Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, said he believes an Ohio court case, Ream v. U.S. Department of Treasury, may succeed in rolling back federal overreach regarding Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
The Buckeye Institute, an Ohio think tank, filed Ream v. U.S. Department of Treasury in January on behalf of John Ream of Licking County, Ohio.
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Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said not only does Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s $3.1 billion transit referendum, which is expected to be presented to Davidson County voters on the November ballot, appear illegal under the 2017 IMPROVE Act, but its implementation would inevitably raise property taxes for residents.
O’Connell unveiled his transit plan, “Choose How You Move: An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety,” last month.
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Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, continues to scrutinize the legality of the Nashville mayor’s $3.1 billion transit referendum expected to be presented in front of Davidson County voters on the November ballot.
Mayor Freddie O’Connell unveiled his $3.1 billion transit plan, “Choose How You Move: An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety,” last month. The plan would be funded through a half-cent increase in the city’s sales tax to construct miles of new sidewalks, bus stops, transit centers, parking facilities, and upgraded traffic signals.
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Metro Government has responded to a criticism that Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s proposed transportation plan is not legal under state law.
Nashville Tea Party founder Ben Cunningham recently called O’Connell’s referendum illegal because it would increase taxes to fund projects he argues are not covered by the IMPROVE Act, like sidewalks and traffic signals.
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State Senator Ferrell Haile (R-Gallatin) reflected on his work in the Tennessee General Assembly during this year’s recent-adjourned legislative session, specifically when it comes to passing legislation protecting children and addressing the effects of illegal immigration at the state level.
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Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of America First Legal (AFL), explained why the Next Generation (NextGen) Fellowship Program through AFL is a critical tool for young conservative lawyers who seek to “advance the conservative movement in a way we haven’t seen before.”
The mission of AFL’s NextGen Fellowship Program, according to the organization’s website, is to “train and build a bench of lawyers equipped with the legal skills needed to save our nation and to effectively push forward an America First agenda in government, including in future conservative presidential administrations.”
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Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin County) said that establishment Republicans need to come together during this election cycle to support and elect grassroots candidates and former President Donald Trump to office.
Mastriano, who recently detailed his personal experience of betrayal by establishment Republican organizations during his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, said “it’s going to take a lot of effort, energy, and unity” to elect strong Republicans into office this November—especially in the toss up state of Pennsylvania.
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Jason Whitlock, sports journalist and host of the Fearless with Jason Whitlock show, is set to hold a men’s summit at Rocketown in Nashville next month.
The summit, Fearless Army Roll Call 2.0, is a “gathering, celebration, and encouragement of men to put on the full armor of God to take a stand against the evil forces destroying American culture,” according to the event’s website.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the Biden administration’s finalized rule to rewrite Title IX is “extreme,” noting how the administration’s determination to rewrite anti-discrimination rules to encompass gender identity issues appears to be one of its “highest priorities.”
On Tuesday, Skrmetti led six states in suing the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over its finalized rule to rewrite Title IX to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation.
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Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network, announced the launch of the Star News Electoral College Map for the 2024 presidential election.
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Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, explained how the lawfare against former President Donald Trump “accelerates” as his lead grows in 2024 presidential general election polls.
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Tennessee State Representative Chris Todd (R-Madison County) reflected back on this year’s session of the Tennessee General Assembly, calling it “productive” in terms of lawmakers passing a “balanced budget” and “protecting the liberties and freedoms” of Tennesseans.
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Former U.S. Special Envoy for Haiti Dan Foote said in an exclusive interview on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show that former HP CEO Meg Whitman, who now serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, is the official behind the security deal between Kenya and Haiti.
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Rachel Alexander, lead reporter at The Arizona Sun Times, said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ announcement that the State Grand Jury returned indictments to those who agreed to serve as a slate of alternate electors for Donald Trump had he won the 2020 election is “deliberate.”
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NewsChannel 5’s chief investigative reporter Phil Williams continues to be criticized for his “journalistic failures” as he dodged an opportunity to confront State Representative Justin Jones (D-Nashville) on his alleged coverup of a 2020 assault of two protesters by a homeless man.
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Roger Simon, the co-founder of PJMedia and current columnist for The Epoch Times, said the pro-Hamas protests unfolding on Ivy League college campuses across the nation are comparable to the scene in Germany in 1937.
Simon made the comments on Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show after listening to audio of a clip taken from Columbia University where pro-Palestine protesters formed a human chain to keep Jewish students out of an encampment on the university’s campus.
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, addressed personal attacks from NewsChannel 5’s chief investigative reporter Phil Williams over the weekend, saying such attacks are “absolute silliness” and a common tactic used by Williams when pressed on his “journalistic failings.”
