Live from Music Row Monday 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 Dr. Matthew Spalding, Vice President of Hillsdale College and the Executive Director of the 1776 Commission to the newsmakers line to discuss the dismantling of the 1776 Commission by the Biden administration and new resources for parents of K through 12 students.
Leahy: We are joined now on the newsmaker line by Dr. Matthew Spalding. Kirby, Professor in Constitutional Government at Hillsdale College and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government. Welcome, Dr. Spalding.
Spalding: Great to be with you. Good morning.
Leahy: The Hillsdale 1776 curriculum has been released. Tell us about it and its relationship to the 1776 Commission formed by President Trump and then disbanded immediately upon inauguration by Joe Biden.
Spalding: Well, a quick succession of things. The 1776 Commission, which was formed by the President, I took a leave and was Executive Director of that and we put out in 1776 Report, which you pointed out was immediately acknowledged by executive order because the Biden administration wanted to go in the direction of equity and pursue its racial policies, including things like critical race theory or various versions of that in the federal government.
What they were getting rid of was a traditional approach to looking at the founding, looking at the Declaration, and the Constitution in ways that saw those as driving the narrative of American history. And that’s what they couldn’t abide by. We are in a debate between what seems to be two versions of American history.
They want to go in a completely political direction to pursue their current racial objectives and policy. The report called for new curriculums and Hillsdale, which has been working on teaching and doing teaching and curriculum for decades.
And the college for over a hundred, almost 200 years now has been working on a curriculum. It’s been released two months ago. The 1776 Curriculum and it’s already had 50,000 downloads in a very quick amount of time.
It’s about civics and history meant to fill this immediate void and eventually draw out a full curriculum for anybody who wants to use it.
It’s all free of charge and we’re putting it out there to have an alternative to the absolute absurd curriculum and things being put out by public schools, by critical race theory, and what is going on over the country.
Now there actually is a great alternative for homeschoolers, private schools, public schools, and anybody who wants to use it.
Leahy: Where can people go to download this curriculum? You can go to the main college website, Hillsdale.edu. There’s also a K through 12 website that has other materials for people who teach and have kids. K12.hillsdale.edu.
Any of those you can download, click and there’ll be easy ways to find it and print it off yourself. It’s whole health and pages, all the lessons, questions, and everything would need to teach these materials from K through 12.
Leahy: How many public school teachers have downloaded this and are using it in their classrooms?
Spalding: It’s hard to tell immediately when people are downloading it, but I think probably the people who are downloading and using it immediately are the ones we talked to the most.
Charter school teachers, private school teachers, and home schoolers. But I can tell you we have some evidence and suggestions for people calling and talking with us that there are public school teachers who are stuck in these schools.
They’re being used to transfer this critical race theory stuff. There are some good people still in some of those schools who are looking for alternatives, and they’ll look to this whether public school will adopt this formally or not.
That’s another question. But now there’s something else that you look to in order to offset what they’re trying to make them teach. And let me just reiterate where to go to download this fantastic curriculum. K12.hillsdale.edu.
Leahy: Dr. Spalding, we have this little event here. We call the National Constitution Bee based upon a book that I co-authored, A Guide to the Constitution and Bill of Rights for Secondary School Students. This will be our fifth year. We have some experience in interacting with public school teachers.
And I can tell you it’s not been encouraging in terms of their interest in having traditional American constitutional civic values taught. And it seems to me that this is a systemic problem.
State legislatures around the country have laws that say you should be teaching the Constitution. I’m not seeing it implemented at K12 public schools. Do I have this right? And if I do what can be done to turn it around beyond making this great curriculum from Hillsdale available?
Spalding: No, I think in general, you’re absolutely spot on that’s correct. And you actually alluded to a very important thing that’s the key to the solution here. The federal government under the Constitution and by federal law has no role in curriculum.
As matter of fact, by law, the Department of Education is prevented from getting involved in curriculum. It’s a state matter. States have all the power. State legislatures can give guidance to their departments.
