Live from Music Row Tuesday 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 Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in studio to discuss the federal government’s control through Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) vaccine mandates.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the mayor of Maury County, that bastion of freedom, a turbocharged engine of economic growth, Andy Ogles. I just have to say that I love love that phrase.
Ogles: Well, you know, I’m biased, but I love that phrase, too, because it’s talking about Maury County. (Chuckles)
Leahy: I know. But it is a bastion of freedom and a turbocharged engine of economic growth. A lot of that has to do with your leadership, I believe.
Ogles: We fought hard to figure out a way through COVID. We stayed open, we resisted the mandates, and as such, we flourished. Not only from big corporates. Maury County is a net importer of jobs to Tennessee, but also even on the small business side.
We look at some of the other counties and you see a lot of small business turnover because of COVID. That’s not been the case in Maury County.
Leahy: Very good. Now we are in a situation now where we have a legal but not legitimate maladministration. The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the grifter in chief, ran by a bunch of puppeteers who have a different agenda for America. I argued that from the very beginning.
Their agenda is to destroy our constitutional republic and create chaos. Nothing confirms that more than the latest news on this illegal and unconstitutional order put in through emergency provisions by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which mandates that employers with more than 100 employees will require that all employees be vaccinated by January 4th.
Or if they don’t fire employees that haven’t been vaccinated, they will be subjected to fines from the national federal government. The out-of-control tyrannical federal government, in my view. Fourteen thousand dollars per incident, I guess up to, like, $700,000.
They want to crush small businesses. This is clearly what their intent is. But to illustrate how little they respect the law after Saturday when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals placed a stay on this order, the White House went ahead and is now telling businesses to proceed with vaccine mandates despite court-ordered pause. What do you make of that, Andy?
Ogles: I would argue that this push, this control, these vaccine mandates really have more to do with the 10th Amendment and the federal government, and the control that DC has over us. They’re expanding that power.
And you mentioned our economy. The problem is that the robust economy, the success we’ve had despite COVID kind of get in the way of our reliance on the federal government. And so they’re pulling out all the stops. I mean, they’ve even talked about shutting down another pipeline.
Leahy: This is more evidence of what the Biden maladministration is intentionally doing. They are destroying the free market. They are intentionally intervening in the market to drive up the price of any fossil fuel.
Why? I’ll tell you why? Because their billionaire buddies have made financial bets on alternative energy like solar and wind, et cetera. That’s why. It’s a pure grift.
Ogles: Just the overall reliance on government. Suddenly you need that $750 payment monthly or you need that $1,200 payment monthly. At a time when propane is projected to be 54 percent higher this winter.
Natural gas is going to be 30 percent plus higher this winter and we’re going to close down another pipeline? Not only that, you don’t have to be an economist to know that that’s a bad idea.
Leahy: I got another bad piece of information evidence that shows that the grifter in chief and his team of grifters that are current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, their desire is to destroy middle-class America.
Apparently in this infrastructure bill that was passed and is about to be signed into law, there’s a tax on propane. Did you see that? It’s hidden in the 2,000 pages that you have to pass before you know what’s in it.
Ogles: That’s right. You have to pass it to know what’s in it. I’m not surprised. It’s this driving agenda. What you do is you make the cost and the acquisition cost for the consumers so high that suddenly, whether it’s solar or wind, the math doesn’t work on the solar and wind, but it becomes more and more palatable as long as you have government.
Leahy: Well, that’s exactly right. By the way, there’s also a report that the Biden maladministration intends to place windmills all up and down the east coast of the United States because nothing says to preserve the environment like a bunch of wind turbines out in the Atlantic Ocean.
Ogles: They could put a few outside of CNN and all the news headquarters because we’re getting a bunch of hot air out of there.
Leahy: Thump, thump, thump. There go the birds. Actually, if you are a supporter of continuing bird species, there are a lot of folks who love birds who hate these wind turbines because bird flies through that, they don’t make it through it.
Ogles: What is the cost of fossil fuel to produce these turbines? The economics don’t work. But this gets back to that agenda. And quite frankly, Rahm Emanuel worked for Obama, a former congressman. His saying was, never let a crisis go to waste. They have leveraged COVID as effectively as one can to destroy this account.
Leahy: And because everything now because of COVID everything is an emergency. We’ve been in an emergency for 20 months. Give me a break. This is not an emergency anymore. This is just an ongoing health situation.
The White House said on Monday, this is from CNBC. Businesses should move forward with President Joe Biden’s vaccine and testing requirements for private businesses, despite a federal appeals court ordering a temporary halt to the rules.
The latest propaganda pusher because circle back Jen Psaki tested positive for COVID, hasn’t been seen for two weeks. “People should not wait,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during a briefing they should continue to move forward to make sure they’re getting their workplace vaccinated.
Now, there is a little element in this story that is very interesting to me. It’s an assertion in the story by CNBC. I’ll read this article and get your reaction. OSHA, which polices workplace safety for the Labor Department developed the vaccine and testing requirements under the emergency authority established by Congress. The authority allows the agency to shortcut the process to issue workplace safety standards, which normally take years.
I missed that emergency authority. Did you catch it? Did you see anything about that emergency authority under Congress?
Ogles: No. And what this again gets back to is these mandates don’t have legal muster. And so they’re trying to extort and bully companies into doing Biden’s dirty work.
Leahy: And by the way, rulemaking, there is a very clear statutory standard for rulemaking. It’s called the Administrative Procedures Act of 1950. Congress passed a law. And in the law, they say, well, the details of this law will be worked out by this agency and through a rulemaking process.
Those rulemaking processes require the publication of the draft rule, six months for comment, and review, et cetera. It’s a long process. Somehow, there’s one little sentence in one of these bills that nobody read, apparently, that they use as justification for these emergency rules. It’s not statutory at all.
Ogles: Workplace safety is a different issue than managing and meddling in someone’s personal healthcare decisions. And the fact that the federal government is just continuing to overreach, that’s why these states have to sue and why I’m disappointed that our General Assembly didn’t push back harder.
They did something which is better than nothing. But you’ve got health care workers across the state of Tennessee who are now going to be fired. I’ve got 901 facilities just in Maury County.
Leahy: Unbelievable.
– – –
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.
