Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed John Harris, the founder and CEO of Tennessee Firearms association to the newsmaker line to comment on the Tennessee General Assembly’s lack of awareness of the Second Amendment.
Leahy: We are joined on the newsmaker line right now by our friend of many years, John Harris. John is the founder and CEO of the Tennessee Firearms Association. This is a group that defends the Second Amendment here in Tennessee and has done so for 28 years. Good morning, John. Thanks for joining us.
Harris: Good morning. Thank you.
Leahy: John, what’s going on with the Tennessee General Assembly? Are you happy, or are you displeased?
Harris: I will say I am not surprised by the cavernous lack of constitutional stewardship shown by our Senate this week.
Leahy: That’s quite a phrase. You call it the cavernous lack of constitutional awarenesses. Did I get that?
Harris: Stewardship.
Leahy: Cavernous lack. That’s pretty good. That’s a great phrase.
Harris: It’s unfortunate. It really is.
Leahy: Tell me about it. What do you mean by that, John?
Harris: We have, discussed and pushed through TFA now for two decades or better, the concept of Tennessee’s lack of true constitutional carry. And a fact that clearly dates back in our statutes to at least 1801. And the Tennessee legislature, particularly under the control of the Republicans for the last 13 years, and the Republican leadership, particularly in the Senate, have used every opportunity they had to block and stonewall efforts to try to move Tennessee towards true constitutional carry, which is simply an environment that says if you can legally possess a firearm, it just simply isn’t a crime for you to carry it in public.
Leahy: Wherever you want in public.
Harris: Right. It’s what most of us think of it as the free exercise of a constitutional right, and we don’t have it. We’ve never had it in Tennessee with respect to the Second Amendment.
Leahy: I’m just surprised that you constantly think that here in the United States, we’ve got to have our constitutional rights. (Chuckles)
Harris: I feel like I’m talking to the leadership in China sometimes as opposed to elected officials in a constitutional republic because they really don’t care what the governing document that restricts their authority as elected officials says.
They do what they want to do and they listen to both Governor Haslam’s and Governor Lee’s administrations, which clearly have demonstrated in the hearings this week as one of the stories on The Tennessee Star this week, showed quite clearly that they don’t care what the Constitution says, nor do they really even understand what the Constitution says in terms of the existence of this right, and what the right means, despite the fact that there are now within the last 15 years, three U.S. Supreme Court decisions have laid it out quite clearly what this concept stands for.
Leahy: John, do you think that you and I ought to give them, copies of the book that you helped co-author with me, The Guide To The Constitution and the Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students? I think our kids that go to the Constitution Bee probably know the Constitution better than some of our leaders in the Tennessee General Assembly.
Harris: That would be a marvelous idea. It’s sad that it would be necessary, but in this particular context, we’re talking about a provision of the Constitution that is literally one sentence, and the operative phrase is less than 10 words. They can’t get it.
Leahy: Shall not be infringed.
Harris: Yes.
Leahy: Shall not be infringed. Actually, that is four words, shall not be infringed.
Harris: No doubt about it. It’s clearly a disposition and Governor Lee’s leading the charge, but he’s got a lot of support, particularly in the Senate with Randy McNally and Jack Johnson and Todd Gardenhire, that they don’t want this particular constitutional right to be recognized or understood in Tennessee.
Leahy: Is that bill dead in the water now?
Harris: Here’s what happened. The bill came through the house last Wednesday and came out of the House Civil Justice Committee in a format that we were substantially happy with. There had been an amendment put on it that we did not like because it created a conflict among four different statutes.
But otherwise, it would’ve done two, or three things of necessity. It would’ve eliminated a sentence in the Tennessee statutes that says it’s a crime to carry a firearm with the intent to go armed. That gets us substantially to the base concept of constitutional carry.
The next thing it did was it would have provided that the handgun-only restrictions under Tennessee law for permits and permitless carries would be repealed. All of those references to handguns would be substituted with references to the phrase firearms, which again, in the constitutional context, are not limited to firearms, but they certainly aren’t limited to handguns.
So it would’ve been a move in the right direction to, say, firearms. Then the third thing it would’ve done is it would have changed the permitting age and the carry in general, from 21 down to 18. And that’s not really a change because the state has executed an agreement to be submitted in federal court in East Tennessee that already says that.
