Cover Story: 7th Congressional District

A rock and a hard place. Death and taxes. The devil and the deep blue sea. Barr and Linder.
It’s simply a fact of life that we are forced sometimes to make difficult choices between undesirable alternatives.

Bob Barr and John Linder, staunch Republicans both, are arguably Georgia’s two most conservative congressmen. Their votes have netted them near perfect marks from the American Conservative Union and the NRA — and abysmal ratings from the League of Conservation Voters and other liberal groups.

Scorecards aside, both candidates lean far more to the right than the average resident of the admittedly conservative 7th District. But because it’s a solidly GOP district, the election really will be decided by a narrower group of voters in the Aug. 20 Republican primary, meaning one of these two guys will be going back to Washington.

The reflexive response among liberals and even many moderate Republicans would be to boot Barr from office, where he’s worked tirelessly to earn a national reputation as a bomb-thrower and champion of gun nuts.

Consider this cringe-inducing litany of Barr endeavors: calling for Bill Clinton’s impeachment long before the term “blue dress” became a late-night punch line; introducing the Defense of Marriage Act, which recognizes only heterosexual unions as legitimate; helping to stop Wiccan ceremonies on military bases; leading the charge to repeal the assault weapons ban and defending his extremist vision of a locked-and-loaded America even in the wake of the Columbine massacre.

Barr also is so fervently anti-drug that he once sponsored a bill blocking D.C. election officials from even tallying the results of a non-binding local referendum on legalizing medical marijuana use.

In terms Jerry Seinfeld could grasp, Barr is the Bizarro Cynthia McKinney. He’s a shrill, reactionary loose cannon whose over-the-top grandstanding on hot-button topics seems calculated to win points from his fringe-dwelling supporters, but mainly succeeds in embarrassing mainstream Georgians.

Like McKinney, Barr seems less interested in the complexities of thoughtful legislation than in staking out ideological turf on largely symbolic issues that have little real impact on the lives of folks back home, such as banning “partial-birth” abortions or posting the Ten Commandments in court houses.

Linder, on the other hand, is about the process of lawmaking, serving as he does on the Rules Committee, which determines the bills that make it to the floor and how long they’re debated before being voted on. Although, like Barr, he qualifies as an archconservative on social issues and he’s even more actively partisan, his personal style is much subtler; he’s more comfortable making back-room deals than shouting his position from the Capitol steps.

In fact, where one particularly thorny controversy is concerned, he claims to have no position at all. The Northern Arc is probably the single most important quality-of-life issue for his potential constituents — the proposed highway is almost completely contained within the 7th District — and it’s a significant economic question mark for the entire metro area, yet Linder cravenly contends that he has no opinion on the matter. Not only that, but he tells CL that, because it’s not a federal road project, voters don’t really care what their prospective congressman thinks about the Arc. Hogwash.

Barr may have flawed reasoning for supporting the road plan — he apparently buys into the argument that the Arc is needed to help move east-west traffic — but at least he’s not afraid to share his views on this or any other subject.

Which brings us to the reason that — and we never imagined we’d be saying this — voters should resist their instinct to dump Bob Barr. The fact is, for all his pandering to right-wing interests, Barr has emerged as one of Congress’ strongest advocate of civil liberties.

At a time when even many Democrats are rubber-stamping the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism agenda, one guy who’s not afraid to goosestep, er, we mean, march out of the mainstream has shown the courage to criticize John Ashcroft’s thought-police tactics. Without mincing words, he attacked the attorney general’s call for citizen snitches as having fascist implications. He also pressed for the position of “privacy czar” to be created within the proposed Department of Homeland Security to help ensure Americans aren’t subject to improper surveillance by their government.

If you want to preserve your right to pack serious heat or your constitutional protections from unreasonable search and seizure, secret arrest and trial, and covert snooping, Bob Barr’s your man.

We know this sounds crazy, but we’re asking you to vote for the right-wing firearm fetishist — it’s important.

The 7th District stretches across north metro Atlanta from Gwinnett to Paulding counties. Barring an unforeseen scandal, the nominee will face token opposition from Democrat Michael Berlon in November.