Liberty Updates

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Shortly after being sworn in as our nation’s 46th president, Joe Biden issued an executive order emphasizing that his first priority as commander-in-chief was to ensure that transgendered individuals in the military are protected. Biden’s unusual, but not wholly unexpected, emphasis on transgenderism was followed within days by the new secretary of defense, retired Army General Lloyd Austin, issuing a military-wide order mandating protection for transgendered personnel. On Feb. 4, Austin doubled down on this inward-looking focus when he declared a 60-day “stand down” designed to identify and ferret out “extremism” in the ranks.

Since early February, this administration’s obsession with wokeness in the military — referred to officially as “diversity” and “inclusion” — has only become worse. According to civilian military experts, this fixation is weakening our nation’s war-fighting ability.

To confirm this disturbing state of military affairs, one need look no further than the U.S. Army’s recent recruitment video, “Emma/The Calling.” This animated video, designed obviously to encourage lesbians to enlist in the Army, does not even pretend to value what heretofore has been the raison d’etre for maintaining a military — the ability and responsibility to fight and win wars. Instead, Emma stresses the paramount importance of “inclusion,” as depicted by the character’s lesbianism and her “two mothers.”

The Army video shares this vision with a similarly focused CIA recruitment video, in which a “Latina” employee of the Agency encourages other “intersectional” and “cisgender millennials” to join today’s “inclusive” Intelligence Community as she did, notwithstanding her preexisting mental problems (which she identifies as “generalized anxiety disorder”).

The controversy surrounding the mission and values undergirding both our national intelligence capabilities and those of our armed forces, was on further display last month in an exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and Defense Secretary Austin; an exchange precipitated by opinions expressed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The conservative commentator had criticized the Biden administration’s drive to feminize our military and pointed to the announcement that maternity uniforms were now available for pregnant female troops.

Rather than leave the debate surrounding the feminization of the military to civilian commentators and Biden administration spokespeople to defend, active-duty military officials responded directly and pointedly to Carlson on official government communications sites. This precipitated Cruz’s letter to Austin, in which he expressed strong concerns about “politicizing the military” and “undermining civil-military relations.”

There does not yet appear to have been any public response by Austin or other military leaders to Cruz’s demands for an “official response” and for an “in person” meeting with the Marine Corps Commandant to explain the military’s official rebuke of media critics of the Administration’s policies. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, however, did respond publicly and even declared that Secretary Austin shared his “revulsion” at Carlson’s expressed opinions.

At the core of the Defense Department’s push-back against Carlson is the time-worn trope that the “greatest strength” of our military is its “diversity”; not its war-fighting ability, but its “diversity.” Therein lies the problem. When a nation’s military shifts its priority away from developing and maintaining war-fighting effectiveness and toward amorphous and deeply divisive culture issues, such as “transgenderism” and “inclusion,” it necessarily loses the sharp edge essential to projecting strength and winning military conflicts.

As military policy expert Mackubin Owens wrote in the April 6-13, 2021 edition of the Washington Examiner, in a piece titled “War Goes Woke,” our military now is at a crucial “crossroads … between military effectiveness and ‘wokeness.’” Failure to correct this growing imbalance will, in Owens’ learned opinion, lead to “catastrophic defeat on a future battlefield.” In fact, recent war games conducted to plan against just such outcomes in hypothetical conflicts with China, did not turn out well for the United States.

It is one thing to suffer defeat in a U.S.-China war game scenario, no matter how realistic the terms of engagement. It is quite another to contemplate losing such an engagement in the real world — a scenario becoming more frighteningly likely with each passing day that wokeness reigns supreme  in our military.

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

To point out the elephant sitting next to the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the federal government spends too much money. In spite of the regular verbal abuses levelled at so-called “earmarks,” they are not to blame for this massive problem. In a sense, earmarks, can be considered part of the solution. Why? Because they are transparent.

One of the primary catalysts for profligate spending is the near-complete lack of transparency in the annual congressional appropriations process. Rather than budgets with neatly organized line-items detailing where and how taxpayer dollars are spent, most federal spending results from huge pots of money allocated by very general categories for the thousands of federal offices, agencies, and departments authorized to spend those dollars. Attempting to track specifically where monies eventually are spent is nearly impossible, even for those familiar with the arcane process.

