Bob Barr

For the Major League Baseball player, see Bob Barr (baseball).

Bob Barr
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia's 7th district
In office 1995–2003
Preceded by	Buddy Darden
Succeeded by	John Linder
Personal details
Political party	Republican (while in office) Libertarian (currently)
Spouse	Jeri Dobbin

Robert L. (Bob) Barr, Jr. (born November 5, 1948) is an attorney and a former member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia. Barr represented Georgia's 7th congressional district from 1995 to 2003. Barr is now a life member of the Libertarian Party serving on the National Committee.

Prior to Barr's work in the United States Congress, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to serve as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. He served from 1986 until 1990. He sat on the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association from 2001 to 2007. Barr achieved significant notoriety as one of the leaders of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Barr is currently running for the Libertarian nomination for President of the United States in the 2008 election.

Early life

Barr was born in Iowa City, Iowa. His parents served in the military, and Barr spent many years with them in Iran. He attended the University of Southern California and later earned a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1977. From 1971 to 1978, he served as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. He retired to work as a private lawyer, and in 1986, was appointed by President Reagan to be U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, in which post he served until 1990. From 1990 to 1991, he was president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

Political career

Barr ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992, losing the Republican primary to Paul Coverdell. In 1994, he was elected to the U.S. House, upsetting six-term Democrat Buddy Darden. He was reelected three more times. Although his district had a small Democratic majority, its residents were fairly conservative.

Political positions

Barr was one of the most conservative members of the House. However, he displayed a slight libertarian streak, and was considered one of the strongest supporters of civil liberties among House Republicans. He voted for the Patriot Act, but only after his amendments adding "sunset clauses" were added to the final bill. Barr played a similar role during the debate over Bill Clinton's Comprehensive Anti-terrorism Act of 1995, crafting pro-civil liberties amendments to the original text. He now publicly regrets his Patriot Act vote.

He is best known for his role as one of the House managers during the Clinton impeachment trial. It was Barr who first introduced a resolution directing Judiciary Committee to inquire into impeachment proceedings -- months before the Lewinsky scandal came to light. Chief among the concerns Barr cited at the time was apparent obstruction of Justice Department investigations into Clinton campaign fundraising from foreign sources, chiefly China.

Barr took a lead in legislative debate concerning same-sex marriage. He authored and sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, a law enacted in 1996 which states that only marriages that are between a man and a woman can be federally recognized, and individual states may choose not to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state. However, he does not support the Federal Marriage Amendment, citing states' rights reasons.

Barr was a strong supporter of the War on Drugs and adamantly opposed the legalization of medical marijuana. He successfully inserted an amendment in a District of Columbia funding bill that blocked the implementation of a medical marijuana initiative that had passed a referendum. He remarked that marijuana "has no place in medicine, no place in pain relief, and ... no place around our children." However, he opposed a provision prohibiting the dissemination of information about the manufacture of illegal drugs in the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, citing free speech reasons. His position on medical marijuana has changed dramatically as he continued to work on civil liberties issues after leaving Congress.

In Congress, he also controversially proposed that the Pentagon ban the practice of Wicca in the military.

Prior to the 2002 elections, the Democratic-controlled Georgia legislature split Barr's 7th District during the redistricting process, even though Georgia had gained two seats as a result of the latest census. Barr's home in Smyrna was drawn into the heavily Democratic 4th District, then represented by Cynthia McKinney. Most of his former territory was reconfigured into the 11th District and drawn to be more Democratic. He chose to challenge fellow Republican Congressman John Linder in a district that, while retaining Barr's district number (the 7th), contained more of Linder's former territory. Barr was thus heavily defeated in the primary. His old district was won by Phil Gingrey, a Republican.

Barr is also a supporter of the Fair Tax and repealing the 16th Amendment, which gives the US Congress the right to levy an income tax.

Controversy

In 1999, during the impeachment trial of President Clinton, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt offered money to anyone who could provide evidence that a prominent Republican had engaged in an extramarital affair. According to the American Journalism Review, "Barr was one of 13 House Republicans chosen to act as prosecutors in Clinton's Senate trial. Barr, Flynt's investigators found, "was guilty of king-size hypocrisy": An outspoken foe of abortion, the Georgia lawmaker had acquiesced to his then-wife having an abortion in 1983. And he had invoked a legal privilege during his 1985 divorce proceeding so he could refuse to answer questions on whether he'd cheated on his second wife with the woman who is now his third."

