Posted on 10/22/2004 11:15:06 AM PDT by grundle
http://badnarik.org/newsfromthetrail.php?p=1478
STRAYING FROM THE HERD: BARR THE CONTRARIAN SAYS HE’S GOING LIBERTARIAN
October 22
by Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway
Defeat alters a politician. Some become permanent reservoirs of anger. Others simply crumple in the face of wholesale rejection.
Barr BadnarikBob Barr adapted. He became more interesting.
Perhaps you saw last night’s airing of the Atlanta Press Club/WPBA-TV debate on the proposed amendment to ban same-sex unions. Barr was one of six panelists — and the only one to upset audience expectations. The man who nearly chased Bill Clinton out of the White House declared Georgia’s gay-marriage amendment to be so poorly drafted that it should be kicked back to the Legislature for a re-write.
But for his razor-edged defeat by Paul Coverdell in 1992, in a runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination, it might have been Barr who we consider the father of the modern Georgia Republican party. Barr instead settled for Congress, until his 2002 defeat by GOP insider John Linder.
The former federal prosecutor is as conservative as ever. But no longer does he feel obliged to carry Republican water. Gay marriage is one bucket he’s declined — an issue of “no urgency,” he says. And George W. Bush is another.
He won’t vote for Bush. But he won’t vote for John Kerry, either. “I have serious questions about both presidential candidates,” he said.
Does that mean he’s voting Libertarian?
“Yep,” Barr said Thursday. That would be Michael Badnarik.
It’s not unexpected. Barr spoke at the Libertarian national convention in Atlanta in May. Libertarians note that Barr has invited Joseph Seehusen, the party’s executive director, to be a guest on his radio program two days before the presidential election.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Bush the Rancher has been roping in the hard conservatives who have strayed over issues such as the deficit, the Patriot Act, even the war in Iraq. On Tuesday, Pat Buchanan gave his blessing, however unenthusiastic, to Bush.
“A presidential election is a Hatfield-McCoy thing, a tribal affair. No matter the quarrels inside your family, when the shooting starts, you come home to your own,” Buchanan writes in American Conservative magazine.
Barr noted Buchanan’s decision to be lassoed. “I was surprised,” he said. “I was disappointed.”
The Patriot Act isn’t Barr’s sole disagreement with the Bush administration. But it’s the most emblematic. “Conservatives of all people ought to stand up for the belief that there needs to be limits on executive power. [The Bush administration] says that terror trumps everything. To me, nothing should trump the Bill of Rights.”
Barr doesn’t like the way the Patriot Act whittles away at the “probable cause” standard that justifies government snooping on citizens. He doesn’t like the circumventing of judges via “administrative subpoenas.”
This last point is where Barr admits a link between the fight over gay marriage and the Patriot Act. Republicans assert the need for a constitutional ban on gay marriage with cries of “activist judges.” And Barr admits he’s seen more than a few of that kind. But to demand that judges should be subservient to a legislature or an executive “on everything” is just as dangerous, he said.
“You need an independent judiciary.”
I'll sign up for that program!
Barr is absolutely right on that issue.
The only question for a true conservative is whether to vote for a man that knowingly violates the constitution.
make mine rare
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