During a discussion Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy spoke to Congressman Mark Green about how he will not be running for the Tennessee Senate seat and how the Democrats are working against the American people and themselves in their hopes of creating a different country.
Towards the end of the segment, Congressman Green talked about how the Republicans are ahead of the game with candidates in an effort to take back the House and how they are instituting a similar system to the Democrats to raise funds, called Win Red.
Gill: Big news this week as governor Bill Haslam, former governor Bill Haslam announces he will not seek the US Senate seat being vacated by Lamar Alexander which immediately turns speculation to congressman Mark Green. Would he run for the seat? Congressman Mark Green yesterday announcing he will not seek that Senate seat but will instead focus his attention on making sure that President Trump gets re-elected.
Making sure that Republicans re-take the house and take that gavel back from Nancy Pelosi and her crackpot colleagues. And Mark Green on our newsmakers lines with us today to give us a little insight into what was behind his decision. And he’s also working to make sure we get that wall built. Mark, good to have you back with us.
Green: Hey Steve. Thanks for having me on the show.
Gill: Yeah a lot of folks immediately, as soon as, actually you know even when Haslam was thinking about running saw that a Mark Green-Haslam race would pit a conservative versus a RINO. It would be a great opportunity for Tennessee to follow in what they did with Marsha Blackburn putting a conservative in the US Senate. When Haslam announced he’s not running you immediately said, “Ok, I want to make sure I clear the air. I’m not either.” What was behind your decision?
Green: You know first let me just say we had planned this decision, a planned announcement loping on our TV guide Chris Unguard and his folks to do the announcement or sort of the “Hey, here we are. Here’s our plan.” And then find out that Governor Haslam’s making the announcement on the same day. So that was rather coincidental I think and interesting.
But anyway you know for me I have always all of my life tried to go to the place where I thought I was supposed to be most needed. Other people and I, of course, my wife and I put it in terms of our faith and what God is calling us to do. For me that’s always been the hard place. Ranger school. Special Operations. Med school. I’ve gone where I thought I was supposed to go. And praying over this one and looking at what the challenges are that are really facing America and facing Tennessee.
The number one challenge is we have to get President Trump re-elected. And number two, we have to win control of the House. We can have the best US Senator from Tennessee in the slot, I mean a superstar, best ever in the world, you know and with no control of the House nothing happens.
Gill: Well that’s what we’re already seeing. You’re seeing again the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib’s getting all the attention but more importantly they’ve moved the Democrats and the House even further to the ledge off the far left and retaking that House is again critical as you point out. The Democrats, we had David McIntosh from Club for Growth on with us yesterday…
Green: Great guy.
Gill: You know the Democrats when they ran two years ago were running veterans. They were running so-called moderates that would be different kinds of Democrats. Well, they’ve just done a story and a report that shows that the new Democrats are voting with Nancy Pelosi about 95 percent of the time and with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about 92 percent of the time. The new D’s are the same as the old D’s. They just have a different costume on.
Green: Yeah, they’ve taken the veil off and shown us who they are. This has been their intention all along. Especially the leadership. There are Democrats out there, you can sit down with them. I have conversations with them and they’re baffled at what’s happening. So there is a schism in the party. It’s just at the leadership level they’ve always been aligned and going this direction and it is socialism.
It is America needs to pay for its success. You know our success is we’ve obviously been such a great nation because we cheated other people and we did these horrible things. They can’t acknowledge that free markets that freedom is what produces the best prosperity. They just hate our country. The senior leadership, they want a different country.
They want to stack the Supreme Court. They want different election systems. They want to do away with the electoral college. They want a different country! You mentioned the wall. They’re using images from Barack Obama’s presidency of children in cages and saying this President is putting children in cages.
Gill:Â Well and Elizabeth Warren is announcing that she wants to increase the percentage of refugees, immigrants coming in addition to the illegals pouring in. She wants to bring in 700 percent more refugees if she gets elected President. Again, we got to have a wall and a rational immigration policy and those are some of the things that you’re talking about.
Green: Well absolutely. This Flores Amendment you know where a child basically becomes a visa and we have to…
Gill: Whether it’s your child or not. I mean they’re finding out that the DNA of a bunch these kids they’re coming in with were assigned to them by the cartels. They have no relationship to the children they’re using to get into the country.
Green: Absolutely. They’re basically grabbing kids and using them to get in the door. And it is ridiculous. So the asylum laws need to be fixed. But we do have to secure the border and it is both and of course, AOC’s out there saying “Let’s do away with the entire Department of Homeland Security.” That’s the Coast Guard. That’s TSA. That’s ICE. That’s CPB. I mean all of those agencies are critical to the security of this country. Like I said, they want a different country.
Leahy: Speaking of security Congressman Green, Michael Patrick Leahy here.
Green: Hi Mike.
Leahy: You had a great bill introduced yesterday. You want to have a little check off where (Green chuckles) in the IRS where now you check off do you want to give funds to the Presidential matching funds. Now, do you want to give money to the border wall trust? That’s a brilliant idea. Where’d you come up with that and what’s going to happen with that?
Green: You know one of the guys on my team. And I’ve got a great team. We sit around and we have our legislative planning sessions and one of the guys popped off with that idea and it was just brilliant. Basically, on 1040 you can check that box, give three bucks or six if you’re married filing jointly to the campaign. The Presidential campaign fund. And we’re basically replacing that with a checkbox on your IRS tax form that allows
Leahy: (Laughs) I love it.
Green: You to direct your funds to the wall. To build the wall. (Chuckles)Â Yeah absolutely.
Gill: And whether it is allowing illegal aliens to get health insurance paid for by taxpayers. Whether it’s building the wall. All these things have had overwhelming support by the American people including Democrats, Independents, and those in battleground states. I mean the Democrats are running against where America is.
Green: Absolutely. And they’re running against themselves. Like I said earlier there are a lot of Democrats out there that are shaking there heads going, “Oh my god. Where are these people going?” And so yeah, I’m content with that because that just means we have a chance to take control of the House.
Gill: And they’ve got to run away from their own party to get re-elected. Whether it’s sports or politics, recruiting is the key. You can’t win in the SCC unless you’ve got the horses. Same things true in congressional races. I know your close with leader McCarthy and the head of the freedom caucus Mark Meadows.
How is recruiting going? Because one thing the Democrats did is they recruited veterans. They recruited people who looked and sounded like rational people not like Democrats. (Leahy chuckles) Are we doing a good job recruiting candidates to take those seats back?
Green:Â Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll just if I can give a little bit of an update on how we’re doing getting ready to take the House back. About this time the last cycle we had about two hundred and 75 candidates recruited. Right now we’re well over four hundred. So that’s almost double where we were in the last cycle. Money wise we’re way ahead in raising money. Now we still are behind them because of Act Blue. We’ve instituted our similar system called Win Red and it’s taking off like gangbusters. But we really we are behind them on fundraising.
Leahy: And Act Blue, by the way, is the big money-raising machine that has this long list of liberal donors. It’s sort of like their tithing right? They give money to Act Blue and Act Blue gives it to all these Democrats.
Green: Yeah, it’s basically a campaign fund distribution system. It was very effective for them. I think part of what hurt us in the last cycle and those close races they had the funds to stick in at the last minute and flip a few like Steve Russell over in Kansas is an excellent example of how that happened and how Act Blue was used. So we’ve now instituted a system very similar to that and we are way ahead of where we were.
Listen to the full show here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 am to the Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Mark Green” by Mark Green.
