Dozens of mayors from across the country recently issued a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ask for continued refugee resettlement in their respective cities and townships.
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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. – Leahy and all-star panelist Carol Swain were joined on the newsmakers line by Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton.
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday creating a task force to investigate the unsolved cases of missing or murdered Native Americans and Native Alaskans.
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A Texas federal judge ruled President Donald Trump’s emergency funding for a southern border wall to be unlawful, the latest roadblock in the administration’s attempt to build hundreds of miles of barrier.
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THE VILLAGES, FLORIDA – U.S. President Donald Trump sought to woo seniors on Thursday with an executive order aimed at strengthening the Medicare health program by reducing regulations, curbing fraud, and providing faster access to new medical devices and therapies.
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On Wednesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Michael Patrick Leahy spoke with metro council at-large candidate, Steve Glover where he described his recent lawsuit filed against the ‘illegal’ executive order by Mayor David Briley.
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State officials are challenging Metro Nashville Mayor David Briley’s sanctuary city policy, saying the decision could cause the city to lose a $300,000 federal grant to process ballistic evidence, NewsChannel 5 said.
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Nashville Metro Council candidate Steve Glover said that he is currently working with an attorney and intends to file a civil complaint against Mayor David Briley’s recent executive order instructing Metro employees not to cooperate with federal agents who are enforcing immigration law.
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On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – host Leahy and special guest Steve Glover, formerly of Nashville Metro Council who’s currently a candidate for the upcoming election, talked about the “legal authority” of Mayor Briley in relation to his recent call for executive action against ICE. Nearing the end of the show, Glover said he would be more than happy to debate Briley on the legalities of his upcoming actions. Leahy enthusiastically offered a platform at the Tennessee Star Report for one full hour which would allow Briley and Glover and open forum to discuss the issue. Leahy: The person in front of us right now whose story we’re hearing is Steve Glover. And so Steve, you were explaining to us the legal authority. And you’re understanding as a former member of the Metro Council. Former as of September first. Just a couple of days ago at midnight. Waiting for this runoff election a week from Thursday. Glover: Right. Leahy: So, what is the legal authority of an executive order? And the reason we want to know this is because Mayor David…
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On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – host Leahy welcomed in-studio guest and Nashville Metro Council at-large candidate, Steve Glover to the show to discuss David Briley’s recent desperate decision to enforce an executive order against ICE and it’s federal orders to detain illegal immigrants in Tennessee. Nearing the end of the show, the men discussed how and if a Mayor had the power to enforce an executive order and clarified the legalities stating that “Nashville is not a sovereign state within a state.” Leahy: So we are joined in studio by Steve Glover who is a current council member of the Metro Council. Which district do you currently represent? Glover: Well, I was the current council member until September first at midnight. Leahy: Oh. Glover: It’s all changed now. Leahy: Oh, that’s right. So you are not now a council member? Glover: Correct. Leahy: OK. Which district did you formerly represent? Glover: District 12. Hermitage. Leahy: Hermitage. Great. It literally is Andrew Jackson’s? Glover: No, it’s Larry Hagar’s district. I’m on the other side and I go to the water of…
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The White House is crafting drafts of a proposal addressing what some Republicans believe is a conservative bias within big tech, Politico reported Wednesday, citing sources within the Trump administration.