This purposeful lack of transparency is made worse due to decades of funding government through short-term (usually “emergency”) bills, where bloat and the sheer speed at which the bills are passed helps to ensure opacity.

One of the most popular Beltway novelties is Sen. Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus Report” that confirms what we have long known, which is that government is wasteful. The truly bothersome take-away from Rand’s study is the degree to which it makes clear the absurd ways in which taxpayer dollars actually are being wasted.

While Rand’s yearly opus sheds a broad light on wasteful spending, it is by definition, after-the-fact. Earmarks, on the other hand, provide a more current way for taxpayers to see how some of those federal dollars are to be spent, as they are specific line-items in proposed appropriations bills. This process allows at least a small amount of sunshine to be cast on an otherwise deliberately dark process.

Often, the stigma directed at earmarks is not with the process itself, but with the specific programs or activities to which the earmarks are directed. This is understandable. However, contrast earmark spending, which constitutes a mere one percent of the budget, with the vast office budgets for federal agencies that lack anywhere near the same level of transparency as earmark spending. We might know that a particular agency receives so many billion dollars in funding, but that is about it.

When considered objectively, earmark spending represents how government spending should be handled. In order to get an earmark, a member of Congress who has a specific need in his or her district must convince fellow members on committees to consider and approve funding for this need. If they are successful in convincing other members of the merits of their proposal, it becomes a public line-item in the budget to then be voted on, and with a “paper trail” for the world to see.

Imagine if all federal funding had to go through a similar process, rather than money just being tucked away in a “general fund” where billions in taxpayer dollars are allocated without ever seeing the light of day. Earmarks hold members of Congress accountable for spending habits far better than the overall appropriations process, notwithstanding they always make easy targets for “fiscal hawks” to prove they are “fiscal hawks.”

Not surprising, it rarely is noted by earmark critics that such proposed spending measures do not actually constitute new spending, but instead are specifically directed expenses from the amounts appropriated for the federal agencies that are to perform the earmarked projects.

In other words, whether earmarked or not, the money is being spent regardless, so the more honest conversation is not about earmarks themselves, but why Congress feels compelled to spend so much overall year after year. That, however, makes for a far more uncomfortable conversation, and one that many self-described “fiscally conservative” Republicans would rather avoid, especially when a president of their Party is the one on a spending spree.

Banning earmarks in the past did not curb federal spending, nor will doing so in the future. Unless and until Democrats and Republicans alike stop using the latest and greatest “disaster” to camouflage and justify ever more wildly excessive government spending, taxpayers actually stand to benefit from earmark spending, which affords them at least one tool with which to sift through the bureaucratic fog that otherwise hides the trillions of dollars Uncle Sam blithely spends.

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

Despite being labeled a major health epidemic in 2013, the extremely powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl continues to flood into our country and ruin lives in communities from coast to coast. A nagging question is whether the United States Postal Service (USPS) is part of the solution or part of the problem.

The lethargy exhibited by the USPS in complying with federal law mandating that it do a far better job of stopping fentanyl from entering the United States from abroad – especially from China — has been the subject of more than a single congressional hearing in recent years.

Also problematic, however, is failure by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to uphold its part of the bargain, as also mandated by the Congress.

Despite the “Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention Act” (STOP Act) becoming law in 2018, only now, two-and-one-half years later, is the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, getting around to issuing final regulations to implement the act.

For its part, the USPS has been openly dismissive of the law’s requirement that it implement technology, known as “Advanced Electronic Data (AED),” by which to identify suspicious packages coming into one of several international mail facilities to be flagged for inspection by CBP. Such AED technology was supposed to have been in place by Jan. 1 this year but was not. Last September, the USPS Inspector General publicly blamed CBP for this shortcoming because it had failed to issue implementing regulations for the STOP Act.

The CBP has taken an almost Alice-in-Wonderland view of the problem. For example, in testimony last Dec. 10 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, a top CBP official, Thomas Overacker, blithely declared that, despite the deadline of Jan. 1, 2021 being “on the near horizon,” his agency “has persistently …  expanded interagency cooperation, updated technologies, and changed staffing methodologies to enhance targeting, enforcement, and interdiction of narcotics in the international mail environment.” Translation – nothing of significance has yet been done.