They create the curriculum, they control the public schools, and that goes from the states all the way down to school boards. The most important thing to change the politics of what is going on right now, because I think the debate in curriculum and K through 12 is a cultural manifestation of our national debate is get involved in those things.
If you have the where with all to be involved in a state legislature or have ways to get involved in anything all the way down and especially in school boards, where the decisions made about adopting curriculum are crucially important.
And there states and local communities and school boards have a lot of authority. Don’t want to assume the settle government is taking us over and can fix it, or is the problem.
You can’t think about it. Get involved in those things. It’s going on all over the country. We need more of that because that’s what going to upset the apple cart.
And I think there in those debates, people who are concerned and want to see a more traditional curriculum have not only a foothold but in many ways a great advantage given the people there.
The most interested are the ones that have the children who care for them as opposed to the teachers who often don’t and are merely implementing these bad curriculums.
Leahy: It seems to me that the way to go, if you want to have this great curriculum in your school is to go directly to teachers, directly to the school board, and directly to administrators and present it to them. K12.hillsdale.edu, that’s the short term. The intermediate-term would be by your state legislature to accept and promote this. What are your thoughts on that?
Spalding: No, I think that’s right. The immediate is a school board debate. State legislatures. There are a lot of states. I’ve been very involved in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, other states here in the process that either have and now they’re implementing or they’re changing their city rules and looking ahead.
Departments of Education, that is where the real higher-level political battle is going on and they make those decisions. They can’t then be overridden by the federal government. The federal government has no role here. So that battle is the battle that needs to be won.
Leahy: Why do so many school administrators promote a left-wing, we hate America version of the country?
Spalding: I think the answer there gets into the long-term effect, which, unfortunately, and many people have not been focused on are the teachers’ unions and the effect through the academy of shaping teachers and the creation of curricula.
And then what’s going on in state legislatures. As long as the progressive elements of liberalism, either intellectually or politically or through unions control the process, they’ve been working on this for some time, I think this critical race, which is a bridge too far to say the very least, has revealed what has been going on.
And with COVID we saw our children getting this stuff first hand at home, and I think it’s really kind of pulled back the curtain. Now we see this debate for what it is and have our opening despite the fact that they’ve been working on these things for some time.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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 Friday 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 by Fox Business contributor and Wall Street expert Liz Peek on the newsmakers line to discuss Joe Biden’s fiscal stimulus, wage increase disposition, and the consequences of inflation.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line our good friend Liz Peek, Fox News contributor and expert in finance. Liz, you always deliver common sense.
We’re in a land and an era where common sense seems to be very short in supply. I got one word for you. I’d like to get your reaction to this. Inflation.
Look, this is a serious problem, and I think it has been dismissed a little bit too easily by the Federal Reserve chair and by President Joe Biden.
Jerome Powell is in an awkward position. He wants to be reappointed when his term expires, I’m sure. And he also is on record having called for enormous fiscal stimulus, a lot of government spending to get us out of the slump that we were in because of COVID.
And now that that’s being delivered, probably at a level much more than he expected, it’s very hard for him to turn around and say, no, no, I was only kidding. These are not good ideas.
These $1.9 trillion dollar bills, $2 trillion dollar bills, et cetera. Please hold off on that. Even as I continue to throw billions, trillions of dollars into the economy through monetary policy.
So he’s got a problem. But I think the country is waking up to the fact that these giant spending programs that have been promoted by Democrats are simply pushing too much money into an economy that is chasing too few goods and now showing up in inflation.
Biden actually talked about it the other day (Chuckles) and his explanation was completely muddled. Which I guess we’re not surprised about.
But he’s talking about how the investments he wants to make in, I don’t even know what, green energy, et cetera, and that’s going to help inflation.
No, he’s wrong. That’s not going to help inflation, not in our lifetime, probably. In fact, it’s going to spur it because everything they want to do, for example, in energy is driving up the cost of energy.
Yes, the government is going to be subsidizing it so the consumer may not see it right away. But the truth is if you start piling into our economy, higher-cost energy, it flows everywhere.
So we have a problem. We have a spending problem. We don’t have a tax problem. If you look at long-term trends, the country is simply spending too much money.