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by Evie Fordham President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday morning that he called “groundbreaking action” on treating kidney disease, including through organ transplants. “Many, many people are dying while they wait,” Trump said. “We’ll do everything we can to increase the supply, and we’ll be able to do that very substantially … getting Americans off these wait lists.” Chronic kidney disease affects an estimated 37 million U.S. adults. The Trump administration’s plan emphasizes transplants over dialysis as a more cost-effective solution for patients. Trump said the initiative includes “very substantially incentivizing” organ donation to offset costs to donors like child care and lost wages, as well as revising rules governing organ procurement organizations to “ensure available kidneys reach waiting patients as quickly as possible.” The federal government expends more than $100 billion a year on kidney transplants and treatment, reported Politico. The plan includes treating patients at home in an attempt to cut costs and trying to catch kidney disease earlier with better screening. Roughly 12 percent of people begin dialysis treatment at home, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. On the prevention front, nine out of 10 adults with chronic kidney disease do…
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by Audrey Conklin President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to establish a new council for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that focuses on affordable housing. The White House Council on Eliminating Barriers to Affordable Housing, chaired by HUD Secretary Ben Carson, will work with state and local governments to “identify and remove the obstacles that impede the production of affordable homes — namely, the enormous price tag[s] that follow burdensome government regulations,” HUD explained in a press release. California HUD Regional Public Affairs Officer Eduardo Cabrera told the Daily Caller News Foundation that while it’s important to get things done without funding, “we know now that 25% of expenses with new housing are related to regulations” that can be cut if they are properly identified. Today @realDonaldTrump signed an Executive Order establishing a White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing led by @SecretaryCarson. By removing burdensome regulations, we can reduce housing costs & strengthen communities! pic.twitter.com/t77FTzeGgX — GOP (@GOP) June 25, 2019 “Burdensome regulations make construction more expensive and time-consuming,” Cabrera explained. More than 25% of the money used to build a new home is the result of federal, state and…
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U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday which he calls a “groundbreaking action” that will increase the “quality, affordability, and fairness” in the U.S. healthcare system. The order would require hospitals to disclose prices up front showing what patients can expect to pay for services in a manner Trump says will be “clear, straightforward, and accessible.” This also means patients must be told at the beginning how much they can expect to pay out-of-pocket for deductibles and co-pays. Trump says patients would be able to find another doctor if their first choice is too high. “We believe the American people have a right to know the price of services before they go to visit the doctor,” he said. The president complained that for decades, insurance companies, lobbyists, and special interests have not been transparent in disclosing the real costs of medical procedures to patients, often leaving them with huge bills and unexpected costs. “This lack of price transparency has enriched industry giants greatly, costing Americans hundreds of billions of dollars a year.” Trump says he has seen such bills as $800 for saline, $6,000 for simple drug tests, and more than $17,000 to stitch a wound. He…
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order Monday establishing a new Task Force on Women in Sports. “Multiple studies have documented that women who play sports are more likely to seek and fill leadership roles in other sectors. Yet even with the enactment of Title IX nearly fifty years ago, opportunities for girls and women in sports, while improved, remain severely limited,” the executive order states. In the executive order, Whitmer suggests that “limitations” on female athletes “intersect with what is now a pivotal moment for gender equality and opportunity in Michigan.” “Female athletes defy gender stereotypes, serve as role models, and widen perspectives,” the executive order continues. “This inequity in access and opportunity prevents girls and women in this state from fully accessing the benefits in leadership development that sports can provide—to the detriment of not only these girls and women, but also this state, which stands to gain from their leadership.” The executive order establishes the “creation of the Task Force on Women in Sports,” which will be overseen by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. The task force is charged with assessing “the history of and current landscape for girls and women in sports in…
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by Michael Bastasch President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders aimed at speeding up oil and gas pipeline permitting, including limiting the ability of activists and states to block key energy projects. Trump signed the orders Wednesday at an International Union of Operating Engineers’ training center near Houston. Some labor unions have pushed back against Democrats’ anti-fossil fuel agenda, including the recently introduced Green New Deal. Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up permitting for pipeline projects, including asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to curtail state authority to block projects under the Clean Water Act (CWA). The administration is responding to criticisms that some states have weaponized CWA permitting to block energy projects. For example, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration has blocked a number of natural gas pipelines from running through his state, depriving the northeast of much-needed energy supplies. The supply crunch hit hard during winter when the region was forced to import gas from Russia. New York City locals fear a moratorium on new gas hook-ups will stall commercial developments. Across the country, Washington state, under Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, a 2020 contender, has blocked coal and oil export terminals planned along…