Rest assured, however, as Overacker told the Senators in that same appearance, “CBP, USPS, and our federal partners in the United States will continue to monitor progress toward compliance with the AED requirements” and continue “working closely” to address the fentanyl problem. Translation – expect more of the same.

It is no secret that much, if not most of the fentanyl entering the United States is from China – directly or indirectly by way of Mexican cartels that produce the synthetic opioid with chemical components from China. The finished product is then smuggled across our increasingly porous southern border. The preferred means for China’s fentanyl producers to send the drug directly to American consumers is by USPS, since the chances for detection are low and the likelihood of delivery high.

Private sector delivery services, such as UPS and FedEx, have for several years, and as required by federal law after the attacks of 9-11, utilized AED technology to scan virtually every package that comes into the United States from abroad through their delivery services.

Significantly, the USPS was successful in carving out an exemption from the post-911 law’s AED mandates. Even though the Postal Service tried unsuccessfully to exempt itself from the 2018 STOP Act, its slow-walking implementation of the law’s requirements has been notorious and, for recipients of fentanyl-laced packages ordered openly on the internet from China, deadly.

As currently drafted, the pending CBP “final” regulations contain numerous loopholes, including an overly broad definition of “letter,” a category of incoming international mail exempt from AED review. More important, however, is the fact that many countries (some 130) are exempted from the AED requirements, with no meaningful benchmarks for compliance.

There are other dangers to the years-long failure by the USPS and the CBP to get their act together in this regard. Not only has this bureaucratic dithering negatively impacted the fight against illicit fentanyl importation but has made it much easier to bring counterfeit goods, including PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) into the country.

If the Biden administration is looking for an easy way to stanch the flow of illicit fentanyl into the country and at the same time curtail the importation of counterfeit goods, it can easily do so by strengthening the pending CBP rule to at long last fully implement the STOP Act, and then actually force federal agencies to abide by it.

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 Central Intelligence Agency under President Joe Biden and his appointed director, Bill Burns, appears to have morphed into yet another tool of the “woke” Left; unrecognizable to many of the men and women who, like me, were proud to serve what was in years past the world’s preeminent intelligence agency. It has become an embarrassment.

In a recent recruitment video published on social media, the point is made clear that the mission for employees of today’s CIA is not about serving as members of a team committed to providing the very best objective intelligence to policymakers in the administration. The mission now is more about using the CIA as a vehicle to boost one’s self-image.

This ad, perhaps dreamed up by some overly woke ad agency, has the self-declared 36-year-old female CIA employee refusing “to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas about what a woman can or should be.” She then informs us that she is “tired of feeling like I have to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance.”

Labeling this gobbledygook idiotic is being overly kind. In fact, when I first saw this video, I thought it was a joke. Sadly, it is not. It is an official CIA recruitment video, obviously directed to self-centered individuals with pre-existing psychological issues (including something the star of the video calls “generalized anxiety disorder”).

At National Review, Charles Cooke humorously pans the video as a “well-targeted” recruitment tool, given the sorts of people who respond positively to it are “already experts in manipulating, infiltrating, surveilling, and extracting dubious confessions from the rest of us.” However, the video represents more than just an absurd attempt to blend in with today’s progressive orthodoxy.

The recruitment video apparently is one of a series, and depicts an internal culture that no longer understands the underlying and fundamental responsibility of the CIA, an agency at the center of our Intelligence Community. Part and parcel of that responsibility is, or used to be, to hire and retain employees who understand their job is to produce the very best finished intelligence product for our nation’s top policymakers.

This absurd, woke recruitment video twists that crucial responsibility so that the job of CIA recruiters is to find and hire individuals based on their self-image, and on how working for the CIA will contribute to their, not the country’s well-being. The ad also raises questions about the intelligence of those within the Agency who concluded that releasing the video was a good idea in the first place.

