Senator Marsha Blackburn Joins C&B to Cover All the Big Issues

CLAY: Joining us from, I believe, the great state of Tennessee — although she may still be in Washington, D.C. — Senator Marsha Blackburn. Senator, Joe Biden’s already left the White House for the day. He’s headed to his beach house. He didn’t get in ’til 12:30 on Monday. But I was kind of thinking, is it better for Joe Biden just not to be in the White House at all since everything he seems to be doing is such a disaster?

SEN. BLACKBURN: Everything they are doing makes the life of Tennesseans and the American people worse. And when I talk with people here in Tennessee, Clay, they are saying, you know, “I voted for Joe Biden” or “I didn’t support Joe Biden but I thought he would be a moderate. I didn’t expect Bernie Sanders.” And they are just so frustrated because inflation, the price at the pump, the price at the grocery store, the open border, drugs in the streets, crime in the communities.

The list goes on and on, and they’re really frustrated with what is coming out of this administration. So, maybe we just want to see Joe go to the beach and stay there for the rest of the summer and the Democrats not try to pass one more bill because we’re playing block and tackle every single day.

BUCK: Senator Blackburn, thank you for being with us. The latest that we saw on the bill that was supposed to be bipartisan on gun control, gun restrictions, that it’s running into some problems now and may not actually go through Senate. Have you any insight into that? Can you tell us more about that?

SEN. BLACKBURN: Well, they have a framework, they don’t have legislative text, and there’s big difference. And I’m one that has said, “Look, I will not vote for anything that is going to infringe on anybody’s Second Amendment rights. I am not going to vote for anything that would give a platform that the federal government could establish some kind of national gun registry,” and do we need to harden schools? Yes. For months, I’ve been recommending that we use the $100 billion left over from covid in the elementary and secondary schools fund so that schools can apply technology, harden those schools.

Also, for years I have been recommending that we work with retired law enforcement and veterans and deputize them so they can take a shift and be the officer on duty at every school with schools having one — one — point of entry into those schools. Those with R common-sense things that could be done. But, you know, when you leave it to the left, they don’t want to do that. They want to have red flag laws that they are going to be they can incent the state, but then it turns out to being a mandate, and it’s coercive behave on behalf of the federal government. So, for me, that is not something I’m going to support.

CLAY: Senator Blackburn, you know this. My kids live in, you know what I’m saying, counsel just outside of Nashville and what you just referenced, they go to public school, we have a security police officer there that they love: Officer Show who’s been inside their school for years. Kids all love her, and they have one entry point. And I don’t understand why that’s remotely controversial.

I also want to thank you, this absurd wokification that’s going on with our mitochondrial where we spend more time talking about diversity and inclusion that we do kicking people’s ass. And you’ve got a policy in place that you’re working to try to de-wokify our military. What would that entail?

SEN. BLACKBURN: Yes. I actually have two different bills. I had offered these in our Defense Authorization Act markup that we had. And, Clay, what this would do is I think the military should be focused on our adversaries and on fighting and winning wars. We know that the new axis of evil is communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

They don’t give a ripping flip about how woke the U.S. military is. But the American people care desperately about defeating our enemies and our adversaries. That is what the focus of the military should be: Readiness, training, preparation to fight and to win. And the second provision that I have offered and am working on is to protect the children of military members when they are in our DOD schools, on military bases.

It had come to my attention that we had some teachers who were trying to work with the student to hide the student wanting to do gender fluidity or gender transition or have psychological care. The parents do not need to be kept in the dark on this, and we do not need teachers on our military bases encouraging children not to talk to their parents and to hide things from them. And I found out through this process that there was not a DOD policy that the parents needed to have the right to be involved in these decisions. So, I tried to push that forward, and we’re yet to get bipartisan agreement on that one.

BUCK: Speaking to Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Senator, if you are in the majority come next year — which Clay and I and certainly the audience are hoping is gonna be the case — what are some of the things that you and your Senate colleagues — again, assuming a Republican majority — would plan to do? Biden would still be president so that creates some roadblocks, but what would you like to see happen?

SEN. BLACKBURN: We need to get the country on the right track and starting with that are two things we needed to. Address the costs at the pump — which means restarting the Keystone XL pipeline, opening up Alaska, offshore drilling, go back to fracking — and it’s going to mean that a Republican-led House and Senate and going to have to take this up and push it forward and override Joe Biden and the leftist opinion on this issue.

The second thing is getting government spending under control. And as y’all know and as you’ve talked about, the two things — inflation, the price at the pump, the grocery store, and government spending — have been the two drivers on this out-of-control inflation rate that we’re seeing. So we need to freeze government spending.

We need to freedom government hiring, we need to freeze escalation rates in salaries of government employees. And then, we need to require a supermajority to pass any spending bill during times of high inflation. And that is legislation I’ve had now; this is the second year I’ve had it. When inflation is high, we ought not to have these bills flying through Congress. Just look at what the Biden administration has done. You’ve got $6.8 trillion that was spent on covid, and then you had another $2 trillion, then $1.9 trillion in infrastructure. And now for his Build Back Broke agenda Biden wants another $2 trillion, and economists are saying, “Stop spending government money!” So let’s be smart about this. Let’s stop it.

CLAY: Senator Blackburn, you also have gone aggressively after the threats that have been put forward against Supreme Court justices. The left wants to pretend that a crazy lunatic didn’t show up at Justice Kavanaugh’s house trying to assassinate him. It took forever for the House to actually pass a bill to provide protection. I know the Senate acted much faster on that. But to your point, “What in the world is going on with this lack of protection for Supreme Court justices?” What should happen in your mind? I know you’ve been pretty outspoken and active about this.

SEN. BLACKBURN: When it comes to our justices and their families, they need to have round-the-clock protection. That is the bill we’ve moved out of the Senate; then Pelosi sat on it for a month. And then you had The Squad and the leftists in the House vote against it. But bear in mind every last one of them — every one of them — voted for extra protection for themselves after January 6th. So, they want to protect themselves but they don’t want to protect the justices and the justices’ families. The other thing is these protesters that are out in front disturbing the peace, messing up the neighborhoods where these justices live or where they go to church.

They should be marched down to city hall and they should be booked on violation of 18 USC 1507, because it is illegal to go out and protest at a judge’s home and try to influence a federal judge on the outcome of a decision. It is an illegal act! So I think that DOJ and FBI need to get out here and they need to do their job and they need to make certain that they are very careful with what is happening with these protests in these communities because many of these protesters in these groups that are sponsoring the protest, y’all know they have been saying, “You’re gonna have a summer of rage if we don’t get the opinion we want from the Supreme Court!”

That is illegal. Chuck Schumer ought to go out here and he ought to apologize to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for calling them out on the steps of the Supreme Court some months ago and saying, “You have unleashed the whirlwind!” That is inappropriate. He should be out there apologizing. We need to protect the court. We need to protect the justices on the court.

BUCK: Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Senator, always appreciate you coming by.

SEN. BLACKBURN: You got it. Take care. Bye-bye now.