On Sunday, Pappert reported on an interview between Williams and Dan Mandis, host of Nashville’s Morning News with Dan Mandis on SuperTalk 99.7 WTN, where Williams said that he once asked Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones (D-Nashville) to respond to claims made by his former close colleague Jeneisha Harris on June 18, 2020 that the state lawmaker had covered up the sexual assault of two protesters by a homeless man.
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Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said not only does Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s transit referendum appear to be illegal under the IMPROVE Act, but the transit plan’s overall vision of commuters suddenly switching over to public transport is “absurd.”
O’Connell unveiled his $3.1 billion transit plan, called “Choose How You Move: An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety,” last week, which would be funded through a half-cent increase in the city’s sales tax.
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National political reporter Neil W. McCabe said the scene of former President Donald Trump visiting a bodega in West Harlem last week “absolutely” resonates with Hispanic and Black voters, which ultimately makes the left “very concerned.”
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Bonnie Brezina, who serves as the state director of Marsy’s Law for Tennessee, said the state is in a positive position to vote on Marsy’s Law as a constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot in 2026.
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Brent Scher, lead investigative reporter and editor at the Daily Wire, said NewsGuard’s censorship of “disfavored” news through its rating tool for media sites “should not be something that is acceptable in the U.S.”
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, discussed the latest developments surrounding a story out of Maryland where police arrested a transgender high school student for a 129-page manifesto that included plans for at least two school shootings.
On Friday, Pappert reported that the student, Andrea Ye, was arrested this week as police say she wrote the 129-page manifesto and shared it with a friend, who then notified police of the document.
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Cheryl Fritze, director of News Operations for Michigan News Source, explained how an elementary school in Michigan is teaching students about pronouns through a book called They She He Me: Free to Be!, a picture book about “busting gender stereotypes and assumptions one pronoun at a time.”
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Aaron Gulbransen, executive director of the Tennessee Faith and Freedom Coalition, said the Tennessee House of Representatives should have introduced a “clean” universal school choice bill instead of attaching additional incentives not particularly related to school choice to the bill.
While the governor’s school choice bill in the House includes additional incentives, the Senate’s version solely focuses on the governor’s proposal.
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Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, said as a plaintiff in the case seeking to compel the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) to release the manifesto left behind by the Covenant School shooter, he believes the the full manifesto should be released – not just the “documents in the car” found on the day of the shooting which Metro Legal suggests would satisfy the plaintiffs in the case.
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Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, said 15 years after the Tax Day Tea Party, the movement’s effect on fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets in federal politics has been “an abject failure.”
“The Tea Party movement was an abject failure. There’s just no other way to put it. Look at where we are today. When the Tea Party movement started, it was triggered by Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. Today, that’s a rounding error. The deficit was $10 billion when Obama took over in January 2009. Today, it’s $34 trillion. It’s going up by a trillion dollars every hundred days, and that rate is accelerating,” Phillips explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
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Roger Simon, the co-founder of PJMedia and current columnist for The Epoch Times, and Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, discussed the ongoing legal battle over the release of the Covenant School shooter’s manifesto, agreeing that the “lives of others” are at stake as long as the manifesto’s contents are kept under wraps.
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Roger Simon, the co-founder of PJMedia and current columnist for The Epoch Times, said the U.S. government paid for Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel, which saw 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles launched at the country.
Simon said the money trail could be traced back to the Obama administration when billions of dollars were sent to the Mullahs.
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Geoff Shepard, former staffer in the Nixon Administration and author of The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, explained in an exclusive interview with The Michael Patrick Leahy Show how he came to the conclusion that the Watergate scandal had been misinterpreted for nearly 40 years.
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Former U.S. Special Envoy for Haiti Dan Foote said in an exclusive interview on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show that the people of Haiti must have a “national dialogue” to begin the process of reforming the country and reclaiming it from violent gangs.
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said he believes Tennessee U.S. Representative David Kustoff’s (R-TN-08) vote on Friday against an amendment that would have ended the warrantless spying on United States citizens allowed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) makes the congressman “ripe for a challenge” this election cycle.
Kustoff and Democrat Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) were the sole members of Tennessee’s congressional delegation to vote against the amendment on Friday, Pappert previously reported.
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Dr. Carol M. Swain, author of The Adversity of Diversity, said the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) standards being pushed today are not the same type of diversity Americans rallied around during the Civil Rights Movement.
Swain said her book points out “everything wrong” with today’s DEI standards and how they violate the U.S. Constitution and Equal Protections Protection Clause.
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Dr. Carol M. Swain and national political reporter Neil W. McCabe, while discussing the politics surrounding the topic of abortion, identified how some seemingly pro-life groups and individuals who claim to be Christians “talk the talk and not walk the walk” when it comes to protecting the unborn.
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Jason Snead, the director of the Honest Elections Project Action Fund, said the practice of Ranked-Choice Voting is a tool used by the Left to “push politics to the left” and “give more power to the left-wing mega-donors.”
