the WHO wants to tie our country’s hands as we try to take care of our own citizens. “We should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines, using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” said WHO’s pious, two-faced director general.

The United States already has its hands full at home dealing with rank incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control, a long-festering problem that rendered the sprawling, Atlanta-based agency functionally useless at its core mission. It therefore boggles the mind why the U.S. would willingly fund a foreign agency that has shown itself similarly incompetent at disease prevention and control.

If, as appears increasingly likely, the GOP regains a congressional majority in next year’s election, the CDC and its international counterpart should be among the first agencies to face the fiscal knife cutters — the CDC for its inept handling of the COVID pandemic as well as for its decades of mission creep into policy areas far outside the scope of disease and virology, and the WHO for serving as little more than a mouthpiece for its puppet masters in Beijing.

To its credit, the Biden administration has called WHO’s proposed booster moratorium a “false choice,” but there is no indication it is reconsidering U.S. financial support. This is a huge mistake, though unsurprising coming from a president obsessed with being the “cool guy” in the international community.

If Biden possessed some semblance of a policy backbone, not one more dollar would be deposited into the coffers of the WHO. At most, America might supply health data that could benefit global research initiatives, but cooperation with the organization should stop right there.

The COVID vaccines are the product of American research and ingenuity, developed by American companies, and made possible, at least in part, by American taxpayers. No foreign government or agency should be permitted to tell us what we can and cannot do with the vaccines. Especially the China-pandering World Health Organization.

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

In the most recent and clearest sign yet that the Biden administration has not the slightest regard for the Constitution or the Supreme Court of the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued another ban on the ability of landlords to evict renters who fail to meet their rental obligations.

Issued on August 3, the CDC’s latest move to void rental contracts for at least two more months is fraught with constitutional error, but such problems are of little importance to this administration because, in the view of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky,  it “is the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do” has become the justification for many modern presidents to sweep aside the foundational constitutional principle that the powers of the federal government are, in the words of Founder James Madison, “few and defined” and do not include mass voidance of lawful private contracts.

The zeal with which Biden is taking advantage of the so-called COVID “emergency” to extend the powers of the federal government into areas in which it has no proper responsiobility, puts his predecessors to shame. One of this administration’s favored tools, but certainly not its only one, is to issue orders prohibiting landlords from evicting renters. The argument put forward in support of this dictatorial power is that  allowing landlords to enforce rental contracts will dramatically exacerbate the spread of COVID.

The government’s argument that evictions will lead to “new spikes in [COVID] transmission” is premised on the self-proclaimed notion that evicted renters necessarily will move into “congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads.” In the further opinion of the CDC director, such a presumed trend would be “very difficult” if not impossible to reverse, therefore justifying swift action by the CDC.

The CDC’s August 3 order broadly covers renters who earn no more than $99,000 per year ($198,000 for joint tax filers) and who, though using their “best efforts” to meet their contractual rent obligation, have failed to do so. The only real limitation on how many such renters are thus protected is that they must reside in a county with a “substantial” or “high” rate of COVID transmission. This limitation, however, means little in light of the fact that according to the manner by which the CDC measures such transmission rates, nearly 88% of all counties in the United States fall into these two categories.

The administration highlights the increased transmissibility of the recent “delta variant,” but the CDC order conveniently fails to mention that this variation of the initial COVID-19 virus has a substantially lower mortality rate than its predecessors. Also ignored are the facts that COVID vaccines now are universally available, and that current medical knowledge about how to treat infected individuals has made this variant far less lethal than earlier variants.

Facts are of little consequence, however, to an administration eager to show its extreme socialist base that it is fully committed to implementing measures wholly at odds with constraints placed on it by the Constitution. To this president, abrogating the right to enforce lawful contracts between landlords and renters is but a means to an end.

Unfortunately, on June 29 the CDC was aided in its drive to exercise dictatorial powers over property rights and the right to contract by the Supreme Court itself. In a split 5-4 decision, the High Court set aside a lower court finding that the CDC had exceeded its lawful authority in issuing its earlier eviction ban.  Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh sided with the four “liberal” justices to allow the CDC to continue with its unconstitutional activity, simply because in his view the ban would end on July 31.  Kavanaugh did at least concede that “clear and specific” legislation would be necessary for the CDC’s ban to continue beyond that date, but he did vote to allow the lawlessness to continue.

