Live from Music Row, Wednesday 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 national political correspondent for One America News, Neil W. McCabe, to the newsmaker line to discuss the powerful punches of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the labor unions’ workaround to obtain political money for candidates.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, a great correspondent, Neil W. McCabe. Formerly the national political editor for The Star News Network. And now he’s the Top Gov tracker. (McCabe laughs) You like that?
McCabe: Very nice.
Leahy: He works for One American News now. And he is the man who tracks the campaign and reports on all the goings on of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. Has there been a Top Gov sighting, Neil, of late?
McCabe: First of all, Mike, I am pumped and jacked to be with you today, and I’m talking to you right now from just outside the state capital at the state House of Florida, which is one of the most – people can Google it – bizarre-looking state Houses in the country, maybe the world.
One of the great things about Governor Ron DeSantis is that whenever he gives his press conferences or makes major announcements, he never does it in Tallahassee. He travels all over the state, and we’ve been fortunate enough to travel with him, but I think it really speaks to his political sensibilities that he realizes that the action is not in the capital.
It’s actually out in the cities and towns of Florida. I think the biggest news coming out of Governor DeSantis’s sort of administration is he has fired four members of the Broward County School Board. That was Friday.
And of course, his re-election campaign is kicking off. And immediately his campaign is laying into the Democrat who is running for lieutenant governor, who is the president of the teachers’ union for Miami Dade County.
And she’s an out-and-out leftist. She’s always on MSNBC. DeSantis has a program where he wants to take the teacher shortage in Florida, because the population is booming here, and he has a program to help veterans become teachers. And she’s like, blasting that program.
So immediately they’ve got a commercial out blasting it. They’re finding all of her sort of left-wing statements that she’s made on MSNBC. Her name is Karla Hernandez. And the DeSantis campaign is calling her Karla Marx.
Leahy: That is very, very good. Karla Marx.
Carmichael: Karla Marx. That is hysterical. That is great.
Leahy: What I love about Ron DeSantis and his team is he punches. He’s on the attack. Crom has a point for you.
Carmichael: The other thing he does, though, is he acts. In other words, he didn’t just complain about that prosecutor from Tampa, he fired him.
And the same thing with the Broward County School Board. What he’s doing is he’s saying, these people do not have the right to destroy, in his case, our state. And so he’s firing them.
Leahy: Exactly. So let’s talk about this left-wing Karla Marx. She’s the lieutenant governor that the Democrat nominee, Charlie Crist for governor, selected. What was he thinking?
McCabe: It’s weird because Crist was a Republican, right? Crist was the Republican governor of Florida, and then he flipped to be a Democrat and took that congressional seat outside of Tampa and also had an unsuccessful run for Senate. But he’s considered sort of suspect.
The progressives, the leftists here, they’re not sure if they can trust Charlie Crist. Certainly if they looked at his voting record, they would have confidence. Basically what he did was he picked a hardcore leftist to be his running mate.
And remember, every year the biggest contest in American politics is who’s going to give more money to the Democratic Party? Is it going to be the teachers, or the trial lawyers? And so these guys run neck and neck.
The teachers’ unions are financing the Democratic Party in Florida and across the country. So really, it’s not like he made the decision on his own. He basically hired one of his constituents.
Carmichael: Neil, let me give you a thought. And I don’t know if this is something that, in your position or any journalist – and you’re right at the top of the stack – can run this thing to ground.
But when I see a candidate like Raphael Warnock get 90 percent of his money from out of state, from “small contributions,” what I’m wondering is whether or not unions can, through their membership, make gifts that they could not make as an institution to candidates.
But they run it through their massive membership without – really, it doesn’t matter whether it’s with the consent or not. But it’s in the name of members.
In other words, they say, we want to give $2 million and we can only give $2,000 as an organization. So we’ll get 1,000 of our members to give $2,000 a piece, and we’ll do it and we’ll give union dues through them. Have you ever looked into that?
McCabe: This is the way it’s done – all of the rules about when they brought in these election rules, reforms, and laws after Nixon, because of the phenomenal money that Nixon was able to raise through Maurice Stans.
But when these laws were written, they were done to protect and facilitate the way unions run business. Political action committees, frankly, were created so that conservatives could do something even close to what unions do.
And this is just the way it is. And their programs, you’ll see referendums across the country where they say, because there are home care people, a lot of times members of people’s families will be labeled as home care workers.
And then they’ll be able to get money from the state if they’re taking care of disabled children or elderly or whatnot. And there’ll be a referendum to unionize those people.
Once they unionize them, then they recognize a union and then they can grab those dues. It’s all a dues-grab to finance a political operation. DeSantis, like Mike was saying, he takes everybody on. He doesn’t concede any premises.
The guy went to Yale, he went to Harvard. He was a JAG officer in the U.S. Navy. These goofy reporters here in Tallahassee or around Florida, they think they can stump this guy.
The DeSantis campaign put out that Top Gov ad and it’s really just ridiculing the reporters asking these ridiculous questions as if they’re going to set this guy up.
Listen to the interview:
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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.