For example, Senator Johnson’s bill from 2021 to impose that restriction on its face violates the Second Amendment, 14th amendment and constitutes a federal civil rights violation.
Reducing it to 18 statutorily cleans up the code, but it’s something the state has already agreed to it’s new Attorney General is completely unconstitutional and can’t be enforced anyhow. And so that’s what came through the House and is headed to the House floor, and Speaker Sexton signed onto that last week as a sponsor. So we feel comfortable that it’s at least going to pass in the House.
Then yesterday in Senate judiciary, we’ve got a committee of people appointed by Randy McNally to serve on that committee. Two of the nine are Democrats from Memphis, at least seven Republicans, and you’ve got to have five affirmative votes to get a bill out of that committee.
Senator John Stevens has done a good job presenting this bill and advocating that we now have a responsibility in the legislature to follow the Supreme Court’s Bruen laws carrying the bill. That was the companion version of what came through the house last week.
And we had been told that of the seven Republicans, only three, including Stevens himself, who serves on the committee, Senator Kerry Roberts and Senator Don White were willing to vote for the bill. And that left Todd Gardenhire, the chairman, John Lundberg, Paul Rose, and Trent Taylor.
Four Republicans that would support that bill were listening predominantly to representatives from TBI in the Department of Safety who were sent over there, according to Elizabeth Stroker’s own words, Governor Bill Lee, to oppose the legislation.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, everybody who’s paying any attention at all has heard the story that Alvin Bragg is about to indict Former President Donald Trump. If anybody’s paying attention, it’s just ridiculous charges. But the ridiculousness of the charges is not the point. It’s the overreach of the prosecutorial state as the general matter because Biden has called for Congress to give the administrative branch more powers to punish bankers for bad judgment, not for crimes, but for simply making, for simply having bad judgment.
Now, who gets to define bad judgment? The administrative state is to define bad judgment. Biden recently, I think yesterday vetoed his first bill, which the bill said that for retirement accounts, those who are in a fiduciary capacity cannot use ESG as a measuring stick and that they have to exercise their fiduciary responsibility and get what they believe to be the best strategy to get the best returns for their customers. Biden vetoed that bill.
Biden wants financial people who have a fiduciary responsibility, he actually wants them to put ESG, therefore the administrative state, ahead of the needs of the actual customer, and the actual retiree. And so what we’re seeing here across the entire spectrum is more and more power going to the state.
Should Alvin Bragg, if he brings these charges, be investigated? Yes, he should. Should he be investigated to determine whether or not there’s collusion between his office or any other office in the state of New York and various bureaus in Washington, D.C., or the DNC or Biden’s campaign?
But there, there needs to be a thorough investigation to determine who else influenced the decision and if he chooses to make that decision. But the bigger theme here is is what is the power of the administrative state.
We recently read, literally in the last couple of days, that UBS, which is a giant bank in Europe, has taken over Credit Suisse and bought the stock for, I think it was in the story I read for $3 billion, which is not much for a bank that’s that big, but that bank has lots of trouble.
What was not well reported was that there were bondholders who held $17 billion of bonds in Credit Suissee, and they were wiped out 100 percent. Normally when you buy a bond you are in a liquidation stack, you are always ahead of the common stockholders because a bond is a debt instrument, a common stock, and has a fixed rate of return and it has a fixed upside.
And because it has a fixed rate of return and a fixed upside, which means you get your principal back, those bonds are senior to the stock. But in this case, the regulators just on their own wiped out the bonds, avoided the contracts that are inherent in the bonds and rewarded the common stockholders instead. This is what we’re seeing now.
I don’t think that was the administrative state here in the United States. I think it was probably the central banks in Europe that approved that deal and pushed it through, and really forced UBS to take over Credit Suisse. And there’s probably behind the scenes a wink, wink, nod, nod.
If it turns out that the losses that Credit Suisse has are greater than the $17 billion of bonds plus the equity that we wiped out in the process also, but not all of it, then we’ll figure out at the back end how to make you whole.
