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 outline institutional court constraints throttling federal government overreach on states.
Leahy: Crom, we are coming to the end of 2021 and I think when historians look back at this year and they say, what is the theme of 2021, here’s what I think it will be.
I think it will be the following: the authoritarian overreach of the left and the Biden maladministration trying to limit individual liberty in the United States has been constrained by the institutions of America, primarily by the courts. Your thoughts?
Carmichael: I think that’s dead-on. And you have attorneys general in certain states that are pushing back against the federal government, and they’re doing it on constitutional grounds. What you have are cases that are bubbling up through the courts.
We have the Mississippi case on abortion, and there are two things that that case is really about. One is, does the Constitution explicitly protect or even does it protect the right to abortion? Because Clarence Thomas finally got around to asking a question and he said, why are we here?
Aren’t we here discussing abortion? Because the three left-leaning members of the Supreme Court wanted to talk almost exclusively about religion and whether or not it’s a religious thing to determine when life begins.
Which I found to be rather odd because I think even if you are talking to an atheist adult and you want to make the case that their life has not yet begun yet, because there are three of you and one atheist, then the atheist could rationally argue that their being is no different than your being and then claim that they have a right to life themselves as an individual.
But the case, as presented by Mississippi, is that the Constitution gives the states the right to adjudicate issues like this or to legislate on issues like this.
Leahy: To legislate on issues on which the Constitution is silent. There’s no mention of the word abortion in the Constitution, period.
Carmichael: And so then you have these COVID cases where the federal government is trying to mandate a national policy on COVID. And you have the states pushing back saying to the federal government you don’t have the right to tell the citizens in my state what they will and won’t do.
That’s up to the legislature in our state. And then lastly, you have election laws. And you have clearly, the Constitution which gives the right to run elections to the states. But yet the federal government doesn’t like the rules that some states have (i.e. voter ID), which, by the way, a lot of liberal states have voter ID laws.
But because they’re liberal, they bend the knee to the national policies and give up their own state rights that are enumerated in the Constitution.
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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.
