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 Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil W. McCabe to the newsmakers line to weigh in on the potential anti-gun vote in the House and whether or not President Biden will fall and fail at tomorrow’s press conference.
Cunningham: Crom, we’ve got Neil back on the line. Neil thanks so much for calling in again. I know you are overseas. Hopefully, you can hear us ok.
McCabe: Absolutely.
Cuningham: Great.
McCabe: Let me just say that obviously, what’s gripping Washington right now is the shooting in Boulder, Colorado. And President Joe Biden is now coming out of the shadows. He has been hesitant to make a push to restrict gun rights, but he feels the confidence to exploit the crisis and make that push. And he’s going to run into some significant headwinds in the Democratic Party. You were talking before about Joe Manchin.
There are five Democratic senators who are up in 2022 who won with less than 52 percent of the vote. I’ll just read them off for you: Colorado, Mike Bennett, New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan, Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, Arizona, Mark Kelly, and then Georgia, Raphael Warnock. These are five senators in culturally conservative states who do not want to take a gun vote.
And Schumer has been very good about protecting his Democratic senators from having to take bad votes on abortion, immigration and guns. And so it’ll be very tricky to see if the president pushes this thing. It will go through the House and Nancy Pelosi has a tight grip on the House. She will pass whatever she wants to restrict gun rights in the House. But those are five senators right there who do not want to take an anti-gun vote.
Cunningham: Can we depend on the Republicans to stay with us?
McCabe: There’s always going to be Republicans who flake. Of course, the Republican leadership, the staffers, and the consultants they’re all culturally left-wing. They are opposed to gun rights. They think that people who support gun rights are nut jobs. And so they’re personally hostile to it. And there’s a lot of social pressure in Washington, D.C. to sort of go along to get along. But as I’ve said this before, I wouldn’t count on McConnell to advance anything from step one to step two.
Cunningham: Hallelujah.
McCabe: But on defense, there is no equal. And so if McConnell can hold the line long enough so that these Democrats start to flake, that’s where you’re going to have a problem because there’s a razor-sharp margin in the House. And it’s more so in the Senate and they might run into some problems. The other problem you run into is that Biden hasn’t even given a State of Union address.
And so that’s supposed to be the kick-off of his legislative season. The Biden administration is running out of runway. And I’ve written about this in The Tennessee Star, and I’ve talked about it before. But this three trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, there just isn’t enough runway to get it done. And so your program is already getting stalled out.
You’re already running into problems where he’s having trouble getting his people confirmed. He doesn’t even have a confirmed director of Office of Management and Budget. And to throw a gun vote in the middle of all this is just going to create chaos. And that’s sort of been the hallmark of Biden’s career. And it’s the hallmark of his failed presidential campaign, chaos. And that’s what we’re starting to see right now in Washington.
Cunningham: Well, I sure hope you’re right about the gun legislation. I hope we can push that off. By the way, Neil, congratulations on your scoop of the John Kerry Photo on the plane. That was amazing.
McCabe: Was that fun? (Laughs)
Cunningham: It showed for everybody in one clean photo, the hypocrisy of the left, and it was just a beautiful thing. Thank you. As a reader of The Tennessee Star, thank you so much for that scoop. Crom’s got a question, but I just want to ask you real quickly, do you know anything about the press conference tomorrow? Everybody’s got so much anticipation about how it’s going to come off. Are the questions going to be given to him in advance? You got any information about how that’s going to happen? Surely they’re going to try to protect him.
McCabe: It’s we saw that during the debate. He had an iPad with him that was basically feeding him answers live. And so we’ll see if they’re able to feed him the answers that he needs. It’s really going to be interesting because the expectations game is such that if this guy can put one foot in front of the other, everybody says congratulations. I mean, the expectation game is it’s like people are just thrilled that he doesn’t drool and fall (Laughter)
Cunningham: If he remains upright.
McCabe: Yeah, it’s a huge win, huge win.
Cunnigham: Crom, you had a question.
McCabe: What’s your question.
Carmichael: Well, I had two questions. One Neil, when you’re walking into the press room or wherever he’s going to be sure that there’s not a single step that he has to negotiate in order to get into the room. Is it as flat as I think it is?
McCabe: Oh, Yeah. The Oval Office is actually a little higher than the briefing room. So there’s a floor that a bunch of the floors are on. And then he has to come down some stairs. But that’s that’s very much behind the scenes. I haven’t seen if they’re going to have it in the East Room or not. But this thing will be very tightly controlled. Remember the vast majority of the White House press corps are committed leftists and they’re not going to do anything to jeopardize their guy. And it’s just so funny, the same people who are chirping and hollering and interrupting President Trump, they just clap like seals now.
Cunningham: That’s a great phrase. Neil, thanks so much for calling in from overseas. We sure do appreciate you taking the time this morning. I know, it’s got to be a considerable amount of effort to get a call through and we really appreciate you calling. And we’ll look forward to see what happens tomorrow.
McCabe: Take care guys. Be good.
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