And that’s what is going on now. Those who are big and close to political power, are the ones who are benefiting from the political power, which is not in the interest of the average person. And so it goes. And so we’ll see what Alvin Bragg chooses to do.
I don’t believe Congress, I don’t believe the Republicans will give Biden power to punish bankers for just judgment, especially when you recognize that the regulators are the ones who are supposed to be regulating the banks and regulating their risk.
And so, did Biden ask for authority to punish the regulators? No, he didn’t ask for that because they’re members of the administrative state and they’re members on the power side of the equation.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed One America News political correspondent Neil W McCabe to the newsmaker line to breakdown the 2024 Republican presidential candidates.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, top gov tracker, our very good friend Neil W. McCabe, with One America News Network. Good morning, Neil.
McCabe: Michael, Crom, very good to be with you, man.
Leahy: So Neil, Saturday morning former President Trump puts out this tweet: I expect to be arrested by the left-wing district attorney in Manhattan on Tuesday on these trumped-up charges. Almost immediately, our buddy, Vivek Ramaswamy put out a tweet calling on the DA in New York to not make these charges because they were in fact, trumped up.
The Trump campaign made this a litmus test for the other candidates. Some of them ultimately came in and backed him but others didn’t. And your buddy Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida had a, oh, I don’t know, a weak defense of Trump, wouldn’t you say?
McCabe: (Chuckles) He checked the box.
Leahy: He checked the box. But what he didn’t say was that Donald Trump was unhappy with that response. And then he had this social media posting on Truth Social late Monday night where he said DeSantis is struggling. He’s probably gonna be behind young Vivek Ramaswamy in the polls when they come up. What do you make of that?
McCabe: Michael, we learned when we were doing the Breitbart polls together in 2016, and this is from the words of Pat Caddell, Trump wins on the issues, Trump does not win on personality. And Pat, I don’t know if he had this rant with you, but he had a rant one night and basically told me, I’m going to Trump Tower to meet with Bannon and tell Bannon that if Trump keeps making it a personality contest between him and Hillary, he will lose.
He needs to talk about Syrian refugees. He needs to talk about building a wall. He needs to talk about defending gun rights. And I think this is the problem with Trump because more than any other politician around today, it’s personality and issues. And there are a lot of politicians who have no personality, but they’re all issues. And there are some guys who are all personality.
But with Trump, it’s this constant battle. And I think the real sort of subtext of what’s happened in the last month with Trump versus DeSantis is that for the first time, DeSantis is reacting to Trump, not the other way around. I think the DeSantis people have had to move up their timetable to respond to this thing in Manhattan.
And you also saw DeSantis, a week or so ago basically responding to Trump’s criticism where he never really did it before. He basically ignored him. And Monday he had a thing in Panama City and the DeSantis people were calling around telling people, hey you might want to cover this thing in Panama City because there’ll be some availability for questions.
I think that the DeSantis people were shocked that it turned so badly against them. What regular Republicans want is, they just want everybody to rally around a Republican who’s getting sniped at.
The last thing I’ll say about this, Mike I guess on this rant though, is that in the midterms for 2022, we saw the breakup of the marriage inside the Republican Party between the staffers, the consultants, the leaders, and the conservatives because you had the staffers, the consultants, and the leadership working against conservatives who were the nominees. And on Wednesday morning, they were ecstatic.
They were cheering that so many conservatives and MAGA candidates lost and for good or for bad, right? If you have a party, everybody has a primary, and then everyone supports the nominee. If people in your party are actively working against your nominee, that is not a party anymore.
Leahy: You’re down there in Tallahassee?
McCabe: Yes.
Leahy: You’ve been down there for several months, and I think you’re still working on that exclusive interview with Ron DeSantis. I see that your buddy Piers Morgan…
McCabe: Wait a minute. I spoke to him. I spoke to him for eight minutes about Hurricane Ian. So there you go.
Leahy: You got the eight minutes. Your buddy Piers Morgan went down and spent an hour with him in the mansion there and had an interview that’s gonna air on Fox Nation Thursday. DeSantis is trying to distinguish himself from Trump and criticized Trump’s style. Is that a winning approach for DeSantis?
