CLAY: We are headed up to Washington, D.C. right now where Senator Marsha Blackburn is joining us from the great state of Tennessee. I’ll start here, Senator Blackburn: First of all, thanks for coming on and merry early Christmas to you. I am right now in Key West. It’s 80 degrees. When I land tonight in Nashville, it’s going to be zero. Is this the worst travel decision ever made to leave Key West and 80 for Nashville and zero?
SEN. BLACKBURN: (laughing) Well, there is nothing like being home in Tennessee for Christmas, but I am hopeful that your flight will be able to land, and I am hopeful that my flight from D.C. to Nashville will be able to land and I’ll get home and get to make those cookies and pies and a great big gumbo and fix Christmas dinner for my family.
CLAY: What’s your favorite thing to do at Christmas? Well, you guys sit around and watch any Christmas movies? I know you’ve got grandkids now. Second part of that question: Is it more fun to be a parent or grandparent at Christmas?
SEN. BLACKBURN: (laughing) A grandparent is the best because you get to love on them and give them lots of treats and then let their mom and dad deal with it later. (laughing)
CLAY: Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.
SEN. BLACKBURN: That is good, but, you know, we do. We have a good time. My husband is taking everybody this afternoon to see It’s a Wonderful Life.
CLAY: Oh, that’s great.
SEN. BLACKBURN: Of course, I’m missing that because I’m here in D.C., but we love to have family dinners and then it’s great to talk about what we’re grateful for, what we did this year that really had an impact on the lives of others, on our own life; what we have been able to share, or how we’ve invested in the lives of others — and so I love hearing those things from my children and the grandkids, their perspective of being able to understand the true meaning of Christmas and the specialness of the Christmas holidays.
CLAY: You are on the Senate floor — or just off it — right now.
SEN. BLACKBURN: Yes.
CLAY: This $1.7 trillion omnibus bill, I believe, if I’m correct, is still, it looks like is going to pass. I want to get the latest there. But I think you guys also just had Senator Mike Lee’s request that Title 42 stay in effect, lose out 50 to 48, if I’m not mistaken. What is the latest on the Senate floor? What is occurring? What can you tell us about the absolute latest there?
SEN. BLACKBURN: Yeah. We’ve got a series of amendments that different members are offering that would improve the language in the bill. There are a lot of things in here that are legislation that really ought not to be in this funding mechanism, and so we’ve had a series of amendments. We’re not winning, we’re making our argument, and we thought that the Lee amendment would pass. Indeed, they had. Two of the Democrats that voted for it changed their votes to no, so that they didn’t have to have to have that debate.
But keeping Title 42, we know from all of our Border Patrol, we know from the mayors and the elected officials down on the border, that is going to be vitally important to them when you look at how this border is being overrun — and this administration, this is a problem of their making. And, Clay, they have absolutely no plan for mitigating this. Zero. None. And what they’re doing is they’re going to turn every state into a border state, every town into a border town. They’re already doing it to Tennessee, saying they’re going to ship these immigrant — illegal immigrants — to Tennessee, 50 at a time.
That’s a busload at a time. At least two busloads per week. And then have them wait out the period of time until they get their asylum claim. These are all single adults and Senator Hagerty and I have written ICE. We are, of course, trying to block this, but we’re also seeking information. Have these individuals been vetted? Do they have a date? Do they have a notice to appear on a certain date? Are any of them criminals? Are any of them on the terrorist watch list?
And we want affirmative in order to protect the people of Tennessee who have clearly said, “We don’t want to be a sanctuary city. We don’t want to establish a sanctuary state.” There are some states like Illinois and New York and others that have said they are sanctuary states, and cities that have declared a sanctuary status. But that’s not us. It is not what Tennessee wants. So, we’re trying to protect our state and keeping Title 42 is going to be an important step.