I don’t think really many people can argue with that. We’ve never had a budget that called for spending $4 or $5 trillion dollars.
These are unimaginable numbers that we haven’t seen since World War II. And here’s the thing, we’re not at war. We have an economy that went into a ditch.
It’s very quickly revived. Democrats are lying about the fragility of the economy because they want these programs embedded now, such as the child tax credits, such as long-term dependent care, et cetera.
This really is not a good thing for our country. And thankfully, I think the polling shows consumers are very anxious about inflation, and that may help stem some of the more radical spending plans.
Leahy: But Liz, not a joke. This is is just temporary inflation. (Imitates Joe Biden) I’m paraphrasing what the President said.
Peek: And yeah, they can point to some things like lumber prices. We know went up 400, 500, 600 percent year over year, and they have come off those highs.
But one of my favorite economists on Wall Street, Ed Hyman, and has described inflation as lumpy. And he’s right. It comes kind of in batches.
You don’t really know what is going to be the big problem area, but here is one big problem area right now is rent. We’ve seen housing prices go through the roof.
Both new house prices and existing home prices are up substantially even as the Federal Reserve keeps buying up $120 billion dollars every month of bonds, including mortgage bonds.
Explain to me why we are buying mortgage bonds when the housing market is red hot? What that does is make mortgage rates lower.
Okay, that’s great. But it also spurs demand and throws out of whack a normal rebalancing of the housing market. But here’s the other thing.
What I am concerned about, and I’ve been writing about four months now, is this whole wage-price spiral. I’m old enough, I’m embarrassed to say, to remember the trauma of the 1970 inflation surge.
And what happened is you have a raft of price increases. And then the next thing that happens is you have workers going to their bosses and saying boss, the price of everything is up 10 percent. I need a raise.
And the boss says, well, you’re right. You do need to raise, put a raise through. And then he has to raise prices because he can’t afford that raise.
Joe Biden keeps saying to the restaurant workers at the CNN Town Hall: If you just raise your prices, your wages a little bit, you’ll be able to attract workers.
Well, what we’ve seen is workers are sitting on the sidelines because the $1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan and other programs are offering so much in benefits and unemployment that they don’t need to take a job.
So we have a shortage of workers I think, due largely to this extremely large test of the federal government, that shortage of workers is meaning everybody has to be out there raising wages.
And there you have it. Wages are going up. Great for workers in the short run, but not if they’re paying more for everything as a result of that, which is what’s happening.
Leahy: I have a theory about why the Biden administration is so off point on this. I think it’s comprised of a bunch of economic dunderheads who are caught in a John Kenneth Galbraith time warp and have gone back to 1960. What do you think of that theory?
Peek: Well, I think you’re right. Actually, I think you’re wrong. I don’t think they have any kind of philosophical framework (Leahy laughs) or theoretical framework for what they’re doing. This is just a power grab.
Leahy: I think you actually have the right answer.
Peek: Well, forgive me.
Leahy: No, that’s fine. This is why we love having you on. Because you know what you’re talking about.
Peek: Well, it’s just so offensive to me. There’s no accountability for these bills that are being passed. Presumably, no one knows exactly.
But it’s – we’re close to $2 trillion dollars that have been allocated by Congress now and not spent. And yet here are Democrats talking about pushing through a $3.5 trillion dollar plan through reconciliation.
No GOP votes. And everyone out there should be wondering what is in that plan? Why are they so desperate? Because, by the way, the polling on this is pretty terrible.
They know this is a risky thing. They know this could cost them the control of the House and Senate in 2022. So why would they risk everything on this bill?
And the answer is because it is a massive payout to the teachers’ unions, the SEIU, and the other groups that will then come back and put them back in office think, two years later.
It’s building their base of support. And this is not right-wing craziness. This is because they are creating programs that are distinctly beneficial to expanding the membership of those unions.
What do those unions do? Well, for example, if they get their way on the voting rights bill, they’ll go out and ballot harvest. What better group than the tens of millions of members of the teachers’ unions to go out ballot harvest from nursing homes and hospitals and long-term care facilities, etc, than all those teachers?