Think back to the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump in late 2019. That entire process was provoked initially by a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president — a call which congressional Democrats found objectionable. Somewhat lost in the partisan trappings of the impeachment, however, was the fact that the person or persons responsible for the initial leaks about the incident, were intelligence officers who considered themselves and their view of what the president should or should not be discussing with another world leader, to supersede their responsibility as an employee of the Intelligence Community.

In this respect, those intelligence employees were performing precisely as the arrogant and self-centered employee in this latest recruitment video would have them behave, as rogue employees asserting their “brilliance” as opposed to working for the president.

The ultimate value of America’s foreign intelligence apparatus is founded on whether policymakers can trust that the intelligence given to them is neutral, objective, and unfiltered. President Biden may prefer receiving intelligence product based instead on a very different criteria, including that its authors think highly of themselves and who see their job as a means of fulfilling their self-worth rather than that of the United States.

If so, this is a recipe for foreign intelligence failures, if not disasters. Making matters worse, and as I have noted previously, it is being aided by a Secretary of Defense consumed with transgenderism and allegations of “white supremacy” rather than threats against us by our foreign adversaries.

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.

FullMAGnews

by Bob Barr

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Since at least the early 1990s, Democrats and other gun control advocates have used the term “common sense” to characterize virtually every scheme they concoct to limit citizens’ ability to own,  possess, use or carry firearms, gun parts or ammunition. The phrase has served as a clever way to camouflage the true nature of what such measures are designed to do, which is to undermine the rights protected by the Second Amendment to our Constitution. The linguistic ploy often has worked to Democrats’ advantage, which is one reason President Biden has proposed a new round of “common sense” gun control measures.

There soon may be some good news on the “common sense” front, however, not for gun control advocates but for Second Amendment supporters.

Late last month, and for the first time in more than a decade, the  United States Supreme Court accepted a lower court case that directly confronts the fundamental scope of the Second Amendment. If the High Court actually decides this case — New York Rifle & Pistol Assn., et al. v. Corlett, et al.  — by overturning the lower court’s decision, it will in fact be rendering one of the most common sense decisions in its 232-year history. Moreover, it will make all those liberals constantly clamoring for “common sense” gun control furious beyond anything we have seen in many years.

Considering the blatant and heavy-handed attacks now being leveled against the Court by Biden and Senate Democrat leaders, and despite conservatives now enjoying what many observers consider a 6 to 3 “conservative” majority among the nine justices now serving, how the Court will rule in the case, and how broadly that opinion will reach, is far from certain.

The case found its way to the Supreme Court because New York has for many decades vested its government officials with the absolute, arbitrary power to deny law-abiding citizens the ability to carry a firearm outside the four walls of their home for self-defense, even if they live in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

Unlike virtually all of the other amendments comprising the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment), over the decades the Second Amendment has not benefited from having the Supreme Court affirm its intended purpose as a guardrail against government infringing the liberties supposed to be protected by it. Not until 2008, for example, did the Court finally confirm that the amendment indeed protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Unfortunately, and important as it was, the decision in that case (District of  Columbia v. Heller) limited the right to “keep” a firearm to the interior of the gun owner’s home; once the owner stepped outside, the right vanished and could be infringed by state and local governments essentially at their will.

As the result of that important but narrow ruling 13 years ago, New York and a handful of other states have been able to prevent citizens from taking lawfully held firearms beyond the threshold of their home .  .  . except when a “licensing official” decides that the owner falls into a very special subclass of “persons” able to “bear” a firearm because he or she has demonstrated some undefined “proper cause” to the satisfaction of the official; something that in New York almost never happens. According to this nonsensical analysis, lawful gun owners are allowed to defend themselves with a gun if necessary, but only inside their home and not outside it.

Such a tortured and artificially constrained concept of the fundamental human right to self-defense is the polar opposite of “common sense,” but it is one that the Supreme Court only now has finally taken under advisement. If the Court asserts itself and applies “common sense” in accord with the clear historic and legal bases on which the Second Amendment was conceived and ratified, and overturns New York’s extremely restrictive law, it will have struck a mighty blow for “common sense” and for the rule of constitutional law more broadly.

