Bob Barr

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 the 7th District of Georgia, from 1995 to 2003.

Barr, a member of the Republican Party, is an adamant proponent of the War on Drugs. Prior to his work in 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. Despite being an ardent drug warrior, Barr opposed the RAVE Act. He also is a staunch supporter of the right to bear arms. Barr achieved significant fame as one of the leaders of the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton.

Barr has been embroiled in controversy several times during his career. In 1998 he delivered the keynote speech at the national convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is a white supremacist; he later stated he had not known the group's views until after the speech. His speech did not deal with race, however, and Barr publicly distanced himself from the council. Barr has also suffered attacks for his conservative stance on family values, which left-wing periodical Mother Jones deemed hypocritical: "Married three times and embroiled in a messy court battle with his second wife over his failure to pay child support, Barr had been photographed in 1992 licking whipped cream off two buxom young women's [breasts and nipples]. And this from the man who would later sponsor the Defense of Marriage Act." In the wake of Barr's adamant support for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, porn mogul Larry Flynt paid his second wife, Gail Vogel Barr, for details of the child support battle and of her abortion. This caused significant political troubles for Barr, noted for his strong pro-life stance.

Prior to the 2002 elections, the Democratic-controlled Georgia legislature split Barr's 7th district during the redistricting process. He chose to challenge fellow Republican Congressman John Linder for the new 7th district, which included portions of the 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 11th (where Linder was the incumbent) districts. Barr lost in the primary and Rep. Linder was then elected in the general election.

While Congressman Barr supported and voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, he was one of the chief architects of the 'sunset clause' which requires most new powers granted to the government under the act to be renewed by Congress in 2005. Since leaving Congress in 2003, he has become a vocal opponent of the Patriot Act and has stated that he regrets voting for it, and opposes any attempt by Congress to renew many of its provisions in 2005.

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 Atlanta.

Regarding Bush's domestic spying:

BARR: 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.

External links

• Barr's Official Website
• The FBI's Pre-Emptive Interrogations Of "Possible" Demonstrators - Article by Barr on Findlaw.com