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 the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to weigh in on the effort to replace Liz Cheney with Elise Stefanick on the GOP House Conference Committee and reveals his plan to put pressure on the elite classes of Democrats.
(Congressman Jim Banks clip plays)
Leahy: Crom that is Congressman Jim Banks, a conservative Republican from Indiana. He said, really, that his view of the Republican Party is the Trump view of the Republican Party and has become the party of the working class and not the elites. And that is the message that a Liz Cheney should be putting out there. It’s not the message Liz Cheney is putting out there. She’s the number three leader in the House Conference committee in the GOP. Now she’s about to lose that position it looks like.
Carmichael: Right. I think that Kevin McCarthy was on with Maria Bartiromo and they brought this question up. And she asked Kevin McCarthy point-blank whether or not he supported the Congresswoman from New York.
Leahy: Elise Stefanik from upstate New York, my old stomping ground.
Carmichael: Yes. She’s terrific. And he said, Yes, I do. In other words, he didn’t equivocate at all. He said, Yes, I do. There will be a vote to remove Liz Cheney.
Leahy: As the number three in the hierarchy.
Carmichael: To replace her. That’s who Kevin McCarthy says he’s supporting now.
Leahy: Elise Stefanik is a Harvard graduate, and she was born and raised in a suburb of Albany. The district she represents actually is in the northernmost part of New York States, where I grew up as a kid. Spent many years there. But it’s a conservative district. It became the big district in the big fight in 2010.
The Tea Party fight with Independent guy Doug Hoffman barely lost because the RINO Republican there dropped out and backed the Democrat. Very heated. After four years, six years, that person was out. Elise Stefanik has done a very good job winning that district. She’s moved up to the Northern part of upstate New York from Albany. She’s not exactly a hardcore conservative in her voting record. But on the big issues, she’s been 100 percent behind them.
Carmichael: And she’s also a Donald Trump supporter.
Leahy: Yes. That’s very clear.
Carmichael: Very clear. And your point about the RINO Republican, I think, is interesting. The party is slowly but surely getting rid of the RINO Republicans. And the freshman class that came in 2020 on the Republican side is a very very solid class of Republicans who stand up for the working people. Liz Cheney doesn’t care about the working people. I’m not sure exactly what she does care about other than herself.
Leahy: She cares about Liz Cheney.
Carmichael: That’s what I just said.
Leahy: I don’t think she’s been back into Wyoming very much at all.
Carmichael: I said other than caring about herself, I don’t know what she cares about. So I’ve figured out what her game plan is.
Leahy: What is that?
Carmichael: She’s now tired of being in Congress. She’s not exactly a Democrat. She doesn’t see a path to winning elections as a Democrat, especially out of Wyoming.
Leahy: That’s not going to happen.
Carmichael: She doesn’t see that. She has recognized that she’s not going to be able to retain her seat. So if you’re not going to be involved in politics…
Leahy: In 2022 in Wyoming.
Carmichael: Yes. If you’re not going to be a politician and you still want to be a power person, what are you doing?
Leahy: She’s going to go be a CNN commentator.
Carmichael: Yes. She is now grooming herself to be the next Nicole Wallace so that she can go on TV. It might even be a network. It might not be a cable company. It might be a network where she then becomes a big wig.
Leahy: The conscience of the Republican Party.
Carmichael: Exactly. And so this is what she’s up to now. This has nothing to do with principle. It has everything to do, though, with her maintaining a position of influence and power. Whoever the nominee is in 2024 of the Republican Party if it’s Trump or Trumpian then she’ll be trashing them just like Nicole Wallace.
Leahy: Absolutely.
Carmichael: That’s what she’s hoping.
Leahy: And for our listeners, Nicole Wallace was a former Republican consultant.
Carmichael: Well, she was a spokesperson for the Bush administration.
Leahy: Well, of course, the Bush administration.
Carmichael: I’m just saying that’s what she was. And so when people say that the people who were in the George Bush administration opinions are that of Republicans, that’s just false. George Bush is kind of the Don Sunquist of the country.
Leahy: Oh, yeah.
Carmichael: Nobody invites him to speak to a group of Republicans. He will get invited to speak to some international group or maybe some group of Fortune 1,000 executives. But he doesn’t get invited to Lincoln Day dinners.
Leahy: No.
Carmichael: He doesn’t invite the things that are the Republican hardcore and the political class. I’m talking about the state-level political class. And I think that there are other Republicans who are slowly but surely being weeded from the party. But I want to go back to when Paul Ryan as Speaker. He passed a lot of bills out of the House that died in the Senate because of the filibuster.
I’m not trashing Mitch McConnell. I’m saying the institution. Part of what Republicans need to figure out is strategic. If keeping the filibuster is important and I think it is, then they need to come up with ways of putting pressure on Democratic constituents to have to pick between two things they don’t want. They have to figure out how to put pressure.
And I’ve got some ideas on how to put pressure on Democrats to pick one or the other. Because you still can pass things through reconciliation. And that doesn’t require budget reconciliation. and that includes spinning bills and taxing bills. And Republicans can pass bills out of the House and send those bills to the Senate.
And then send a bill to the Senate that requires 60 votes. And make the first vote to be so incredibly upsetting to the billionaire class of the Democrat Party and the CEO class of the Democrat Party. And right now, the CEOs in this country, many of them are woke because they don’t want to be canceled. They don’t want to lose their job.
Leahy: So your suggestion is to inflict crumbs House of Pain on CEOs,
Carmichael: House of Pain on CEOs and House of Pain on billionaires. And then say, which one do you want? Do you want this bill passed over here? In which case, you need to get your Democrat senators on board so we beat the filibuster, or do you want this pain? It’s up to you.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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 “American flag on Capitol Building” by House Republicans and photo “Crom Carmichael” by Crom Carmichael.