If a majority of Supreme Court justices rule against New York and in favor of individual liberty in this case, it will also signal that at least five justices have the backbone to stand up to Democrat threats to dilute their power and undermine our judicial system for partisan purposes by “packing” the Court. History and the American people will be watching.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7 District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

President Biden is returning to the Barack Obama playbook of “reforming” municipal police departments by forcing multi-year federal court “consent decrees” down their throats — a strategy that makes it extremely difficult for those departments to hire and retain good officers, or to administer their agencies in accord with the needs of the communities they serve.

Of course, as with everything being undertaken by this Administration, it is all about race and politics, not good policing. Police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville are but the latest recipients of this federal intervention.

It is noteworthy, though not often noted, that both of these cities have been under Democrat Party control for more than three-quarters of a century. One reason why left-wing propagandists, such as Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media fail to note this anomaly, is that it invites the uncomfortable question of how, with Democrats at the helm of these cities for so long, police departments under their purview descended into the alleged hotbed of systemic racism that now warrants federal oversight by the notoriously heavy-handed Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.

A key question that should be asked, but of course is not, is what precisely is to be accomplished by Democrat bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. that has not been possible for Democrats locally across nearly eight decades of control.

Investigating and prosecuting real cases of alleged civil rights violations by police officers is a legitimate focus for the Department of Justice, especially in cases for which there is no adequate prosecution by state authorities. Were this the sole focus by the Civil Rights Division, it might constitute an appropriate use of federal law and resources. However, this Administration, just as the Obama Administration before it, instead looks to deploy federal resources as a bludgeon with which to publicly humiliate police as a whole, rather than as a scalpel to delicately remove those few bad apples.

Here is how the scam works. The Justice Department opens a civil rights investigation into a local police department on the pretext that its officers “target” young black men or some other identifiable category. It always is relatively easy to find some “evidence” of civil rights issues on which to file a lawsuit in federal court against the local police department. Justice Department lawyers then leverage that potentially lengthy and costly proceeding to force local departments to consent to legally binding court decrees that place them under federal control for years, in some cases 10 years or more.

Such consent decrees rob local police chiefs and elected city officials of the ability to establish and administer hiring and training programs, and to set priorities that meet the needs of the communities they serve, as opposed to priorities deemed worthy by lawyer-bureaucrats in Washington. With federal monitors looking over the shoulder of every officer in such departments, it is no wonder that individual officers back away from proactive policing and that the departments receive fewer qualified applicants and suffer higher rates of retirement.

What do citizens get for all of this — police departments with fewer and less well-trained officers, whose performance is measured not by local needs, but by the “woke” standards mandated by liberal lawyers and bureaucrats far away in the nation’s capital. Any true reforms that might result from such programs move at the glacial pace favored by bureaucrats not subject to local voters, and whose ultimate goal is to maintain control and their respective budgets as long as possible.

This is nothing more than a charade so Democrats in D.C. can make it look like they are taking action to cover decades of failures by local Democrats in city leadership.

Yes, there are problems in America’s law enforcement, and as entities populated by real, fallible human beings, there always will be. However, employing bureaucratically conceived and driven national templates to “solve” deeply complex problems between diverse communities and police, is both foolhardy and ultimately dangerous.

Any meaningful effort to resolve today’s problems in community policing must focus on core fiscal, cultural, and social issues, employing solutions founded on local needs and concerns rather than performative Beltway meddling. In other words, exactly what this Administration does not want.

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

Last week it was revealed that the United States Postal Service (USPS) is an active participant in the government-wide effort by the Biden administration to surreptitiously surveil social media postings by American citizens, with the apparent goal of identifying individuals inclined to protest government policies and activities; in other words, people who plan to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The response on Capitol Hill to this news of a special USPS intelligence unit called “iCOP” (Internet Covert Operations Program) secretly surveilling social media usage by citizens, was predictable – Democrats yawned, and House Republicans expressed shock and amazement.

The sad reality is that anyone who has followed government operations ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, knows that every federal, state and local government agency with even the slightest degree of law enforcement power is always looking for ways to gather more information on citizens. This has only become far worse since the Jan. 6 trouble on Capitol Hill.