Post-congressional career

Since leaving Congress in 2003, Barr has become a vocal opponent of the Patriot Act and has stated that he regrets voting for it, claiming that the Bush Administration has used it to further erode due process even in nonterrorism matters. He claims that the Clinton administration did much of the same thing. In 2005--the year the Patriot Act was due for renewal he helped found an organization called Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, a bipartisan group dedicated to eliminating aspects of the Patriot Act that could potentially affect law-abiding citizens rather than terrorists, and to "restore traditional checks and balances on government power so the country can effectively fight terror without sacrificing the rights of innocent Americans, rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution." Barr still serves as the group's chairman.

Departure from Republican Party

More recently, Barr has become a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union, sometimes doing paid consulting on privacy issues. In the 2004 Presidential election, Barr abandoned the Republican Party and publicly endorsed the presidential ticket of the United States Libertarian Party. He briefly wrote a regular column for Creative Loafing, a weekly newspaper in the Southeast.

Barr has been a vocal opponent of President Bush's claim of authorization to wiretap transnational phone calls without individual judicial license. He has said, "What’s wrong with it is several-fold. One, it’s bad policy for our government to be spying on American citizens through the National Security Agency. Secondly, it’s bad to be spying on Americans without court oversight. And thirdly, it’s bad to be spying on Americans apparently in violation of federal laws against doing it without court order."

In January of 2006, to emphasize the bipartisan nature of the event, Barr planned on introducing Al Gore at a speech cosponsored by the Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy to address what they called the "NSA Spying Scandal", although technical problems interfered with Barr's live satellite feed.

In 2006 he debated the architect of PATRIOT Act, Viet Dinh, on terrorism and privacy issues.

On December 12, 2006, he became a regional representative on the Libertarian National Committee, representing the Party's Southeast Region. Since joining the Libertarian Party, Barr has reversed his previous stance favoring the War on Drugs and is now a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project. According to Barr,

I, over the years, have taken a very strong stand on drug issues, but in light of the tremendous growth of government power since 9/11, it has forced me and other conservatives to go back and take a renewed look at how big and powerful we want the government to be in people’s lives.

He is one of the four founders of the American Freedom Agenda, which is described as "a coalition established to restore checks and balances and civil liberties protections under assault by the executive branch." The American Freedom Agenda has established a 10-point Freedom Pledge for presidential candidates to confirm their commitment to civil liberties. He is also a member of the Constitution Project's bipartisan Liberty and Security Committee.[2]

Talk radio

Barr hosts a conservative talk radio show on Radio America called Bob Barr's Laws of the Universe, on which he has had guests including Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Oliver North, and Robert Bork. His first "law of the Universe" is that "the world is full of idiots", and he features an "Idiot of the Week" on his show, along with a top ten of "Idiots of the Year" selected from the Idiots of the Week. His Idiot for the Year for 2005 was the city of Newark, New Jersey, for using a federal anti-terrorism grant to purchase ten garbage trucks, explaining that the trucks could “be used as barriers to protect possible targets” in a time of crisis.[3]

Other activities

In 2003, Barr served on the defense team for White Supremacist Chester Doles.

Barr is a commentator on political and social issues and is chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation's '21st Century Center for Privacy and Freedom.' In Spring 2008, Barr will teach a course on privacy rights at Kennesaw State University.

In 2008, in his column "The Barr Code", he lambasted the new policy of Boston police of allowing warrantless search for firearms in teenagers' homes.

He appeared in the mock documentary Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. He met with "Borat" (portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen) in the United States Capitol where he was given cheese that Borat described as being made from his wife's breast milk.

2008 presidential campaign

In early 2008, rumors circulated that Barr was considering jumping into the Libertarian Party presidential nomination contest. A draft Bob Barr petition was started, as well as a Facebook group. The Washington Times later caught wind of it. In March, Barr confirmed that he was considering such a campaign.

On April 5th, he launched a presidential exploratory committee and campaign website. The domain name of the campaign site was previously that of on an online petition to draft Bob Barr, and was donated to the campaign. Early polling had Barr leading among candidates for the Libertarian nomination, but without enough delegates to take the convention on the first round of voting.

External links

• Barr's Official Website
• 2008 Campaign website
• Candidate profile at Project Vote Smart
• The FBI's Pre-Emptive Interrogations Of "Possible" Demonstrators — Article by Barr on Findlaw.com
• Barr's Article Archive at the American Conservative Union
• Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances
• Posts by Bob Barr at Huffington Post
• Ex-Rep. Barr Quits GOP for Libertarians
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress