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 the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to weigh in on the abortion law in Texas citing how this could create a new trend against unelected bureaucrats.
(Nancy Pelosi clips plays)
Leahy: Well, there is a Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, 80 plus years old and getting more crazy every day. She’s trying to wrap the Supreme Court decision not to enforce a stay on the Texas law that allows people to sue clinics that conduct…
Carmichael: And the doctors.
Leahy: And the doctors. So that’s a terrible, terrible thing in her view. She’s trying to make that the big issue.
Carmichael: By the way, Nancy Pelosi is also just as an aside, tucked into the defense appropriation bill in the House, women must be drafted.
Leahy: I saw that.
Carmichael: Women must be drafted.
Leahy: What else? And I saw the pulling on that crime, and the polling is like only one-third of women support that.
Carmichael: Pelosi doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. It’s the power of government. I have said over and over again that the Democrat Party is the party of government, and it wants to have power over the individuals.
And this is a way to have power over half the population. But, Michael, I want to go back. As we said, going out of the last segment, I want to tie this thing in Tennessee, where the nursing student was removed.
Leahy:Â And by the way, just the more the backstory on the nursing student. There was a state law that passed in this session of the Tennessee General Assembly. That law was designed so that universities could not have any negative impact on people that chose not to take the vaccine.
Students. There was a little carve out in that which said, nursing students or medical students who were going to be conducting rounds would be required to take the vaccine, according to this law.
Again, we talked about these slipping little things in the laws at the last minute. But it got slipped in. Now, here’s the thing. What happened in the case of this nursing student at MTSU that was removed from the classroom on Thursday by MTSU police officers at the instruction of MTSU officials, she was not going on rounds.
She was simply attending a class in which she was targeted because she filed a lawsuit asserting her rights. And the university administrators had sent out an email, ‘no exceptions’ to this rule. Very problematic.
Carmichael: So now I’m going to tie this back to the Texas law on abortion. What did Texas do? That is a precedent. Texas said we’re not going to have the government enforce the law. We’re going to have the citizens enforce the law.
Therefore, in Texas, if a citizen learns that a clinic has performed an abortion that is not legal under the law, the government can’t arrest that doctor, the government can’t indict the clinic, but the citizens can sue.
So let’s say that the same way of thinking about the law applied to this case because this nursing student doesn’t have any real recourse against the university.
Leahy: She has a pending lawsuit against them.
Carmichael: But that’s just to get herself back in class.
Leahy: No, no, no, no, no, no. The lawsuit was filed six weeks ago.
Carmichael: And what are the damages that she’s wanting?
Leahy: She wants to be able to simply attend class.
Carmichael: That’s what I just said. All she can do from her lawsuit if she wins is get the right to attend class. But suppose she had the right to sue the president of the University and the professor in that class and the dean of students personally for breaking the law? If she could sue them personally, then they would think twice before they would break the law.
Leahy: I think we’re getting to the main point here.
Carmichael: Yes. Yes. And that is this thing in Texas that is fascinating to me. And that is that if you’ve got government regulators and government officials who abuse their position, just as in Texas their law says that once a heartbeat is detected, that that fetus becomes, by definition, a protected human being.
Not protected by the government, but protected by the citizens. If we had that same way of thinking, then government regulators and government officials, for example, if we had a law in Tennessee that said you cannot teach critical race theory in schools and you have teachers union’s saying we are going to ignore the law and if the law also said and for those people who do break the law, they can be sued by the parents of the schools where their children attend.
Guess what? The teachers’ unions wouldn’t do it anymore, because now the teachers’ unions could be sued for millions of dollars. And the teachers’ unions are all about money. That’s what they’re about. They’re about money and power.
And so what Texas is doing is fascinating in that it’s putting in the hands of the citizens the ability to enforce a law of the legislature and not leaving it up to government bureaucrats.
Leahy: And the citizens then working through the judicial system. That’s an interesting way because we’ve had in the country since the days of Herbert Hoover an ongoing assault on individual liberty and the usurpation of other authorities by federal bureaucrats.
Carmichael: Not just federal.
Leahy: Federal and state.
Carmichael: And local.
Leahy: If you look at the history of why the FCC got all its authority because they were trying to regulate the call letters and the frequencies, et cetera. There was another way that it could have gone.
In other words, instead of having the government set the rules, people could have basically claimed the property rights of a frequency and then had those rights litigated through courts. The government chose not to do that. And we might have been better off had they done that in terms of freedom of speech and of the press.
Carmichael: But the other thing that Roosevelt did when he did that because we had years ago on the Teddy Bart Show, a person on who knew the history of the FCC. And it was fascinating. He said the reasons Roosevelt did that and he also gave every license a one-year license.
Leahy: So that he could keep the authority.
Carmichael: And he could take it away.
Leahy: At any time.
Carmichael: At any time. And interestingly enough, all those license holders, we’re very supportive of Roosevelt.
Leahy: What a shock.
Carmichael: What a shock.
Leahy: That’s a surprise to me. (Chuckles)
Carmichael:Â Great surprise. But, you know, Michael, next week, I want to delve into this question about how does a legislature that wants individuals to have freedom handle a situation like this?
Let me give you an example. It’s been the law that if an employee of a company sees a company doing something that is wrong, it can file, I don’t know if it’s called a whistleblower type of thing,
Leahy: A private whistleblowers type thing.
Carmichael: And then the government then investigates. And if the government then finds wrongdoing, that whistleblower gets a percentage of the money that the company pays.
Leahy: Like, 10 percent or something.
Carmichael: 10 percent of $200 million is a big number. So it’s the fact that money is involved. Private companies are under much greater scrutiny to not break the law and not abuse their position because their own employees can turn them in and make money in showing, demonstrating, and collecting the evidence to show that the companies are doing something wrong.
And I think that’s a good thing by the way. It has forced companies to be better. I think we need to look at doing exactly the same thing with government officials because a government employee in a regulatory position who uses their authority to do something on a regulatory basis that is not within the law. They have no, they don’t have any personal risk.
Leahy: There’s no risk at all for that abuse of authority. That’s your point.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: That’s a very good point.
Carmichael:Â And Texas has changed that. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what’s so fascinating to me about this.
Leahy: You are fascinated by it.
Carmichael: But I think because it’s the first time I’ve seen it.
Leahy: Let me just say this Crom, you are able to identify trends, and I think you’ve hit on a trend there.
Carmichael: We’ll see it if it happens again. Now you have a line and now you may have a trend.
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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.