A brief review of the legal authorities according to which the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) operates reveals that the Service in fact can be employed to investigate far more than mail theft or damage to postal facilities, which had been its long-standing and primary responsibility. For example, the Attorney General of the United States can direct Postal Inspectors to aid in enforcing any “laws of the United States.” All that is needed to send Postal Inspectors off on such missions is a decision by the Attorney General “that violations of such laws have a detrimental effect upon the operations of the Postal Service.”

In other words, according to authority already on the books, the USPIS can investigate whatever the attorney general wants it to investigate, so long as such investigations have something to do with negatively affecting some aspect of Postal Service “operations.” More troubling still, such broad, open-ended investigative power can be given to the USPIS in secret, and the Postal Service need not provide any answers to public inquiries about its surreptitious surveillance. Last week, for example, when asked about the Yahoo News revelations about the iCOP program, the USPIS declared dismissively that it “does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods, or tools.”

On April 22, the day after Yahoo News broke the story on the USPIS social media surveillance program, 32 GOP House members signed a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy demanding to know what was going on with the program. In keeping with the absolute partisanship within which all congressional business is conducted these days, not a single House Democrat signed the letter, notwithstanding that it touches directly on possible violations of citizens’ rights guaranteed by the First Amendment – something the Democrat Party once professed to care about.

Across the Capitol rotunda, also on April 22, members of a Senate committee were questioning three nominees whose names had been submitted by President Biden to serve as members of the USPS Board of Governors. Reflecting the Senate’s lack of interest in social media surveillance by the Postal Service, nary a question was raised about the matter by Republican or Democrat members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

This disinterest is consistent with how little all but a handful of senators care about the degree to which law enforcement agencies routinely undermine citizens’ privacy rights supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights. On the House side at least, 32 Republicans cared enough to send a letter of inquiry to the postmaster general.

Unfortunately, if past investigations are any guide, interest in the matter will soon fade and the Postal Service, in conjunction with innumerable other agencies at all levels of government, will settle back to their business as usual of gathering as much information, however they can on the social media and other communications of American citizens.

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

For the eight years I represented Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House, I was a member of the Financial Services Committee; a committee on which California Rep. Maxine Waters also served. It did not take long for me to learn that she is as mean-spirited as they come, a characteristic she wears proudly to this day.

Over the course of the past year, however, as violence, looting, and attacks on law enforcement officers spread across our country, Waters’ mean streak has become far more than a reason to avoid crossing her path in person. Her calls for demonstrators in Minneapolis and elsewhere to become ever “more confrontational” reveal Maxine Waters to be more than a deeply unpleasant individual, but rather a public menace, inciting mobs to violence as a new mini warlord for the Left.

While Waters might prefer for people to think that her bluster is the result of heat-of-the-moment passion, the reality is that it is all carefully planned political grandstanding, something she has perfected over decades of haranguing. Three decades ago, for example, as a freshman member of the House, Waters cheered on as mobs rampaged through south Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict. More than five dozen people died in those riots.

True to form, in 2020 as mobs ransacked businesses, police headquarters, and other government buildings in cities from Portland, Oregon to New York and Washington, DC, Waters has been in the forefront of urging continued confrontation against law enforcement and all manner of other targets of demonstrators’ ire. Last year’s rioting added up to $2 billion in damage to property and cost more than two dozen lives, making them the costliest riots in American history.

Not content with simply encouraging movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) to “confront” police “in the streets,” Waters injected herself directly into the Minneapolis trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin as the case was being sent to the jury. Her cries urging “confrontation” if the verdict was not “guilty, guilty, guilty” earned an unusually explicit rebuke from the judge presiding over the trial.

Waters remains unfazed by such pushback, insofar as she is safely ensconced in a heavily Democrat district in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Moreover, with Democrat leaders in both the House and the Senate trembling at the possibility of upsetting the leftwing extremists in their midst who wield a voice far larger than their numbers, Waters remains immune from being disciplined by Speaker Pelosi, her nominal boss. Actually, in the aftermath of Waters’ most recent exhortations, Pelosi publicly defended her.

The fact that Waters receives no punishment for exhorting people to confront police and “take to the streets,” highlights the grotesque double standard practiced by Democrats at the national level. Earlier this year, for example, House Democrats, lording their majority power over their GOP colleagues, stripped Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green of all her committee assignments as a form of punishment for sending some old social media posts to which Pelosi and other Democrats objected; this, even though Taylor Green publicly apologized for the objectionable posts, which were not by any reasoned analysis confrontational.