It is just the most nefarious cycle of payouts and then support building at the expense of the American taxpayer. It’s really extraordinary.
Leahy: It’s a pure power grab.
Peek: It is.
Leahy: I think you nailed it. That’s exactly what this is. It has nothing to do with any kind of underlying economic theory. They don’t care about that. They want power, and that’s what defines them.
Peek: Yeah! The latest excuse in terms of a theory is this so-called modern monetary theory, which argues that you can just spend forever and ever unceasing amounts as a federal government.
As long as your currency remains whole and sound, it’s just basically become a talking point on the left. At some point, your currency doesn’t remain strong and sound.
Leahy: That worked so well for the Weimar Republic in Germany.
Peek: (Chuckles) Exactly. We never learn from history. How would we? We don’t teach or learn history anymore?
Leahy: Last question for you, Liz Peek. When are you moving to state income tax-free Tennessee?
Peek: I want to tell you something. I mean, I have to write about this. Maybe we just got noticed from some organization that follows this stuff that bonuses, and of course, Wall Street is a bonus community.
That’s where they make their money, not on their salaries. The rate of taxation in New York has gone from nine percent, I think, and change to 13 percent in change.
Like a 40 percent increase. I’m not sure people are even focused on this. But to your point, the exodus from New York is only going to swell. And I can guarantee you that that’s happening.
Leahy: And we’ve got some Realtors here that I can put you in touch
Peek: (Laughs) Let me tell you, it’s so tempting. It is so tempting.
Leahy: Okay, we’ll see you soon here, Liz. We’ve got a place here for you.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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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.
Photo “Liz Peek” by Liz Peek.
Live from Music Row Monday 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 columnist Karol Markowicz to the Newsmakers Line to weigh in on the teacher union stranglehold on public education and the awakening of parents in the post-COVID era.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by Karol Markowicz. Among other things, she’s a columnist for The New York Post.
She was born in the Soviet Union and raised in Brooklyn. Good morning, Karol. Thanks for joining us.
Markowicz: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Leahy: My first question for you, Karol: Which was worse? The Soviet Union in the 1980s or New York City in 2021?
Markowicz: (Chuckles) Well, I came to the United States when I was little. I was under two, so I don’t quite remember the Soviet Union, but I grew up very much aware of how lucky I was to be here every single day and how different my life could have gone. I’ll still choose Brooklyn every time.
Leahy: Well, we’re delighted that you are here and your writing is just – let me just say – it’s fabulous.
Markowicz: Thank you.
Leahy: And you have a couple of pieces. The most recent one: critical race theory is part of a woke agenda. Parents should fight it.
Don’t let the left keep brainwashing our kids to fight their political wars. And I really like this recent one. Don’t let Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, whitewash or roll in school closures. It sounds to me like you’re not a big fan of the teachers’ unions.
Markowicz: (Chuckles) Well, it’s funny, because, until this year, I don’t think I’ve written that much about teachers’ unions.
And I don’t think that most parents really care that much about teachers’ unions and their role in our schools. But after a year of many schools staying close, needlessly, while areas where teachers unions weren’t powerful managed to open their schools.
It was just very jarring how much power these unions had, how weak our politicians were in the face of their power, and how much they were able to do to our kids.
I think so many eyes are open now. And it was obviously unfortunate that kids didn’t get to go to school in so many places this last year.
But I think there are so many motivated parents now who realize what’s going on in a way that they didn’t before. And that’s really the one sort of benefit of what happened this year.
Carmichael: How do Black and Hispanic children in particular fair in schools in Brooklyn and in the New York City area?
Leahy: By the way, that’s Crom Carmichael, who’s also in studio with us. He’s a regular all-star panelist.
Markowicz: Hi. We have some really great charter schools in New York. But for the last eight years, while Mayor de Blasio has been the mayor, he’s very far left, there’s been an all-out war on charter schools.
And there have been no new charter schools allowed. And the teachers’ unions again have managed to squelch any opposition to them because they have so much power with these politicians.
