Live from Music Row Thursday 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 all-star panelist Clint Brewer in-studio to weigh in on Tennessee’s new attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, Ron DeSantis’s power, and the 2022 midterm elections polls.
Leahy: We are just delighted to have in-studio, recovering journalist, all-star panelist, all-around good family man, Clint Brewer. Not a man about town. Not like Fred Astaire, dancing away, going to the clubs.
Brewer: Fred Astaire. (Laughs)
Leahy: Not a man about town, but all-around good family.
Brewer: We are dating ourselves, Mike, by talking about Fred Astaire.
Leahy: Well, when you say “man about town,” don’t you think of those 1930s movies?
Brewer: (Laughter) I guess.
Leahy: We are six weeks and five days until the midterm elections. There was a sense, I think last week, it was the apex of Democrat possibilities.
Brewer: And the tennis ball has been served back over.
Leahy: It’s been served back over. Thank you, Ron DeSantis. An overreach.
Brewer: Ron DeSantis, an emerging national leader.
Leahy: Yes. Wouldn’t you agree?
Brewer: Absolutely.
Leahy: And actually, of course, the speculation of who will run for president in 2024? We’ve got to get through the midterms first, which is most important because if the Republicans don’t take over the House and they don’t get the Senate, it’s going to be big-time trouble for the survival of our constitutional republic because the Biden administration is doing so many terrible, awful things, abusing power left and right. And there’s got to be a pushback.
And actually, there are two elements of that pushback. One element is from Congress, if Republicans take it over. But also, great news. Sitting in the same seat where you are right now, on Monday our new Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti was in-studio. That guy.
Brewer: That’s progress right there.
Leahy: That guy is A, smart; B, humble; but C, very, very conservative and very aggressive in terms of …
Brewer: I’m just talking about a Tennessee attorney general from any era doing a radio interview. I don’t know if that’s ever happened.
Leahy: He was on our show on Monday. He’s going to be on the other radio station in town at the 8:00 hour. And they are very aggressively communicating their agenda, and they’ve already gone after Mastercard, Visa, et cetera, who have decided to change the merchant categorization code for gun retailers so that they can be better tracked.
Skrmetti said, no, not so fast, and he led the way with 23 other attorneys general. So the Republican attorneys general out there, like 27 of them, are perhaps the most important people in America right now because they can push back against all of these egregious usurpations of the national, federal, Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS, all those guys.
Brewer: I think that’s very wise on the gun purchases with the Mastercard and Visa. The greatest path to gun ownership is removing financial barriers.
Leahy: There you go.
Brewer: I’ve said for years, if Tennessee wanted to become a truly Second Amendment-friendly state, they would eat the cost of the InstaCheck, and they would cap the amount of sales tax that you can put on a gun at, say, the first $200, and remove any fees and tax stamps from ammunition.
Leahy: All this to the point of saying it’s a new day in Tennessee, with a new attorney general.
Brewer: Right.
Leahy: Literally, there’s a new sheriff in town, if you would say that’s the case … . Okay, Let’s talk about the Senate, because there has been movement according to the prognosticators at RealClearPolitics. When last we were here, they were projecting 46 Democrats in the Senate, 46 Republicans, and eight toss-ups. But now they’ve moved a state from toss-up to leans-Republican.
And right now, there are 47 Republicans, 46 Democrats, and seven toss-ups. We’re 50-50 with the word-salad-deliverer in chief Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.
Don’t you smile when I say that, like, Mike, there you go again. But, I mean, come on. She is the word-salad-deliverer in chief. She has a constitutional role as well, the vice president.
Brewer: I was just laughing. (Laughs)Â
Leahy:Â You’ve never heard that phrase? You can use that as much as you’d like.
Brewer: The tennis match, it’s gone back over. I think it was a bit of a stunt by DeSantis to send the immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but it was a very insightful one.
Leahy: And it’s interesting because what it did was – and apparently the number of Americans, according to the Rasmussen Report, who now think illegal immigration is the number one problem in America, has increased by 12 percent in the past week, because he’s highlighted that, and he’s highlighted the hypocrisy thereof.
I understand it was a bit of a stunt, but here’s the deal. In the 10 months of this fiscal year, from October 1st until July 31st, 1.8 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended crossing the U.S./Mexico border. It’s on track to be over 2 million this fiscal year, which ends September 30th.
Brewer: At least they’ve been apprehended.
Leahy: Asterisk, apprehended, and then set free to roam about the country by the Biden maladministration. So here’s the deal. In fiscal 2021, the number of illegal migrants apprehended was 1.6 million.
But the previous fiscal year, which was the last full fiscal year of the Trump administration, that number was 400,000. So we’ve seen, in essence, it’ll be a fivefold increase under the Biden maladministration, where they’re just not enforcing our immigration laws. That’s hurting.
Brewer: I sent you a story earlier today where immigration is going to be front and center for the House GOP caucus for this election cycle. I think it’s top of mind for Americans. It has more impact than just outrage.
I think one of the things that people fail to realize is that our border security is important for more than just economic reasons or social reasons. People don’t like it. But border security is why fentanyl is making it into this country.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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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 “Ron DeSantis” by Ron DeSantis.Â