CLAY: When you see, Senator Blackburn, what happened with 50 migrants — illegal immigrants — on Martha’s Vineyard, and then you see that tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are right now coming across the border in El Paso, for instance. How unfair is it to a governor like Greg Abbott to have to deal with that, for the state of Arizona to have to deal with that? And as you just mentioned, wherever you may be, I think this is important. Every state is effectively becoming a border state. I saw a study where virtually every congressional district in America was right now getting illegal immigrants because as they come across the border — virtually untouched and unrestricted — they go everywhere. And then you can never actually manage to get these people back out of the country.
SEN. BLACKBURN: That is right. And, you know, if you are transporting them to Tennessee or to other states, then you have the ability to transport them back to their home country.
CLAY: It’s a great point.
SEN. BLACKBURN: So just use the trucks to do that. So they’re using the resources that should be used to remove these individuals that have broken the law, that have come over outside of our immigration policies — which are established, which are the rule of law — and they should be sending them back to their home country and say, “Absolutely not. There is a process. You will follow the process. We are a nation of laws. We abide by the rule of law. No, we’re not going to let you come in and get in the queue to enter the country in front of people who are doing this the right way.”
CLAY: No doubt. Now, I’ve been talking in the first hour of this program, and I know this is something that very what troubles you as well. But unfortunately, we don’t control the Senate. But when you see the revelations that are coming out from the Twitter files and you see that the FBI clearly there are receipts that have been published now, didn’t just put their finger on the election of 2020. They put the whole corpus of the FBI on it and said, “We are trying to rig the election for Joe Biden again.” That’s my words. But you look at the receipts, this seems quite clear. What should happen to hold the FBI accountable for what they did in 2020, and how troubled are you by the revelations that you have seen so far?
SEN. BLACKBURN: The revelations are very troubling. They’re troubling to me and they’re troubling to a lot of Tennesseans who have just said, “I cannot believe this actually happened,” and it was so interesting to me this past weekend at home and Sunday at church how many people talked about this, because they want to be able to trust our law enforcement agencies and they look at what the FBI did and they say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The intentionality of how they went about trying to sink the Hunter Biden story, the way they set up a division or a group in the FBI.
They’re they were pulled off of other cases and they were moved to deal with telling social media, “Oh, there’s going to be Russian interference. Oh, there’s going to be Russia collusion. Oh, you better watch out, there’s going to be hacked data.” They even went so far as to go to the Aspen Institute and do a gaming session, kind of a war games on this, how they would handle this message. Now, think about that. They were all they were so in on this, they were not spending their time looking for drug traffickers, sex traffickers, human traffickers.
They were not taking their time to push forward on investigating criminal groups, cartels that are working in the United States. But they pulled people off of some of these child trafficking cases or other cases, and, Clay, they put them on this Russia collusion story and making certain they were protecting Hunter Biden and that this didn’t do anything that was going to harm Joe Biden! It’s amazing to me, and it shows you that there is a group in the FBI that feels like there’s two tiers of justice. There’s one for the elites and the preference to people, and then there’s one for everybody else.
CLAY: Last question for you: This omnibus bill, what am I missing? Given that the House is going to be in Republican control in January, in a few days, in a few weeks, why would Republicans allow Democrats to draft an entire bill and take away the power of the House to actually — hopefully — dial this back as soon as a couple of weeks from now? Doesn’t it seem like basic negotiation that you would use one half of Congress that you own to get a better deal?
SEN. BLACKBURN: And we have tried everything within our power and have done everything that we can do to get to a continuing resolution and then give the Republican House the opportunity to weigh in on this spending. And, you know, it looks like this thing’s going to go through in the next hour or so. But what we have to do is hope that it fumbles when it gets to the House, and then we’ll have to come back and hopefully do a C.R. that will carry us through to after the first of the year and let the Republicans take a swing at it.
CLAY: No doubt. Merry Christmas to you, Senator Blackburn. I know you’re working hard today. Hope you get back to your family and hope that Republicans can stand up as best we can against this $1.7 trillion.
SEN. BLACKBURN: You got it. Take care. Merry Christmas.
CLAY: Merry Christmas to you as well.