So in general, our public schools are bad. Even the good ones are not that good. And we have a situation where when somebody wants school choice – when they want to get out of the system – when they want to find a charter school, they’re largely unable to at this point.
Hopefully, the next mayor will be better. There’s some hope on the horizon that if Eric Adams wins or Curtis Sliwa, either one, they’re much more pro-charter than Mayor de Blasio has been. Things might be looking up.
Carmichael: Let me ask you a question because I think that standards truly matter. In the last year, the standards of police officers have been under tremendous scrutiny. And if a police officer has bad standards, they are singled out, thrown out of the police force, and if appropriate, convicted of a crime.
Markowicz: Right.
Carmichael: Why don’t we apply those same standards to the people who run our teachers’ unions and are teachers, to those teachers who do a pathetic job of teaching our children? They’re just as professional as police officers.
Markowicz: Right. I think the worst part of that is just like good police officers get blamed for bad police officer behavior, I’ve known a lot of really great teachers who are incapable of doing what they need to do with students because of the control from the top, and because of the bad teachers who sort of make it harder for everybody else. For example, this year, there were a lot of teachers who wanted to be in person and who understood that the kids needed them, who understood that Zooming with kindergarteners – I have a kindergartener – is not a thing that works. There were a lot of teachers who wanted to be in person.
But because their union enforced these ridiculous policies, and because politicians listened to them, they kept the schools closed.
They kept the kids at home and the good teachers really got pushed to the side. And I think that that’s a really big problem, too.
These teachers don’t want to stay in the system that rewards bad teachers or spends a year not having kids in school. We push the best people out with the system that we have.
Carmichael: In a charter school in Brooklyn or in the New York area, give an example if you would, because charter schools operate independently. In other words, they’re not unionized.
They don’t report to some charter school board of education. They operate independently. Give an example of the number of students that a charter school might have and the number of administrators and the number of teachers.
Markowicz: So it’s different, obviously, than public schools. But I don’t have the numbers in front of me. But charter schools operate on a very different system where they don’t have anywhere near as many administrators.
They don’t pay nearly as many people as public schools do. But to talk about one part of the numbers with charter schools is charter schools in general in New York, for example. I know that they’re different around the country, but they do far better on state tests than public schools.
And so you have a situation where especially for Black and Brown students, when they’re in public schools, people just sort of throw up their hands and say, these public schools are bad. There’s nothing we can do.
With the same students taken into charter schools, they are much better. They really succeed. And so you have the situation where it is not the students. It’s absolutely the school system.
And like I said earlier, even the good schools, I think, are not that good. Even the schools that are considered sort of success stories are sort of weak.
Leahy: Weak successes at best I think would be the most generous way to describe them. Let me ask you this. You see that both of the major unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, last week, they both came out and said, we are going to teach critical race theory, and we don’t care if the laws say we can’t do that. What do you make of that?
Markowicz: Well, every minute spent on this ridiculousness is a minute not spent teaching math and science and social studies and the rest of it.
And every dollar spent on these insane consultants who come in to tell us that White people are the oppressors and Black people are the oppressed, and the other races sort of don’t really factor in that much, is a dollar not spent on kids’ education.
And like I said earlier, I think parents really have their eyes open to this where this is an actual huge story where a few years ago, I think this would have been just kind of a blip.
They know what critical race theory is now. They know that they don’t want it in their kids’ school. We’re seeing these school board meetings all across the country where parents are fighting back.
And it’s not politicians that are leading the way. It is actual parents. So again, I have some hope that the bright spot of a post-COVID era is that parents know what’s happening in their kids’ schools now in a way that they didn’t before, and that they’ll be fighting.
Leahy: On that note of optimism, we’ll close our first interview with Karol Markowicz. Karol, a columnist in New York Post. Thank you. Very refreshing, very enlightening. Please come back and join us again.
Markowicz: Thank you so much. Absolutely.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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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.
Photo “Teacher Strike” by Charles Edward Miller CC BY-SA 2.0 and photo “Karol Markowicz” by Karol Markowicz.