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by Fred Lucas Polly Olson, a student at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, last year handed out homemade Valentine cards on her campus with Christian messages until college officials told her she was restricted to a “free speech zone.” On Thursday, Olson told her story at the White House before President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at protecting free speech on college campuses. “My mother told me when she was homeschooling me that I would need to know what my First Amendment rights were, because someday they would be violated, and I would have to stand up for them,” Olson said, speaking at the East Room event. “I was told I was soliciting and disrupting the learning environment, and that it would not be tolerated, and that I would have to stop handing out valentines.” Trump’s executive order, “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities,” directs federal agencies, including the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Defense, to withhold money from colleges that censor student speech. The executive order would affect at least $35.8 billion in research grant money doled out to universities and colleges each year, a senior administration official said. It…
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Bill Lee on Wednesday announced his first executive order as Tennessee’s 50th governor, aimed at improving the state government’s “impact” on rural areas. He tweeted, “I’ve said that rural TN is one of my top priorities. Today I’m pleased to announce Executive Order No. 1, which begins to address improving the outlook in those areas by calling on our departments to assess their impact on the rural parts of our state.” I’ve said that rural TN is one of my top priorities. Today I’m pleased to announce Executive Order No. 1, which begins to address improving the outlook in those areas by calling on our departments to assess their impact on the rural parts of our state. https://t.co/j6ohRmZ1dA — Bill Lee (@BillLeeTN) January 23, 2019 Lee’s executive order directs all 22 executive departments to “issue a statement of rural impact and provide recommendations for better serving rural Tennessee,” the governor’s office said in a press release. “My administration will place a high emphasis on the development and success of our rural areas,” Lee said in the press release. “Our first executive order sends a clear message that rural areas will be prioritized across all departments as we work to improve…
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If his first day in office is any gauge of his coming term of office, Governor DeWine will have an unprecedented tenure. DeWine is not the first executive to be sworn in on more than one Bible. As recently as 2017, President Donald Trump was sworn in on two; a common practice. When Mike DeWine was sworn in as Governor of Ohio, he was sworn in on nine. Nine Bibles. At 12:01 A.M., Mike DeWine took his oath of office at his family home in Cedarville. Ohio Supreme Court Justice Pat DeWine, his son, administered the oath with all nine Bibles. When asked why nine, a spokesperson stated that the family wanted one for each of their eight children, in addition to theirs. Immediately following the ceremony, the 72-year-old Ohioan, signed six separate Executive Orders, crossing a wide array of issues. They are: E.O. 2019-01D: Creating the Governor’s RecoveryOhio Initiative, This creates a special task force that will oversee the statewide battle against the Opioid Epidemic. Leading the group as his “Drug-Czar” is Alisha Nelson, who has served in the capacity under DeWine when he was Attorney General, E.O. 2019-02D: Creating the Governor’s Children’s Initiative, Ohio has one of the highest childhood…
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In one of his first acts in office, Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) signed an executive order seeking to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity or expression” in state agencies. Executive Order #1 states that it “is the expressed policy of my administration that the executive branch should prevent discrimination and harassment against any class of citizens because of age, race, religion, color, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression,” and so forth. The order is not yet available online, likely because Evers was just sworn in Monday, but he posted a picture of it to his Facebook page. “In addition to the excitement of taking the oath of office today, I had the opportunity to sign my first two executive orders as governor. These orders prevent discrimination in state agencies and recognize the importance of state employees,” Ever said in a Facebook post. “Each person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. This fosters sound government, society, and business, and it’s just the right thing to do.” According to The Capital Times, the order states that any recipients of government contracts or grants can only hire on the basis of merit, and requires the Equal Employment…
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by Rachel Greszler President Donald Trump issued an executive order effectively freezing federal pay for 2019 at current 2018 levels. Had the president not issued this executive order (and lacking congressional action on federal pay), federal workers would have received a 2.1 percent across-the-board pay increase, as well as a 25 percent increase in locality-based pay. A 2.1 percent across-the-board increase would have cost roughly $5 billion in 2019 while the locality-based increase would have cost a reported $26 billion. That exceptional pay spike would have kicked in had the president not acted and had the default changes specified in the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act kicked in instead. That act provides for annual federal pay increases based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Cost Index, which tracks civilian employment costs. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] Despite the specified formulaic federal pay increases, federal pay has more recently been set by presidents through their authority to propose an alternative pay schedule. As has become the norm in recent decades, presidents typically set their own pay proposal by Aug. 31 and barring alternative congressional action…
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by David Inserra and Klon Kitchen President Donald Trump’s new executive order allowing the sanctioning of foreign individuals attempting to influence American elections is a necessary step in the right direction, but more can be done. The Heritage Foundation consistently recommends pushing back against nation-state actors who use cyber and other means to attack American interests. This new executive order is a welcome response to these recommendations. The executive order—which establishes an interagency process for determining if foreign influence has occurred and for sanctioning those responsible—is inherently reactionary. But it does attempt to change the calculus of hostile foreign heads of state, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, by incrementally constraining those “foreign persons” that other governments and entities use to conduct these cyber-attacks and illicit influence operations. Those who dismiss this executive order because it is not a “silver bullet” risk misunderstanding the challenge and the nation’s needs, as well as the diffuse nature of our country’s unique, decentralized election administration system. There is no single action the president can take to remove the threat of foreign influence. Instead, what is needed is a coherent suite of policies that proactively deters these attacks and punishes those responsible when they occur. Such a policy cocktail will…
