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 Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) to the newsmaker line to weigh in on Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line now by our good friend Congressman Tim Burchett from the Second Congressional District of Tennessee up there in Knoxville. Congressman Burchett, welcome to The Tennessee Star Report.
Burchett: Welcome from the Swamp. Thank you for having me on, brother.
Leahy: Did you do the job that no one really wants to do but somebody has to do? Were you in attendance at the State of the Union last night?
Burchett: Yes, I was. I didn’t like it when the Democrats walked out on Trump. I don’t care for Joe Biden, but I respect the office. So I was there and I wanted to hear it. I probably could have heard it better if I was back in my office just because of his slurred speech.
I had trouble comprehending what he was saying sometimes. And then he would try to talk over the applause and it was just very difficult to follow. And of course, his line of reasoning was beyond belief.
He got one of his loudest applauses when he said, we’re going to do something about the cost of insulin. What he did was he reinstated Trump’s plan is all he did.
He reinstated Trump’s plan of freezing the cost of insulin. And then he would say things like, we’re going to cut costs on prescription drugs. Who the heck is against that? But how are you going to do it?
And then he says, I’m a capitalist, after he rolls out a huge socialist agenda. And then he talks about, which I thought was kind of funny, I was trying to keep up with all the gaps he was making. But then he has the head of Intel, the company, talking about they’re going to spearhead his Made in America program.
If you Google Intel and China, you’ll see that at one time they had some guts and they were going to stop producing their chips in the area where they were mistreating the Uyghurs and were actually putting them in concentration camps and forced labor in their company and their camps.
And China got onto them, and so they backed off of that. This is the company that Biden rolls out? He might as well roll out the people that make Russian tanks. And then it just went on and on and he said, we’re going to do something about the border. And everybody cheers.
But what’s he going to do? He ain’t going to do anything, and he’ll roll out the red carpet, give them more phones and more government cheese, I think. That’s the solution. He’s just not with it, brother.
Leahy: He is not. Crom Carmichael has a question for you, Congressman.
Carmichael: Congressman, what do you think will pass between now and the end of this legislative session?
Burchett: It’s like I told a bunch of my buddies down in the gym, a bunch of Democrats. I said, boys, we got to get to work. And they said, what are we doing? I said, those bridges and post offices won’t name themselves.
(Leahy chuckles) It’s just a bunch of fluff. We do a bunch of procedural moves. So we’re here, we get paid that day, and we follow the law. And then you have to do something every day. And they put a vote to a vote to a vote-up, and it’s just bogus.
The whole thing is bogus. I don’t see a whole lot passing between now and Election Day. The Democrats, they’re obviously gun-shy. But can you imagine that?
They didn’t go far enough to the Left, so they had to bring Rashida Tlaib in to give a Democrat response to the president. Can you imagine?
Leahy: Did you watch that?
Burchett: I can’t stand that. I’m friends with everybody. I’m friends with her, but she’s just one bitter person. I don’t need all that in my life.
Carmichael: It’s the first time ever I can think of where you’ve had a response to the response.
Leahy: Typically the response is from the Democrats.
Carmichael: Typically you have a person of a party give the State of the Union, that’s the president. And then you have somebody selected from the opposing party who gives the response. But in this case, you have … the Democrats get to give another response.
Burchett: It would be like if we asked Newt Gingrich to come in and give a response to Donald Trump. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. And you saw the Speaker up there, and none of them are with it.
This whole thing is out of control. I finally had the opportunity to meet the president a couple of weeks ago, and I told him, I said, “I’m Tim Burchett, Congressman from Knoxville, Tennessee.”
I said, “I don’t agree with a dadgum thing you do,” I said, “but I pray for you every day.” And he spoke to me, and it was inaudible.
I could not understand anything he said. And his handler, the lady that nobody likes, kind of shoved him on the escalator and told me, “you’re not supposed to be here. We got to go.”
Carmichael: He was speaking in tongues. (Laughter)
Leahy: Trying to relate to the Southern drawl.
Carmichael: Let me ask you a question on foreign policy. Given what Biden has essentially said to the Ukrainians, and that is, I wish you well, good luck. What do you think will be the outcome in Ukraine?
Burchett: Destruction of the Ukrainian people. And then it’s going to go to a guerrilla war. And some people think that the long-term effects will further deplete Russia’s ability to be anything in the world. But here’s the issue:
We’re exporting 560,000 barrels a day of Russian oil. We’re paying Putin over $20 million a day that he’s putting in his pocket, which is funneling into his war effort.
The American public is paying for the Russians to invade Ukraine. That’s the deal. If we could just turn the spigot back on when we were exporting energy under Trump, this whole thing would be over.
We would bankrupt them. They have nothing. They have no industry. They’ve got nothing. All they’ve got is oil, and they’ve got these oligarchies that hang around, they’re just a bunch of hangers-on. And Putin is just like a mafia kingpin thug is all he is. That’s all he is. So if we could just turn that spigot back on, if the president had said that last night, “we’re going to remove these restrictions.”
There are dozens of pipelines that are technically in the pipeline to get approved at FERK, which is a federal organization that does that, will not approve. Dozens. And it’s just the whole thing.
They’re going to write Discovery Channel documentaries on this thing for years about the corruption at this level where whether it’s his son Hunter or whoever. But somebody is getting rich in this country.
And there is a reason that we didn’t slap him with sanctions personally. Now, why would you not slap him with sanctions personally?
And it’s delayed 30 days. So if somebody tells me they’re going to shut my bank account down in 30 days, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to move it to another bank. Which is exactly what they’ve done.
Leahy: Hey, Vladimir Putin! Here are 30 days to move all your assets around. So we actually don’t take any of them.
Burchett: And that’s exactly what they’re doing. And that’s what they’ve done. And then Pasaki gets up there in her little arrogant voice and says, “you just don’t understand diplomacy.
Let me explain it to you how it works.” No, you don’t understand diplomacy. Diplomacy is at the barrel of a gun with these people, and that’s all they understand. So that’s kind of where we’re at.
Listen to the full interview here:
– – –
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.