July 31 has come and gone. Congress has not passed legislation authorizing an eviction moratorium. And the Biden administration has thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court by directing the CDC to issue another unconstitutional eviction ban.

It remains to be seen whether the Court will have grown the necessary constitutional backbone before this ban expires in October. If not, and even if the Democrat-controlled Congress passes such a ban, the administration will have successfully driven another three-penny nail into the constitutional coffin.

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

Ratings for the Olympics are at record lows, and it is no surprise why. Between the anti-American protests of some U.S. athletes, and the empty stands that make the competition feel hollow and flat, Americans are just not catching the Olympic spirit this year. It certainly did not help when Simone Biles, America’s top Olympic gymnast, threw in the towel in the middle of her sport’s biggest competition and on the world’s biggest stage.

For America, a country built on hard work, sacrifice, and a “never quit” attitude, Biles’ exit was a slap in the face to the quintessential “grit” that pioneered the very country she represented. Even more ironic, she quit not in an individual event where the fallout would impact only herself, but in the team final when her team was counting on her the most.

Some say Biles did not owe “us” anything, and that she was right to do what was “best for her.” Therein lies the problem, reflective of a corrosive selfishness in athletic competition where individual “o.k.-ness” is the highest priority. Contrary to the unsurprising gushing of marshmallow soft liberals, this psychobabble kumbaya spirit does not refect “strength,” but rather textbook weakness which in decades past was afforded no place in American sports.

Now, in the Age of Me, this phenomenon is being celebrated; for instance, rewarding tennis pro Naomi Osaka following her sudden withdrawal from the French Open for “mental health” reasons after ditching a press conference. Her actions netted her cover spreads in major magazines, complete with the quintessential woke headline, “IT’S O.K. NOT TO BE O.K.” This fawning coverage of the disgruntled prima donna was accompanied by a call that “sports need to change.”

If such a worthless platitude is adopted as the new standard of excellence in sports, what can we expect in the months and years ahead? A college football team cancelling a day ahead of a scheduled matchup because the team needs a “mental health day?” Lebron James walking off the court mid-game when he decides he is too stressed about the Lakers falling behind? The Olympic Committee refusing to permit an American team to participate because their dominance might adversely affect a less talented team’s sense of self-worth?

This is not the attitude of winners, but of narcissistic losers. If an athlete needs a break from competition, that’s fine – take a break – just not in the middle of, or right before, a competition on which your teammates, your school, or your country have a right to rely. Moreover, such decisions should not be celebrated as some sort of “heroic” effort.

Competition, especially at the highest levels of Olympic or NCAA Division One competition, requires phenomenal physical and mental training. To arrive and remain at the top, one must be relentless and virtually flawless in the execution of his or her sport. This is extremely stressful and comes with immense public pressure, but the sacrifice is not without immense rewards – championship trophies, lucrative endorsements, national celebrity status, and lasting notoriety for decades to come. For these athletes to demand a mental health day at their convenience is nothing short of an admission they are not cut out to be among the elite of their sport.

From a broader perspective, adopting the woke attitude that it is “ok” to take a break and back off whenever one feels like it, is another example of how America slides down from the top, and not only in sporting competition but in other far more significant policy arenas such as national security. Teaching our youth (and showing our adversaries) that it is okay to quit whenever “you are not quite feeling up to it” sends the unmistakable signal you are not really serious about winning.

It is a defeatist mind-set with serious and far-reaching consequences.

Neither Biles nor Osaka deserve the blame for all of this. Both young women are members of a changing society that rewards softness, shuns grit, and declares that “everyone is a winner” in order to make sure “no one is made to feel bad.”

However, permitting this trend to continue and take hold of our culture will inflict perhaps permanent damage to the American Fighting Spirit that has sustained our rise to the pinnacle of world power.

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

One-hundred-and-seventy-four years ago a not-for-profit professional organization was formed “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) is about as far removed from that lofty goal as is the contemporary Democrat Party from its avowed status as “the party of the common man.”

The length by which the AMA has strayed from its original goal of promoting the science of medicine is perhaps best illustrated by its recent decision recommending that birth certificates no longer include the gender of the newborn.