Ranked-Choice Voting, an election process where voters can rank multiple candidates for a single office, is currently used statewide in the states of Alaska and Maine, cities including New York City, and other jurisdictions across the nation.
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Shelby County resident Dr. George Flinn, a Republican candidate for U.S. Congress in West Tennessee’s 8th District, said he is running because incumbent U.S. Representative David Kustoff (R-TN-08) needs to be “challenged.”
Flinn, who has run as a Republican and Independent candidate in U.S. Senate and primary races for Tennessee’s 8th and 9th Congressional districts, said he believes Kustoff “should not go unchallenged” considering the incumbent’s recent voting record on bills, particularly spending packages.
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Mike Olcott, a Republican who won last month’s primary election for Texas House District 60, invalidated News Channel 5’s Phil Williams’ claims that his opponent he defeated in the race, State Representative Glenn Rogers, was defeated by “billionaire” pro-school voucher “forces.”
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Cheryl Fritze, director of News Operations for Michigan News Source, said former President Donald Trump must “stay on message” in order to win the state of Michigan in the November general election.
In the 2020 general election, incumbent President Joe Biden defeated Trump in Michigan by 2.78 percent.
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Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s transit plan, which is expected to be on the November ballot, is likely illegal under the IMPROVE Act, which passed the Tennessee General Assembly in 2017.
The 2017 IMPROVE Act, signed by former Governor Bill Haslam, permits local governments to seek a dedicated funding source via surcharge to support mass transportation projects through local referendum.
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said he believes that the Best of Tennessee Action Fund’s goal is to “get rid of anybody who will support” former President Donald Trump based on the political candidates the treasurer for the dark money group has donated to in the past.
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Metro Nashville Council Member Jeff Eslick detailed how the council has recently taken up resolutions surrounding statewide issues and how some members request that a hand vote be recorded as a “shaming move” against members who oppose the resolutions.
In addition to activists taking advantage of the public comment period during Metro Council meetings to speak on the current situation in the Middle East between Israeli and Hamas forces, Eslick said the council has taken up three different types of resolutions that “condemn or express disappointment with the state” in recent weeks.
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, detailed how three new fundraising entities in the Volunteer State – collectively called The Best of Tennessee – mirror the agenda of the nationally focused, Never-Trump organization The Lincoln Project.
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Matt Giffin, a reporter at The Tennessee Star, and Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Star, discussed a recent segment from Steve Bannon’s War Room where host Bannon explained how leftist Christians deceptively cherry-pick elements from the Gospel to push a socialist agenda.
Bannon specifically used Jim Wallis, founder of the non-profit, faith-based organization Sojourners and author of The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Re-founding Democracy, as an example of those using selective elements from the Gospel to paint Jesus as a social justice warrior.
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Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, revealed how NewsGuard is making its way into K-12 public schools and “warping” the minds of tens of millions of schoolchildren.
NewsGuard is a for-profit entity dedicated to countering what it calls “misinformation” founded by journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.
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Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said News Channel 5’s Phil Williams “ought to be embarrassed” as the investigative journalist continues to provide illegitimate responses to inquiries surrounding the legality of a recorded phone call the network aired during last Monday’s 8-minute anti-school choice hit piece.
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Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Tennessee Star, dissected a critical revelation in the case of The Covenant School shooter, 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who took six lives last year at the Nashville school.
Hale, who identified as transgender, shot and killed three adults and three students at The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023.
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NewsChannel 5 and investigative journalist Phil Williams have so far refused to answer questions about the suspicious origin of a phone call recording Williams obtained and broadcast in a Monday report attacking a school choice advocacy group.
The recording captured a phone conversation between Executive Director Tori Venable of Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee and State Representative Todd Warner (R-Chapel Hill), who currently opposes Governor Bill Lee’s pending school choice legislation.
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Matthew Giffin, a reporter for The Tennessee Star, and Michael Patrick Leahy, editor-in-chief and CEO of The Star, questioned the legality of News Channel 5’s airing of a so-called secret recording of a call between Tennessee State Representative Todd Warner (R-Chapel Hill) and Americans for Prosperity – Tennessee (AFP-TN) State Director Tori Venable.
On Monday, the news outlet ran investigative reporter Phil Williams’ 8-minute anti-school choice hit piece focused on AFP-TN’s push for state lawmakers to advance the governor’s bill.
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Steve Baker, a current opinion contributor for Blaze News and an investigative journalist, said he is being treated as a “terrorist” by the weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ) for covering the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as an independent journalist.
Baker has been charged with four misdemeanors for being present at the Capitol on January 6.
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Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Scott Golden explained why the Republican National Committee (RNC) and state Republican parties are pushing voters to vote early in this year’s November general election when the time comes.
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Ohio State Representative Beth Lear (R-Galena) said her bill that would modify the timeframe for voters and candidates to declare a political party is a “simple” piece of legislation that would work to make elections fairer in the Buckeye State.
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