McCabe: It’s the only lane available to him because he recognizes the Trump dichotomy, which is personality and issues. So he can’t go after Trump on issues. He has to go after Trump on personality, which is a mistake. If you attack Trump on personality, you will lose.
The guy has to make a case so he agrees with Trump on all the issues. Trump endorsed him and made him the governor of Florida. Trump was nice to him and considerate to him after he was the governor of Florida and did whatever he could for him.
And even after DeSantis’s people started sniping at Trump, he continued to be nice to him. And so you have to ask Governor DeSantis, why are you working so hard to block Trump from being president of the United States just so you can be president of the United States?
Leahy: I think the argument would be DeSantis would have a better chance of beating Joe Biden. What are your thoughts on that?
McCabe: People tell me, we’re really tired of all this Trump static and it’s just too much. There’s just too much noise. He jumbles everything up and makes everything crazy. And we need a guy who’s calm. A calm conservative.
I can tell you, DeSantis is not the guy who calms the water. (Leahy chuckles) He banned black studies from AP black studies in high schools. He’s going after the drag queens.
Leahy: He didn’t ban it. He said that version of it wasn’t gonna work
McCabe: The AP course is banned. And he said, you know what, when AP said, hey, we don’t think the governor’s right about this. The governor says we might just throw out the SAT too. The governor has said he will throw out the SAT if the college board doesn’t behave itself.
He also took 50 homeless migrants from Texas and told them they were gonna have paradise in Martha’s Vineyard. He videotaped it so he could use it in campaign commercials and give it to Fox. I’m not saying it wasn’t a funny prank. Don’t tell me he’s the guy who’s going to calm everything down and not have static.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio for the first edition of Aaron’s Analysis.
AARON GULBRANSEN:
I have a simple exhortation for the audience and a lot of you do this already, but I think it’s very important to note when it comes to news and politics. Always think and dig deeper. Pay attention. Most of the people talking in politics, speaking, messaging, and creating messaging are doing so with a specific aim and goal in mind and want you to act accordingly.
You, the audience, have your duty to always ask why and what they are aiming for. Because this message is very often self-serving and also deceptive. The motivation in politics is almost never what the stated purpose is. If you barely pay attention, you will get fooled and act and speak accordingly.
A perfect example of this is the failed Russia Gate and the accusations against Donald Trump. If you were to rely upon what the members of the left, the media, and former Obama administration officials were saying on TV, you would’ve believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin.
If you go went and read the congressional committees and paid attention and watched their testimony, you saw that they were lying on television and Trump did not collude with Putin. Even right now, in a slightly different way, you’re seeing a lot of self-serving messaging on the Trump indictment.
Obviously, coming from the left, they believe that Donald Trump should go to jail because their hatred is blinding them. But also because we are in the middle of a campaign contest for the presidency, you are seeing Trump’s supporters pile on and demand fielty from opponents of Donald Trump or potential opponents of Donald Trump in the Republican primary.
Another scenario where messaging has been deceptive is when you had a former candidate for the RNC chair which happened several months ago where Harmeet Dhillon was talking about how she was the conservative outsider and she was going to take the party back to grassroots. She made over $800,000 from the Republican National Committee as an attorney.
Deceptive. Even today, at the local level, you have candidates running for office and chairman in counties like Williamson, Sumner County, and several other places as well, where they talk about the various things that the party is going to do once they take over, take over the school board and take over this body and that party.
The role of the Republican party and this is not messaging, this is just very true, is to get Republican nominees elected. The same thing goes for the Democrat Party. These parties structure which is several different things than outside groups like mine and others. So when you’re hearing messaging very often, ask yourself, what’s the truth here?
Take things to their logical conclusion. Why is the messenger saying this? And what are they looking for? Are they looking to simply win an election and they’ll say anything to get there, or are they looking to make somebody else look bad?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this analysis:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Thuan Vo.
Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio to discuss Tennessee Faith and Freedom Coalition goals and the expected swift passage of modified abortion trigger ban in Senate next week.
Leahy: We welcome in studio, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report and all-star panelist, Aaron Gulbransen and also the Tennessee state director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. How much longer do you anticipate the Tennessee General Assembly will remain in session?
Gulbransen: Everybody tells me probably the first week in May.