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U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) told “Face the Nation” that the immigration policy that separated families was done in a “ready, fire, aim way,” and insinuated that Republicans who are concerned about illegal immigration hate others. The Tennessee Republican appeared on the CBS show Sunday. The host asked him if the U.S. committed a “human rights violation.” The senator deflected the question and said, “It obviously is not something that’s realistic. It’s not something that appreciates these young children. It certainly was done in a ready, aim, fire way, obviously.” Corker said President Trump signing an executive order to reunite families “led to another crisis” due to the 20-day limit on how long children may be detained with their parents while they are prosecuted. He accused “some” in the administration of using the issue “as a force to activate the base for elections, but obviously the president realized that was a mistake, and now it’s up to us in Congress to work with them to come up with a longer-term solution.” Corker raps his party Corker was asked about “American values” and a CBS News poll result: Those who enter the nation illegally should be punished as an example of toughness,…
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by George Rasley In another act of Trump jujitsu, President Trump has turned the tables on the Democrats and open borders RINOs by signing an Executive Order restating the Administration’s intention to “rigorously enforce our immigration laws” while affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation. Saying it is “It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.” The Executive Order stated that it is the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. The Order then stated, “The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary), shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.” The President also directed the Attorney General to take the necessary legal steps to address the root cause of the problem, which was a consent decrees in a 1997 immigration case. “The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California…
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by Natalia Castro Employees should be hired based on their ability to complete the tasks they have been assigned and nothing else. Yet under the Obama administration, hiring practices for the federal government were moved away from merit to fulfill goals irrelevant to the positions. Policies intended to simplify the federal government application process had the consequence of increasing politicization in the federal workforce and overburdening human resource offices. In May 2010, former President Barack Obama issued a memorandum on Improving the Federal Recruitment and Hiring Process. This memorandum directed agencies to simplify their application process to “eliminate any requirement that applicants respond to essay-style questions” and allowed individuals to submit resumes and cover letters or complete “simple, plain language” instead. The result was a flood of new applications. According to Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning, the goal was not just to increase hiring in the federal government but to increase political hiring. Manning notes, “The 2010 memorandum was always intended to give Obama supporters an easier path to enter the civil service. By overwhelming human resource departments with applications, it accomplished just that.” This was the first of several presidential orders to reshape the federal workforce. In August…
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The 2017 Guide to the Mayor’s Office, posted on the Metro Nashville government website starts with the Mission Statement for the Mayor’s Office: To serve the citizens of Davidson County by directing the executive and administrative functions of the Metropolitan Government through enhanced collaboration while ensuring the local government operates in an efficient, transparent and fiscally responsible manner. On February 24, 2016, Mayor Megan Barry signed Executive Order 005, Financial and other disclosures by certain Metropolitan Government employees and officials; ethics, conflict of interest, and acceptance of gifts on the part of employees of Metropolitan Government. The Mission Statement of the Mayor’s office and her Executive Order are both implicated by Barry’s two year affair with a subordinate Metro Nashville employee while both of them were on the Metro payroll and using public funds to travel together on city business. “Fiscal responsibility” has emerged as a dominant issue as details of the affair have emerged, some of which are opaque at best. While the Mayor has been deliberately vague on the precise starting and ending dates of her affair with Sgt. Robert Forrest, head of her security detail, she has insisted that every trip on which they traveled alone together, was…
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President Trump in Nashville on Wednesday defended his revised travel ban, which earlier in the day was blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii. “We’re going to take our case as far as it needs to go, including all the way up to the Supreme Court,” Trump said during his speech at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium. “We’re going to win. We’re going to keep our citizens safe.” The ban is part of an executive order issued March 6 that outlines measures to protect America from terrorists and others wishing to harm the U.S. The new order was released in response to a similar order from Jan. 27 that was blocked by a federal judge in Washington state and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Various changes were made to try to appease judges, but Wednesday’s ruling in Hawaii shows that hurdles still exist because of what Trump called “judicial overreach.” Among other revisions, the new order took Iraq off a list of seven Middle Eastern countries whose citizens are temporarily barred from entering the U.S. The revised executive order temporarily bans citizens of six Middle Eastern countries who do not currently have “green card” immigration status from entering the U.S.: Yemen, Sudan,…
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