Such nonsensical assertion that human beings are not born with male or female physical attributes has taken hold in a number of medical schools across the country. This has led to absurd instances in which professors feel obligated to apologize to students for inadvertently intimating, even indirectly, that there are differences between men and women. As noted in an article last week by Katie Herzog, for example, a professor of endocrinology at a medical school in the massive University of California system apologized profusely to students for uttering the verboten phrase, “pregnant woman.”

It is in this same Bizarro World that a medical doctor, Valinda Riggins Nwadike, MD, lent her name to an article in Healthline.com in December 2018 that declared, “Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant.” With an assertion like this enjoying the imprimatur of medical doctors, and with professors of medicine afraid to use terms “male” and “female” for fear of being labeled “transphobic,” it may not be long before the AMA declares “the end of disease as we know it.”

The AMA’s conclusion that gender identity at birth is to be ignored, if not denied outright, follows a pattern by the formerly respected organization of involving itself in matters wholly unrelated to “the betterment of public health.”

The Association for years has advocated openly and aggressively for all manner of gun control legislation, including bans on “assault-style” guns and “high capacity” magazines, limits on “concealed carry” permits, advocacy of so-called “gun buyback” programs, and essentially any other mandated measures pressed in the political arena by activists like Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.

Then there is the issue of abortion. The AMA now stands firmly on the side of physicians performing abortions so long as such procedure is lawful in the state in which they practice. This is a position starkly at odds with the view of abortion as antithetical to the moral underpinnings of the medical profession for many decades prior to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing the procedure in 1973’s well-known Roe v. Wade.

The practice of medicine at the time the AMA was established and until very recently, was founded in “science” and understood to be based on fundamental factors capable of identification, measurement, analysis and eventual cure. This reflects a process that has led to phenomenal breakthroughs in fields such as cardiology and oncology, with survival rates among cancer survivors and heart attack victims undreamed of a generation ago.

Yet, for today’s “woke” doctors and medical professors, worrying about whether “men can get pregnant” appears more important than the fight to treat and cure diseases such as cancer.

With the “science” of medicine seeming to drift from one political issue to another, and woke practitioners rushing to embrace the cultural phenomena du jour (no matter how unmoored from reality the issue may be), the formerly respected American Medical Association is in danger of losing whatever degree of  credibility it may still enjoy even among the minority of practicing physicians it represents. Then again, for the eighty or more percent of doctors who no longer pay dues to the AMA, this is hardly a noteworthy loss.

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

The problem with having a reputation as a political bomb-thrower is that sometimes a good idea gets lost in the dust-up. This was the case last week when, in an interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stated she would “kick out every single Chinese in this country that is loyal to the CCP.” Predictably, critics latched onto the word “Greene,” and immediately discounted the substance of what the freshman congresswoman proposed.

In fact, if you brush aside her phraseology, there is something worthwhile and timely in what Greene is saying, and which confronts a serious national security problem most leaders in Washington, D.C. refuse to acknowledge.

The dirty little secret is that our national security is being seriously undermined because far too many Chinese nationals are living and working freely here in America, even as their allegiance remains tied to the communist regime in Beijing, our primary adversary on the world stage (as I have noted previously).

Federal agents rounding up large numbers of Chinese immigrants holding visas or who have resident alien status, in order to scrutinize their “loyalty” to the Chinese Communist Party, does not make for an effective (or likely constitutional) response to the threat posed by China. As a public policy, it is akin to using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is the far better tool.

Moreover, were Republican leaders to adopt such a proposal, China’s leaders would sit back and smile serenely while the media, academia, and U.S. businesses with ties to the communist behemoth soundly bash the idea, thereby ensuring the proposal will fail to materialize as policy, while providing additional camouflage for their nefarious activities in our country.

The essential point Greene appears to be making, is that it is high time the federal government direct some of its vast intelligence apparatus toward identifying Chinese aliens who have verifiable, working ties to the CCP or its Red Army, and then take steps to send them home. On this point, Greene could not be more correct.

For far too long, federal officials in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our government have worn the same rose-colored glasses they donned in the 1990s, believing that increased economic ties would liberalize China and turn the Communists into allies. Instead, and quite predictably, under President Xi Jinping, China has hardened its position against the U.S. in economic matters as well as military.

Years of kowtowing to Beijing, especially a naive attitude towards Chinese students and those with work visas, have allowed Chinese intelligence assets to become embedded in American academic, technological, scientific, and even our military institutions. Members of Congress are not immune from being targeted as information assets; just ask Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).