Leahy: We’ve got probably, what, five or six more weeks left, right?
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: These sessions have an ebb and flow to them, right?
Gulbransen: They do, especially at the beginning, right? You’re, they’re not doing a lot on Mondays. Then, as of late, they do a lot on Mondays, but they’re typically not in session on Fridays. And they have their floor. This will expand as it goes on, but, they’ve typically had their floor sessions early in the morning on Thursdays in both Houses, and they get out of town.
Leahy: They did. I think they accomplished a lot early on with the prohibition of gender mutilation for those under the age of 18 and with the bill that prohibited sexually suggestive public shows where kids attended adult cabaret shows on public property.
Gulbransen: Adult cabaret shows on public property and also where children may be.
Leahy: They got that done.
Gulbransen: For those of you lefties in the audience, because there’s so many of you, I say sarcastically, listening to this show, the talking points on the left have been just so bizarre on SB 3.
Leahy: SB 3 being…
Gulbransen: The adult cabaret show ban on public property. And in front of kids they’ve tried to twist it and say, oh, you’re banning drag shows. You can’t do Shakespeare in the park anymore. And it’s just ridiculous empty rhetoric.
And of course, by revving up their people, the General Assembly got flooded based on that. And that, of course, was Senate Majority leader Jack Johnson’s bill. He’s had a great session. He was on the two bills we just mentioned; he was the Senate prime sponsor.
There is also legislation he sponsored passed that made some protections against government overreach on COVID, permanent. Which obviously is very important to me and most of us listening.
It was a good session for Leader Johnson. Of course, on the adult cabaret show ban, Chris Todd in the House deserves a lot of credit too.
Leahy: Chris has emerged as quite a leader there. There are a couple of other bills out there, though. There’s this controversial bill but it shouldn’t be controversial, but the proposal to make the Duck River a scenic river.
Apparently, there is a group that wants to turn parts near the Duck River in Maury County into a landfill. That’s turned out to be fairly contentious. I don’t know if you’ve tracked that particular one.
Gulbransen: No, because unfortunately, the Tennessee Faith and Freedom have nothing to do with that, those sorts of issues.
Leahy: Good point. So here’s my take on the Tennessee General Assembly right now. I think it started off very strongly. And now in part because of the controversy surrounding Lieutenant Governor McNally, it seems to be bogging down toward the end. Your thoughts?
Gulbransen: I think so. I think they were so hot and heavy and got a lot accomplished very quickly that it’s at the point where, okay, where do we go? Or a lot of the very important issues they’re working on, they’re not getting a lot of media attention.
Last night the House passed with 83 votes in favor of the modification of the state’s abortion trigger ban. Ultimately after a lot of public pressure and a lot of work by a lot of different people, a very narrow modification was made. They removed the affirmative defense clause in there. For those of you who don’t know what that means…
Leahy: Add me to that list. (Chuckles)
Gulbransen: You’ll see this in a lot of legislation and laws on the books in the state, especially on gun carry laws. It’s basically as some would say, an arcane way of saying you can’t do this except X, Y, and Z. And if you find yourself being charged this is your affirmative defense. I’m trying to think of an analogy that isn’t inflammatory here, but, if you are…
Leahy: Oh, you can be inflammatory.
Gulbransen: If for some reason you have to go speed really quickly because you’re in fear for your life and you get pulled over and you get a ticket and you can go to court and explain affirmatively. Yes, sir. Yes, I was speeding. But it’s because such and such was chasing after me with a gun. That’s affirmative. That’s an affirmative defense.
Leahy: That bill has passed the House now pretty resoundingly.
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: Where is it on the state Senate side?
Gulbransen: I think you’ll see action next week.
Leahy: And you anticipate that bill will pass in the state Senate?
Gulbransen: I think it will. It’s on the Senate judiciary calendar today. It’ll probably sail through that and then you’ll see probably a floor vote next week.
Leahy: What’s the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s view on that bill?
Gulbransen: We are far happier with it than the original intent of it.
Leahy: That is a very qualified answer.
Gulbransen: In the beginning, it was far broader and it was all over the place. But we’re much happier with what it is now.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Tennessee Senate” by Tennessee General Assembly.
