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 Tea Party Patriots, Bill Pascoe to the newsmaker line to discuss the consequences of Democrat deficit spending, its effects on future generations, and who is bearing the burden.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by our good friend for many years, Bill Pascoe with Tea Party Patriots. Good morning, Bill.
Pascoe: Good morning, Michael Patrick, how are you?
Leahy: I’m great. You actually have a long, long history in the conservative movement. Tell our listeners a little bit about your background, Bill.
Pascoe: Let’s just say that the first campaign that I ever got paid to work was in 1980, Ronald Reagan’s successful campaign for president.
Leahy: Well done Bill, well done! (Chuckles)Â
Pascoe: I have been working in conservative politics ever since I’ve been at the Heritage Foundation. I’ve been at the American Conservative Union.
And let’s see, for the last nine years, going back to 2012, I’ve been working with Jenny Beth Martin and the team at Tea Party Patriots.
Leahy: I remember when you joined back in 2012. And you’ve done a great job communicating the conservative message, the populist constitutional conservative message of Tea Party Patriots. The latest fiasco in Washington, this budget mess. Tell us where we stand with that right now.
Pascoe: House Democrats just joined with the action that the Democrats had taken a few weeks earlier to pass a $3.5 trillion budget resolution combined with the $1.2 trillion, so-called bipartisan, so-called infrastructure framework that they passed a week before that.
That means that we’re on track to spend another $4.5 trillion. That we don’t have and that we can’t afford. I’m not going to say we’re borrowing it from our children and grandchildren and future generations, because borrowing is when you ask somebody, do you have money that you can loan me?
Nobody is asking our children and grandchildren. We’re not seeking their permission. We’re taking this money from them and sticking them with the bill. And where I come from taking money without permission is called theft.
It’s called stealing. So let’s end this canard that we’re borrowing money from future generations. We’re stealing money from future generations.
Leahy: It’s a falsehood, a lie, a mistruth. I like it when people use that phrase. It’s one of my favorite ways to describe it. A canard and that is exactly what it is Bill. Picture for a moment, the wrong Reagan, who was elected in 1980, what would he have to say about this?
Pascoe: He would have said, this is why I left the Democratic Party years ago because their views on taxing and spending are reckless. Interestingly, the Democrats who have engaged in deficit spending for so long that the bulk of the roughly $28 trillion national debt that we know that we now have to face came because of Democrat policies.
Ronald Reagan would have looked at it and said, this reckless approach to taxing and spending is simply wrong. It’s morally wrong. This is not just gree eyeshade stuff. There’s a moral element to this. It is simply wrong to consume services that you’re not willing to pay for. And that’s what we’re doing here.
There was a very interesting piece in The Washington Post just a couple of days ago where we learned that another because of the pandemic and because of the shift in policy because of the pandemic, that $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, the Cares Act, that went through earlier this year with mostly Democrat votes, turns out that we’ve changed our tax system again and made it more progressive.
The increase in the child tax credit, in particular, lifting it from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child or $3,600. And I’m talking on a monthly basis. This $3,600 a month for every child under the age of six, that has made the tax system even more progressive.
We’ve now got more than 100 million people in the country who do not pay federal income taxes, yet they consume federal government services. So we’ve created a class of citizens that receive benefits that they don’t pay for.
Well, what kind of incentive does that create? That creates an incentive to ask for more benefits. Why wouldn’t you ask for more benefits if you don’t have to pay for them? We’ve gone even more progressive.
We’ve got an even larger section of the population where over of the population consumes government services that they don’t pay for.
And this makes it more and more difficult for those of us who are pulling the wagon rather than riding in the wagon, as Phil Graham used to say 25 years ago when he was on the floor of the Senate, by doing this kind of stuff.
Leahy: Let me follow up on that. What is Tea Party Patriots doing to see that resistance to this effort is out front and center?
Pascoe: This weekend, we’re actually working on something slightly different. A lot of people think that the Tea Party movement was originally about taxes and spending. In fact, the Tea Party movement was created in 2009-2010 over the issue of health care freedom.
It was opposition to Obamacare. Largely that really kicked in with the stimulus package of the $887 billion so-called stimulus package, the pork package that gave birth to the Tea Party. But it was really the opposition to Obamacare that solidified the Tea Party through 2009 and 2010.
Leahy:Â And that was, if you recall, August of 2009, during that recess, when the members of the Democratically controlled Congress went out to hold town halls. They were raucous events. This is before the passage of Obamacare in March of 2010.
Pascoe: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So it was twelve years ago right now that we had those town hall meetings, of course, they won’t do town hall meetings anymore. Democrats have figured out that’s a dangerous opportunity for their opposition to show up.
Instead of doing town hall meetings, what we found out is that there is new opposition based on the same principle of healthcare freedom that you should have the right as an individual American citizen to make health care decisions for yourself based on conversations with your doctor, not conversations with a government bureaucrat.
And so the result is, we’re seeing a bubbling up of grassroots activity all over the country at the same kind of level that we saw 12 years ago over the same issue, medical freedom. And so what we’re doing on Saturday is all over the country we’ve got protest rallies, demonstrations, even sign-waving events in smaller locations.
People are going to be fighting the notion of mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Now, let’s be clear. If you want to take the vaccine, that’s fine. If you prefer to wear a mask, that’s fine. We believe in individual liberty. Make up your own mind.
What we oppose is government ordering or government pressuring a private business. In particular, we think the government has no business pressuring private businesses to issue edicts demanding that their employees and or their customers receive a vaccine they may not want to receive.
So you can go to stopmedicalmandates.org. That’s a website that we’ve set up that just simply lists where are all the known events that we know of? Where are they going to take place on Saturday?
And if there’s no event that’s already scheduled close to your listeners and they want to schedule an event themselves, they can download a How to Guide. Tea Party Patriots have been famous for our tool kits, How to Guide’s.
You can download it and figure out how to put on your own event on Saturday so you can join in the fun, make your voice heard, make your opposition known, and stand up with your fellow neighbors who are opposing mandates we think are wrong.
And that’s the kind of activity that we’re seeing. This is actually something that’s being led by the grassroots. We didn’t come up with this idea. We heard that there were a couple of different demonstrations going on, and people got in touch with us and asked for help.
And we realized, wow, there’s an awful lot going on. Maybe we ought to try and put something on the ground. And we talked with our local leaders around the country, and they all voted yes. Let’s do it on Saturday the 28th. So that’s what we’re doing.
Leahy: And there was an event that we covered at The Ohio Star, part of The Star News Network in Columbus, Ohio. It was our lead story yesterday.
Pascoe: That’s right.
Leahy: 400 people showed up to demonstrate their opposition. So there’s a lot of grassroots support for medical freedom out there. Give us the website one more time, Bill.
Pascoe: Stopmedicalmandates.org is where you can go to find out where the local events are and what the schedule is. And if there isn’t a local event near you, you can download a How to Guide right there.
Leahy: Bill Pascoe with Tea Party Patriots thanks for joining us. Come back again, please.
Pascoe: Thank you.
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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.
