Bob Barr

Bob Barr (born November 5, 1948, Iowa City, Iowa, U.S.) is an American politician and attorney who served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1995–2003). He was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 2008.

Barr, whose father was a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, lived in various cities throughout the world, including Lima and Baghdad. In 1966 he graduated from the Community High School in Tehrān. He then studied at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1970), and George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (M.A., 1972), before receiving his J.D. from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (1977). Between 1971 and 1978 he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Barr then moved to Georgia, where he practiced as a criminal defense lawyer until 1986, when he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia by Pres. Ronald Reagan. He left the position in 1990 to become president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm (1990–91), and in 1992 he was unsuccessful in his bid for the U.S. Senate, losing narrowly in the primary.

In 1994 Barr ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and defeated the incumbent, six-term Democrat George Darden. As a freshman representative, he sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, and he quickly became recognized as one of the most conservative members of the House. Barr later became a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, and he helped lead the impeachment efforts against Pres. Bill Clinton in 1998–99. Barr was reelected to the House three times—in 1996, 1998, and 2000—but he lost the Republican primary in 2002 to John Linder.

In 2004 Barr founded Liberty Strategies LLC, a consulting firm based in Atlanta. Two years later he announced that he had joined the Libertarian Party, citing disillusionment with the Republican Party over the increasing size of government and the erosion of civil liberties under the administration of Pres. George W. Bush. He served as the Libertarian National Committee’s regional representative for southeastern states, and in May 2008 Barr announced his bid for the Libertarian nomination for that year’s presidential election. During the Libertarian National Convention on May 26, 2008, Barr endured six rounds of voting before finally being nominated as the party’s candidate, with Wayne Allyn Root selected as his vice-presidential candidate. Barr and Root received about 0.4 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election.

Barr subsequently rejoined the Republican Party, and in 2014 he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives. However, he was easily defeated in the party’s primary runoff.

In 2004 Barr published The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton.