Tom Pappert, lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, said he is “very skeptical of the federal officials at the Bureau of Prisons” after an official with the bureau formally refused a written request by Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) to move unjustly imprisoned January 6 defendant Stewart Parks to the minimum security satellite camp located at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Memphis.
Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the way the Biden administration handles the first boat of Haitian migrants en route to the Florida Keys amid the Caribbean country’s current state of emergency will determine whether or not another mass migration crisis will rock the U.S. in addition to the one unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Matt Boyle, the national political editor at Breitbart News, said former President Donald Trump needs to turn out the “disaffected, working class voters” in November in order to pull off a victory against President Joe Biden.
Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said it’s “pathetic” that advocates of Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice voucher program are not being given a voice through local news outlets across the Volunteer State.
Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) confirmed that Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice voucher program would be forced by a Supreme Court ruling to distribute scholarships to illegal alien students. However, he said he believes that not many will take advantage of the program because its application requires parents to provide their children’s social security numbers.
“Everybody has to fill out the form, including a social security number and so forth. If you don’t have a social security number, then anybody that doesn’t have one, we want to make sure that those authorities are aware that these students don’t have a social security number,” Pody said on Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) addressed two concerns he has heard from families that choose to homeschool their children regarding Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice program, which would give $7,000 education savings account scholarships to 20,000 qualifying students in the first year of its inception.
“[Homeschoolers] have real concerns and they’re genuine,” Pody said on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “These objections are real because there’s something that is an underlying statement: If government funds it, government runs it. So if you take government money, no matter where you are or what you are, if you don’t think there’s a string attached somewhere, you’re not looking close enough.”
Brent Hamachek, author of Dissidently Speaking: Change the Words. Change the War. and vice president and associate publisher for Human Events Media Group, said he hopes his new book will challenge the way Americans think and motivate individuals to stop saying “it is” and instead start asking, “is it?”
Hamachek said his book challenges the “things that people have generally accepted about structures in the world around them.”
Mark Pulliam, a retired attorney and Misrule of Law blogger, said a series of nullification bills introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly are not constitutional despite seemingly being an “easy fix” to federal overreach.
“A lot of people these days come up with these theories and solutions of problems that sound good, that seem like it’s an easy fix, but they’re just not, at the end of the day, serious, and in some cases not workable, and in some cases not constitutional, and this whole nullification movement…is an example of one of those, I think, shamiracle solutions,” Pulliam explained on Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) said the East Bank development in Nashville should be a “private act” that does not fall on the backs of Tennessee taxpayers.
Tennessee State Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) said he is “much happier” with the Senate’s version of Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill compared to the House’s version, which includes additional incentives not particularly related to school choice.
John Solomon, editor-in-chief of Just the News, explained how Republicans in Congress are “playing the long game” when it comes to bringing accountability for the acts of the “Biden crime family.”
Rachel Alexander, lead reporter at The Arizona Sun Times, said there is a “zero percent chance” anything could happen legally between now and November to change federal law allowing no proof of citizenship to be submitted in order for an individual to be eligible to vote in a federal election.
“These 10 million invaders that have come here into the United States under the Biden administration, they’re going to try to get them to vote,” host Michael Leahy said to Alexander on Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “Are there other things that we can do to prevent illegal aliens from voting in the federal election in November 2024?”
Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said all of the “major censorship industry heavyweights” are currently carrying out “very nasty tricks” to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
“The main two tools that they’re using for 2024 censorship are the states because the federal censorship mechanism has been weakened after the Missouri v. Biden trial court ruling, which is now before oral arguments in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is likely to deal them a very heavy blow. So they’re moving into the states to help coordinate that rather than the federal government,” Benz explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Tennessee State Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) said he voted present on the State Senate’s version of Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill this week in the education committee because he said he believed there needed to be “more discussion” on the bill before it advanced out of committee.
“I was present, not voting, because I felt like we needed more discussion in the education committee,” Hensley said on Thursday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, slammed News Channel 5’s Phil Williams for his omission of a key comment submitted by Mark Gill in response to the outlet’s attack piece featuring an undercover video recording taken during a strategy session for school vouchers in 2016.
Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Biden administration has “industrialized parole authority” through its program that has flown 320,000 inadmissible aliens into 43 American airports over the past year.
“[The migrants] are coming in on an authority called parole. That’s supposed to be for two or three immigrants a year on a case by case basis, like an emergency medical treatment or, they need somebody to testify in an important case, and then they turn them right back,” Bensman explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “The Biden administration has industrialized parole authority. Now they’re just letting hundreds of thousands in all at once instead of two or three as the law says on a case by case basis.”
Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, vowed to help “lead the charge” to retire Tennessee State Representative Todd Warner (R-Chapel Hill) in response to the lawmaker’s vote against Governor Bill Lee’s proposed school voucher program.
Tennessee State Representative Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood) said he expects his bill prohibiting the displaying of certain flags on or in a public school, including LGBTQ pride flags, to soon pass the Senate and be signed into law by Governor Bill Lee.
JC Bowman, founder and president of Professional Educators of Tennessee, and Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, debated an audio recording slated to be released by News Channel 5’s Phil Williams supposedly addressing the “origin of school vouchers” in Tennessee.
Jeff Clark, former acting assistant attorney general during the Trump administration, said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson, which restores former President Donald Trump’s name on the Colorado ballot, will also protect a future Trump administration from a “whole bunch of Section 3 litigation in 2025.”
Clark said in addition to the unanimous 9-0 decision in the case, five of the Supreme Court justices went on to “decide another set of issues” in regards to states’ enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to regulate federal candidates.
Former chief of Brentwood Police Jeff Hughes, who is running for Williamson County Sheriff, addressed controversy surrounding his stance in 2022 against a bill in the Tennessee General Assembly allowing for the permitless carry of firearms.
Hughes said his stance against the bill was coming from a matter of “public safety and officer safety,” specifically regarding the bill’s lack of training requirement for gun owners.