Identifying Chinese nationals involved in sensitive research or technology and who have links to the CCP or the Red Army, and revoking their visas in order to send them back to Beijing, makes sense however you look at it, except of course, if considered from China’s perspective. Clearly, the Chinese leadership is betting that American “wokeness” will prevail and such a bold move not taken seriously.

Implementing a policy such as at the root of what Greene is getting at would be neither easy nor uncomplicated. It necessarily would require participation by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, in addition to the departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security.

If our government performed as it should (and as it did in decades past), our intelligence agencies would expertly, but covertly, lead the charge. Unfortunately, this is 2021 not 1981 and these agencies are now far too busy surveilling, investigating, and prosecuting “white nationalists” and domestic “anti-government” groups, to be bothered countering the very real national security threats posed by foreign enemies (including those inside our borders).

This should not, however, dissuade Republicans from at least trying. Pressing the issue will, if nothing else, raise the profile of the threat China poses and hopefully move it from the backburner closer to the front.

Greene’s many critics may continue (as surely they will) to inaccurately label her proposal “racist” and xenophobic, but the longer our government fails to respond meaningfully to the threat she has stepped forward to identify, the harder it becomes to dislodge these real enemies among us.

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

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

You hear it all the time, from Democrats as well as Republicans: “The most important responsibility of our government is to keep us safe.” It is so axiomatic that no one ever really questions it, regardless of whether it is posited in a discussion about COVID restrictions, national security policy or law enforcement. But it is not an accurate statement.

The primary responsibility of the federal government is not to keep us safe; it is to protect and guarantee our liberty and our individual rights as guaranteed by (not given by) our Constitution. This principle is clearly described in the Federalist Papers, and is every bit as relevant today as when those essays were drafted 233 years ago, regardless of the context in which it is applied.

In the context of the Second Amendment, for example, debating the pros and cons of gun control, if we start with the premise that the “primary responsibility of the government is to keep us safe,” then we have ceded to the Left the basic “playing field” on which the extent to which the right to keep and bear arms is to be decided. Flowing directly from this premise is the next building block of the gun control movement — that only those gun “rights” that can be shown by their advocates to be “needed” for self-defense are to be permitted. If the government and its advocates then show that a particular firearm or firearm accessory is not “needed,” it properly can be outlawed without violating the “right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Furthermore, if it is conceded that it is the responsibility of law enforcement officers employed by government to “keep us safe,” then the fundamental need for individual possession of a firearm is easily brushed aside as not “needed,” as indeed some 21st century law enforcement officials have asserted.

To the contrary, however, those who framed the construct of our government, as codified in the Constitution of the United States, understood it is the responsibility of the individual to protect themself, not the government’s. Were it otherwise, there would have been no need whatsoever for the inclusion of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the  individual right to keep and bear arms in self-defense.

In furtherance of that foundational principle, the Supreme Court of the United States has explicitly recognized that the police, as agents of the government, are not legally responsible for protecting each of us as citizens, insofar as this is a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

Still, Republicans and Democrats alike continue to mouth the false premise that it is the government that enjoys this fundamental responsibility; a power from which flows all manner of restrictions not only on Second Amendment rights, but others as otherwise protected by the Bill of Rights, such as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Democrats always have embraced the false premise that is the primary function of government to “keep us safe,” for the simple reason they want government to be able to exercise such powers. Republicans buy into it largely out of ignorance or fear.

The notion that certain firearms rights are not “needed” by individual citizens and therefore can be limited by government laws, regulations, and exercise of “police powers,” is reflected in the array of restrictions on the type and number of firearms already enforced by many states and municipalities. But gun control advocates do not rest on only those restrictions now in effect.

For example, if the Left asserts (as it does) that an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — the most popular rifle in the country — is not “needed” for any legitimate purpose as they so define, then it becomes simple to declare such a firearm illegal. The same holds for so-called “high capacity” magazines, arm braces, bump stocks and sound suppressors, among other guns and accessories.

The fact that Republicans, traditionally considered to be of the party that supports the Second Amendment against being infringed by the government, so easily and often fail to push back against this line of reasoning, is indeed cause for concern if not alarm for the future of gun rights in America, especially with a president who openly advocates broad restrictions on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.

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.