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 Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) to the newsmaker line to talk about his opposition to the $40 billion Ukraine aid package and the dwindling support of the Democratic Party.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by our friend, Congressman Tim Burchett from the Second Congressional District, Tennessee, up there in the Knoxville area. Good morning, Congressman Burchett.
Burchett: We like to call it God’s country, but you can call it Knoxville. I’m wrestling dogs this morning, so if they get a little crazy, I apologize.
Leahy: I stand corrected. You’re quite right. It is God’s country. Of course, the entire state of Tennessee, in my view, is God’s country. And Tennessee has led the way in opposition to this $40 billion aid package to Ukraine without an inspector general.
You were one of four members of the House delegation who voted against that along with Senator Rand Paul, and both of our United States senators, Marcia Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. Tell us a little bit about that vote.
Burchett: Well, it was pretty easy for me. $40 billion. We can’t even get $4 billion for a wall. It’s just a horrible bill, in my opinion. It’s just throwing more money. This president is trying to get us into World War III.
And I just thought it was a big waste of money. I know they’ll be stealing. It just reminds me of Vietnam. All right. I’m 57. I can remember from Vietnam the first thing we did was send in money. Then they started stealing it.
So we started sending in arms. First we sent in arms, then we sent in money, and then we said, well, we got to have some people in there to show them how to use those arms.
And then we started sending in men and women, and then they started sending us home body bags. And Ukraine is a mess, but it’s not our mess.
And it’s time for our European friends and allies to step up and start footing the bill. America cannot be the world’s police force. And we’ve got . . . they’re doing some awful things over there. And Russians are awful.
They are awful. They have a history of this type of activity, but we’re not going to war with China. And they’re putting over 2 million Uyghurs in concentration camps.
They do organ harvesting. They do all the horrible things that we hate. And we’re not going to war with China because we need the trade. I just don’t think it’s our fight, that’s all.
Leahy: So here’s an interesting point that you made, and I’ve heard it from others. You said President Biden – the legal but not legitimate, what I call him, the grifter in chief – you said that he is trying to get us into World War III.
He made some comments over the weekend that would fit into that. He kind of misstated, if you will, the American policy on Taiwan. He said what has sort of been implied, that if China invades Taiwan, the United States would step up.
But it seems like a very awkward thing to say, and clearly, they had to walk that back. Is he intentionally trying to get us into World War III, or is this just incompetence?
Burchett: I think it’s incompetence. I think he’s got some people that are really running the show that have no place on the world stage and they don’t understand reaction to events. The things we do crosses the chain reaction, and it’s a big chain reaction.
As I like to say, they’re playing checkers and the rest of the world is playing chess. I used to hang out in the pool halls as a young man. I play pool. I just hit the cue ball at the first ball. A good pool player is thinking three shots away.
Where’s that cue ball going to be after I hit this? What’s it going to line me up for the next one and the next one? And that’s where we need to be playing. But we’re not.
We’re just hitting a cue ball and we’re scratching a whole heck of a lot, from Afghanistan to the border to the price of gas. And this shortage of baby formula, and Tennessee leads the nation in that.
And that’s why I wrote a letter to our state attorney general and the U.S. attorney general about price gouging and illegal hoarding. So hopefully they’ll start enforcing that. And I saw where they might.
We spent $28 million for baby formula and $23 million of it went to salaries and bureaucracy. It’s not going to do anything to alleviate the shortage.
I just think this group is just trying to get through this election and survive, but they’re going to take a lot of people down with them. A lot of people.
Leahy: Our original all-star panel is Crom Carmichael is in the studio. Crom has a question for you.
Carmichael: Congressman, you’re kind of hitting on an interesting question right at the tail end of that last comment, and that is we’re about five months away from the, five or six months away from the midterms. Do you think that anything really terrible will pass the House and the Senate between now and the midterms?
Because it looks to me like Biden wants to spend more and more and more money and raise taxes. Will either of those two things pass the House and the Senate?
Burchett: You’re right. I believe, of course, that Ukraine aid did in some form, it passed the Senate. I don’t foresee anything else. All they’re going to be doing is a bunch of virtue signaling, and they’re going to try more with abortion and trying to wrap that up as some sort of civil rights issue.
And they’ll throw the race card on that, I’m sure. They already have. And I suspect that’s what they’re going to focus on, because they’re just circling the bowl right now. Pelosi will call a press conference almost every day on the steps of the Capitol.
And if you look at the numbers, when she first started doing it over a year ago, it was most of the Democrats. And now it’s just dwindling down, dwindling down. And this last one was over the horrific shooting in Minneapolis and then one of the members got up and talked about one of the, the Korean shooting, and I believe it was done by another Korean.
I just don’t think they’ve got their ducks in a row, and the members are bailing on them quickly, and they should. If you’re a moderate Democrat, the last thing you want to see is Nancy Pelosi’s airplane landing at your airport.
That would be the first thing I’d want to see. I’d hold a fundraiser. She’d come over here and trash me at East Tennessee, I’d just say send your checks to Tim Burchett for Congress. (Laughter)
Listen to the interview:
– – –
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.
Burchett is right, at least about the MILITARY portion of the forty billion dollar Ukraine package. We all want to protect the human rights of the Ukrainians, but to stoke and escalate the violent military clash between Russia and Ukraine benefits only the munitions industrial lobbyists and the N.A.T.O. expansionists. We cannot afford to risk a war that would endanger the lives of our military and young people. The men and women who yell the loudest for U.S. military intervention in Ukraine should be the first ones called to fight!