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 GOP candidate for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District Tres Wittum in-studio to address statements made by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in regard to the removal of three candidates deemed ineligible for the GOP primary due to longstanding Republican Party bylaws.
Leahy: We are joined in-studio by Tres Wittum. Tres is a candidate for the GOP nomination in the 5th Congressional District. Tres, welcome to our studios.
Wittum: Good morning, everybody! Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! Thanks for having me.
Leahy: Who is Tres Wittum and what’s your background?
Wittum: Trace Wittum is a candidate for the 5th Congressional District, number one. That’s what the listeners didn’t know today, first off. But my background is actually in film and television, mass communications – although I have worked in government for 11 years, serving in your Tennessee State Senate.
Leahy: As an aide.
Wittum:Â As an aide, yes. I was going to say with the fine chairman of the Finance Ways and Means Committee.
Leahy: Bo Watson.
Wittum: Bo Watson.
Leahy: And so where were you born?
Wittum: I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. I spent the first 17 years of my life there and my family moved to Cleveland, Tennessee.
Leahy: Where did you go to college?
Wittum: I went to college at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Leahy: You’re a Moccasin.
Wittum: I am Moc. Mockingbird.
Leahy: I got to say Moc. They are Mocs, not Moccasins?
Wittum: Mocking Birds.
Leahy: I didn’t know that.
Wittum: They went Woke.
Leahy: I didn’t know that. Oh, they were Moccasins and they became Mocs?.
Wittum: They were. I think Terrell Owens was a Moccasin. I’m a Mockingbird.
Leahy: Well, how about that? I think I’d rather be a Moccasin. A little more dangerous, but that’s okay. I learned something. So then you worked in broadcasting and you’ve been a State Senate aide for a while.
I want to get right to the point here. You appear to be the most vocal candidate defending the honor of the state of Tennessee against Senator Lindsey Graham. We have a whole long story up at The Tennessee Star.
The headline of the story is: “The Real Story of How the Tennessee GOP Followed the Party’s Bylaws to Disqualify Three Candidates from the TN-5 Primary Ballot.” Those disqualified were Robby Starbuck, Morgan Ortagus, and Baxter Lee.
We’ve documented in detail how they followed the letter of the law and the bylaw to the T. Senator Graham, who backed Morgan Ortagus, didn’t like it and had some … I’ll let you describe what you think these words are.
He said, ’17 people who are tools of colloquial interest disenfranchised Tennessee voters, this type of good old politics and corruption needs to end in the Republican Party.’ You have a message for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Wittum: Yeah, I guess more of it’s kind of a question: Senator Graham, what have you done for South Carolina today? Because I believe that is your jurisdiction. That is the area that you should be focused on. You leave Tennessee to Tennesseans and we’ll choose our own Volunteers.
Leahy: He calls this corruption. He said, ‘If you are looking for Exhibit A of political corruption and good-old-boy politics, you need to look no further than TN-5.’ He doesn’t have any evidence to support those charges. How would you describe those kinds of charges from the senator from South Carolina?
Wittum: Well, obviously, I think what you do is you deflect, right? You don’t want people to look at what you’re doing, so you talk about other people. The truth is you got a lot of people in politics, like Senator Graham, who obviously is out here recruiting people.
Senator Graham, I’m guessing, didn’t read the rules of our party bylaws. He was just making statements. And quite frankly, I empathize with the folks that he put in the middle of this. I mean, obviously, nobody read the rules of the bylaws or we wouldn’t even be in this situation.
And so what you do is you get people to distract and get people to do things that, quite frankly, if they would have just read the rules upfront, they would have had a better understanding. But the U.S. Senate doesn’t care.
I mean, they’re obviously distracting people. I’m a big Seventeenth Amendment guy. And so I personally think that that should be repealed and restored.
Leahy: Tell everybody what the Seventeenth Amendment is, and why it should be repealed.
Wittum: The Seventeenth Amendment is when the U.S. Senate decided that they could explain to people that populist vote should control the U.S. Senate, which … there’s a balance-of-power argument here that the United States House, which I’m running for, is the populace – that’s the people.
The Senate used to be representative of the state capitals and your state legislatures. And in the early 1900s, they changed it to where they said, no, it should run just like Congress.
So now you have a bunch of glorified congressmen who act like governors and get involved in things that they shouldn’t. When we say Washington’s broken, I think it broke right there at the U.S. Senate.
Leahy: Well, that’s very interesting. And also you have a little experience with the bylaws. You were elected chairman of the Davidson County Republican Party back in 2017, and they looked at the bylaws and claimed that you didn’t meet the standards to be a state executive committee or county chairman. What happened?
Wittum: Yes. I still refute that. I voted in all my elections.
Leahy: What was the claim?
Wittum: The claim was you had to vote in four of four elections and they said I had three of four elections. And at the time, as I was a State Senate aide, I did do a mail-in ballot to Bradley County, and they didn’t find the vote, so I had three of four,: and they said that wasn’t enough to be a party chairman.
Now, again, one thing that’s different about me is I won by ballot six times. They kept trying to take the vote and take the vote and take the vote. And I kept winning and so the party said you won.
Listen to the interview 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 “Tres Wittum” by Tres Wittum. Background Photo “Lindsey Graham” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
I’m no fan of Lindsey Graham, but people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.