Live from Music Row Friday 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 Metro Nashville’s City Council Member-at-Large Steve Glover to the newsmakers line to discuss the State of the Metro Address and his dismay for the Mayor Cooper’s decision to raise salaries of teachers only.
Leahy: We are joined now on the line by our very good friend, Metro Council Member-at-Large, Steve Glover. Good morning, Steve.
Glover: Good morning, Sir. How are you?
Leahy: Well, I’m about to find out what you thought of Mayor John Cooper’s State of Metro address yesterday.
Glover: You’re about to. A lot of people are about to. (Chuckles) I think the fire department, I thought that was a great move. 40 new suppression. 20 new EMTs and OEM. And it was good. I think that 40 new police officers were about half what it should have been. Maybe only 40 percent of what it should have been. I want to be very clear about this, Michael.
If you’re going to give teachers that massive raise that you gave them and you don’t do it for everybody else in Metro, that’s wrong in a million different ways. Because if people think over the last year that Metro National Public Schools have done a good job of educating children, they’re wrong. Now that’s going to make a lot of people mad.
And if it does, I don’t care because it’s wrong. Our teachers work hard. I’m not upset about our teachers. I’m upset about the administration because they singled out the teachers and gave them a massive raise. Our police, fire, and all our other employees in Metro got a two percent cost of living adjustment.
Leahy: And how much was the raise for the teachers?
Glover: $6,900. and something on average is the way I read it. I haven’t seen the actual budget yet to be able to understand exactly where we landed with everything. I don’t have a beef with giving a raise to teachers or others. You can’t name one group and then literally annihilate the other group and pretend like you did a good job.
That’s one thing I get really sick of. I get really sick of the administrations in Nashville pretending like they’re doing this great thing. And I get really sick of when they say Nashville for everyone. No, it’s not obviously a Nashville for everyone.
Leahy: And now this particular thing, the plan to make Nashville teachers the state’s highest-paid is interesting because I’ve looked at the numbers in terms of the performance on standardized tests of kids in Nashville and there are like 142 school districts, they call them local education administration agencies I guess.
There are 142 or so of them. And Metro Nashville schools are either at the bottom or next to the bottom at 140 or 142 in virtually every rating in terms of math proficiency and reading proficiency. So why such a big raise for teachers?
Glover: That’s the point. Again, I want to emphasize this is not directed at teachers. They’ve done what they could do over the last year. The administration has kept them out of the classroom. I have a lot of friends that are teachers. They are just as upset about the fact they couldn’t be in the classroom because they know that our children have been let down over the last year. And we as Nashvillians, if we think it’s been okay to do what we’ve done to our children, we are sadly mistaken because it is not okay. I don’t know how we make this ground up, frankly.
Leahy: The other thing about this to me, Steve, this looks like a pure political play for the support of the teachers’ unions by Mayor Cooper.
Glover: Yep. MENP doesn’t like me and I don’t really care for them. I don’t really care if they like me. I’ll tell you what I do like. I like my grandchildren. In fact, I love my grandchildren and I don’t like the fact that my grandson wasn’t able to go to kindergarten this past year because somebody on Branford Avenue made bad decisions.
Leahy: Here’s the story from wsmv.com. It’s about three paragraphs. Let me read it and get your reaction. Under Mayor Cooper’s plan, the average Metro teacher salary will jump by $6,924 annually. Educators with eight to 15 years of experience will receive a $10,880 increase.
The proposed $81 million Mark Nashville’s largest operating ‘investment’ in education. And then the director of Schools, Dr. Adrian Battle said the following ‘throughout my career at Metro schools, I’ve never seen such a strong commitment and support from a Mayor for our public schools and the teaching profession.’ Now, to me, this doesn’t look like support for public schools. This looks like support for the Teachers Union.
Glover: That’s exactly what it is. And that’s one reason I’m saying, look, teachers, don’t be mad at me. I’m not upset with you. I think you’ve been placed in bad positions, just like our children have been placed in bad positions over the last year. Our police, our fire, and our first responders, you want to talk about stressing out the workforce over the last 12 months.