The hypocrisy so blatantly on display in the Maxine Waters imbroglio, and the notion that a high-ranking member of Congress can directly incite to violence and inject herself into the very workings of an ongoing criminal case and escape accountability for such dangerous actions, may account in part for why the Congress itself is not trusted by a strong majority of Americans (61% according to a recent Gallup survey).

Unfortunately, so long as Maxine Waters’ district remains prohibitively Democrat (she won with more than 71% of the vote in 2020), and so long as Democrat leaders in the Congress remain scared to death of open rebellion against them by the likes of Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, conservative-leaning citizens, along with small businesses and law enforcement officers across the country, will pay the price for the disgraceful behavior of this mini warlord of the Left.

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

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States was instituted by Article III of our Constitution as ratified by the states in 1788, many of Western civilization’s greatest legal minds have served as justices on that august bench. One of these exceptional jurists was America’s very first Chief Justice, John Marshall, who served from 1801 to 1835.

It was Marshall who, in 1805, authored an opinion that to this day remains a bedrock principle according to which our government, and indeed our very culture, has rested. In that seminal case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court declared that the final authority by which the constitutionality of any law passed by Congress and signed by the president is to be measured, is the federal judiciary, with the Supreme Court of the United States at its apex.

Over the ensuing 216 years, presidents, members of Congress, lower courts and citizens of all political stripes have complained – sometimes bitterly – when application of this principle of judicial review results in a decision with which they disagree. However, Marshall’s assertion that such process is essential for “the government of the United States” to remain “a government of laws, and not of men,” is at least as important today as it was in 1805.

Our 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was so angered by the Supreme Court’s decisions during his first four years in office declaring provisions of his “New Deal” to be unconstitutional, that in 1937 he launched a frontal attack on the independence of the court; a proposal that quickly became known as Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan.” FDR’s plan would have amended the Judiciary Act of 1869 that established the number of High Court justices (including the Chief Justice) at nine, to increase that number by permitting the president to appoint up to six additional justices for each justice over the age of seventy-and-one-half years old.

The nakedly partisan nature of Roosevelt’s move, to which even some members of Congress in his own party objected, resulted in the plan failing to be enacted into law. Despite this salutatory result, Roosevelt’s move did result in serious damage to the fabric of independence that always and eventually has undergirded the Court.

The seriousness of the threatened court packing, proposed by a very powerful and extremely popular president, was sufficient to accomplish FDR’s real goal, which was to so intimidate one or two of the sitting justices so they would have a change of heart concerning the constitutionality of principles underlying the New Deal. It worked. Within weeks of Roosevelt’s unveiling his court-packing plan in a nationwide radio address, one Justice (Owen Roberts) did a “180-degree turn” and decided in a key decision that the principles underlying the New Deal were constitutionally permissible after all.

Today, the same party that gave us Franklin Roosevelt is pressing to do precisely what their mentor did 84 years ago — intimidate the Supreme Court. While the precise manner by which today’s congressional Democrats are proposing to pack the High Court differs in detail from FDR’s (the House bill introduced last week simply expands from nine to 13 the number of justices), the goal is the same. Democrats hope to intimidate the court so that at least one or two of the more “conservative” justices become less likely to render decisions adverse to Biden’s agenda.

While Speaker Pelosi said publicly that she had no plans to bring this latest court-packing proposal to the floor for a vote, such rhetoric is of little consequence. The reality is that since 2019, in the wake of the horrendous confirmation battle the previous year over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination as an Associate Justice, senior Democrat senators, including now-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have been openly campaigning that if the “conservative” majority on the Court dares to issue opinions against key liberal programs, such as on abortion rights and gun control, those justices would “pay the price” (Schumer’s threat) and face some form of “restructuring” (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s words).

Whether any of the three associate justices appointed by former President Trump in particular will be swayed by this congressional bullying (Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly shown himself to be at best a “Sunshine Justice”) remains to be seen. But if any are thus moved, it will signal a new era of judicial cowardice has arrived.

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.