I’m not going to pick one against the other. Our police officers, our firefighters, our EMTs, OEM, and the Water Department. We can go down to public works. Because I defined first responders to everybody who needs to get out on the front line when we have something bad that happens in Nashville. They got slapped in the face yesterday when the Mayor had the audacity to do this with the school board that has done a lousy job, by the way, of pretending like they’re leading and then does it to our first responders with a two percent cost of living.
Added firefighters. Absolutely. We’ve needed that forever. It’s still not enough. Pretending like we added police officers. He said we’re going to put 40 new officers in order to staff the Southeast precinct. They need a minimum of 66 officers for a new precinct.
Leahy: Good point.
Glover: Here’s my thing. And I said it last night late on my Facebook page. If we don’t wake up and if we don’t start demanding and we don’t start getting upset about this stuff, then we deserve whatever’s going to happen to us in Nashville. At what point do we wake up and say we’ve had it! Enough is enough. We’ll pay our taxes but in return, if you’re going to do an investment, do a real investment.
Leahy: Yeah, exactly. Not a payoff to the Teachers Union, which is what this looks like to me.
Listen to the full first hour here:
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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 Independent Women’s Forum Senior Policy Analyst, Patrice Onwuka to the newsmakers line.
During the second hour, Onwuka reviewed the Biden administration’s COVID relief package that would essentially bail out blue cities and states and sweeping legislation not mentioned on the campaign trail. She also forewarned in the coming weeks of rubber-stamped legislation that would be detrimental to American workers and families and highlighted the hypocrisy of the left.
Leahy: We are joined once again by Patrice Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Forum a very important writer here. And she’s been tracking what’s been going on with the Biden administration. I think you’re perhaps less enthused about it than many in Washington D.C. are. Welcome, Patricia. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Onwuka: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Michael Patrick.
Leahy: By Patrice that that is very common. People actually refer to me as Patrick sometimes because it’s in their mind that Senator Patrick Leahy my distant cousin whom I’ve never met. Distant cousin. Is perhaps the most famous Leahy of the world at the moment. And I have to say we’ve never met and although I did invite him to be on a Leahy Family Feud program back in 2009 when I was at the PJTV with a little Internet TV show.
He declined. We’re on opposites of the spectrum. But he does look a bit like my grandfather. (Chuckles) I’ll tell you that. You have been talking and writing a little bit about the Biden administration. What’s your current take on what they’re up to?
Onwuka: It’s distressful. Frankly all of the things that then-candidate Biden at the time hid. Everything from his energy policies to his labor policies that he didn’t cover on the campaign trail. But we’re now seeing between the sweeping executive orders that were passed within the first month to now this $1.9 trillion COVID relief package which has everything and the kitchen sink that Democrats have always wanted to pass through.
And that’s just the start. I think over the next few weeks we are going to see some major sweeping legislative proposals that he has been rubber-stamped. Everything from election changes to labor policies. It’s going to be scary for the American worker and the American family.
Leahy: Yes. I must agree with you about that. Many Republicans have said look this one point nine trillion-dollar coronavirus relief package as it’s called, only about nine percent of the one point nine trillion dollars actually goes for Coronavirus relief. About 350 billion goes to bailouts for fiscally irresponsible blue cities and blue states. There is a lot of other pork in that bill as well.
Onwuka: Oh absolutely. There’s money for union pension. Money for Planned Parenthood. For the universities for the arts. Even Nancy Pelosi, she’s going to be bringing home tens of billions of dollars to California for things like transit projects. So it’s not surprising that that that I think progressives or those on the left would try and use this massive sweeping spending bill to tuck their favorite pet projects in there and hope that because it has the name COVID relief that people will just pass it right off the bat.
We did see that the House passed the bill. Although there were there was enough pushback from Democrats. And the question is what’s going to happen when it comes up for a vote in the Senate either this week or next week? And not surprisingly it’s going to be a party-line vote. However, they’ve got to ensure that all 50 of their Democrats stay in line. If not, this bill could be sunk.
Leahy: So the two Democratic senators whose names come up most often as possible opponents to the bill are Manchin of West Virginia and Kristen Sinema of Arizona. Do you have any indications reading the tea leaves of where they stand?
Onwuka: Because the $15 minimum wage increases if not likely to be part of the final package. They’re more likely to vote Yes. Now that’s not guaranteed but that $15 federal minimum wage hike was going to be the death knell for this whole bill. Now thankfully we saw the parliamentarian the person who decides, what can and cannot be in a sweeping spending bill like this.
She said hey, no this can’t be in there. Unfortunately, Senator Bernie Sanders was very sad. I insert the meme of him sitting with his legs folded and a sad face because this was really his pet that $15 minimum wage. So because it’s not likely to pass with that in there I think you’ll see Sinema and Manchin come on board. Now, that’s not to say that that something someone else may not hop out. I mean, it’s like a basket of kittens you put one in another one can come out if they don’t get some guarantees or something in that bill that they really want for their folks.
Leahy: I’d be curious as to your reaction to President Trump’s speech at CPAC over the weekend. Did you like it? Do you think he was on top of his game? And who reported on that? I didn’t see much of it in the mainstream media.
Onwuka: No, I think Fox News maybe and Newsmax and some of those more right leading Outlets or are actually independent leading outlets. They covered it. I watched a speech I thought I would have loved to have seen more of this President Trump on the campaign trail because he really number one touted a lot of the great accomplishments that his administration passed on everything from Immigration policies shoring up our borders to the robust economies we had going into the coronavirus pandemic.
And thank goodness the economy was as strong as it was because I think that has softened the blow for workers and I know we’ve got millions of people who are still unemployed. But I think it could have been worse. So he did a great job of laying out what he did when he was in office and then contrasting with what Joe Biden is doing.
His far swing to the left and the fact that a lot of these policies that he kept on the campaign trail and that the media did not ask him about we’re now seeing. And so I think it’s in its opening the eyes of many people. I wish you’d stayed away from the electoral stuff and kind of the campaign was stolen language.
But he absolutely did redefine that the Republican Party is a party based on ideas and policies of low taxes, leadership, America first policies that prioritize American workers and American businesses, and of secure safe borders and safe neighborhoods and communities. Those are really strong conservative topics and issues and I think he’s saying this is who we are.
Leahy: Patrice and woke us senior policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. One word comes to mind when I look at what Joe Biden is doing with the Biden administration is doing what all the Democrats in Congress are doing. That word is hypocrisy. (Laughter) and you know, there’s a case in point. Did you see the story about what the leader of the California teachers union has been doing?
Onwuka: Oh, yes. Oh yes. (Chuckles)
Leahy: Tell our audience about this because it just I mean I saw this and my eyes glazed over.
Onwuka: Oh this guy, he’s priceless. He’s a young man with a little girl and I think she was in Pre-K or a Kindergartner. He was walking her to Pre-K in the morning. Both of them wearing their masks crossing the street. And that should be fine right? Except he is the president of the teachers’ unions in one of the biggest I think cities or maybe the across the state of California and he is taking his daughter to a private institution where she’s able to learn and play.
Leahy: In person!
Onwuka: In person. But all of the kids in California in a lot of districts in public schools do not have that blessing or that benefit. And I think it highlights the hypocrisy of a lot of these leftist leaders and particularly teachers’ union folks who rail against school choice. Who rail against the idea that poor kids should be able to take the federal funds that go to public school and take those two private options, to parochial schools, to charter schools, or even homeschooling and giving them that choice these folks they have a choice they can afford to pay for private school.
They can afford to pay for private tutors, but they do not want to give that to you know, the poor black and brown kids. And hey, by the way, listeners, I’m a Black kid. I grew up in a poor neighborhood with an immigrant family and I made it. And thank goodness. I wish my story could be replicated because of school choice but the teachers’ unions will not allow it.
Leahy: Patrice Onwuka, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. Thanks so much for joining us again. And please come back and come visit us in Nashville.
Onwuka: Alright. Thank you, Mike.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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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.
Photo “Patrice Onwuka” by Independent Women’s Forum.
