After announcing that he would not run for re-election, Congressman Mark Green had a change of heart, and has decided to run again. He joins Charlie on this episode to talk about why he wants to continue to serve the people of Middle Tennessee in Congress, important issues facing the Nation, and his thoughts on the State of the Union.
Clarksville Conversations with Charlie Koon
Congressman Mark Green: Why I am Running for Re-election
I've lived in Clarksville, Montgomery County nearly my entire life and I've seen a lot of growth and met some amazing people along the way. There's a lot going on in our community and on this podcast I hope she had some light of what's going on in Clarksville. I'm Charlie Kuhn and this is Clarksville Conversations. Alright, Congressman Mark Green, welcome to Clarksville Conversations. Thanks for taking time to be with us. Yeah, Charlie, it's always good to talk to you guys. I hope you're well. Yeah, we're doing well and Tracey and the family sends our best. We saw Cammy the other day and it's always good to see you and your family running around town here. Yep, lots to do. So I think that was probably at the near star event. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yeah. Lot going on. Cammy County had to stand in for me there. Yeah. Yeah. She always does a great job for you, so I know you don't worry about that stuff. Nope, not at all. Well, I know you're short on time and I appreciate it again that you're here with us. You've been through a lot in the last couple of months and you made a decision not to run and now you're back in the race. Can you tell us kind of how that all went down, how you made one decision and then change your mind? Well, it was a combination of things on the on both sides that, you know, in terms of deciding to get out, I had accomplished the things that I said as my agenda for my time as chairman of the committee and, you know, we passed the most conservative, strongest border security bill in the history of the Congress. We impeached Mayorkas first, first time in history, a standing or a sitting cabinet secretary has been impeached. That was successful, not without a lot of work though and a lot of persuasion and research and investigations, but and we've got one other agenda item, which is the Texas cyber workforce issue. We're going to get that done among many, many other things, you know, all the bills I've passed and the amendments I've passed to take care of veterans and gold star families and things like that. I get pretty much got everything that I'd said on my agenda done. And then, of course, during the impeachment process, I got back in the constitution with rereading it again and studying it to kind of figure out what high crimes and misdemeanors really mean. And it became very clear to me that, you know, our founders did not want lifetime professional politicians, they want people who will come up here as citizen legislators and do some time and then go home. And so, you know, I made the announcement that I was getting out, but very quickly. I mean, I probably got, I think I got around 2,000 texts, I got, I don't know how many calls from constituents just asking me to reconsider. And then, of course, it started the cascade of state legislators calling me, Kerry Roberts actually went to the press and did an article on it and then Marsha did the same thing and called me and finally got a call from the president that said, President Trump said, look, I need you in there, you know, got to have you. And so, you know, you're running for reelection. And I said, yes, sir, I'll step back in the race. So, my right arm was pinned behind my back and twisted pretty hard and so, I stepped back in. So, we're going to do one more term and continue to serve. You know, it's about duty in the end. You know, there was a change in the Republican SEC rules on who qualifies. And so, it made it a little bit difficult for some folks to run to replace me. So, I think me doing another election cycle will help us make sure that we get somebody behind me that's going to be better than me or at least as good as me. Well, I know you don't take these decisions lightly at all and your family is very important and God's very important. So, I'm sure you leaned on them to make the decision that's best for you. Well, of course, it's a tough job, it's a frustrating job because, you know, our guys, you know, on our side of the aisle, we try to represent our districts and so, that constantly puts us voting differently on the Republican side. For example, you take a district like Brian Fitzpatrick, it's the suburbs of Philadelphia. That district doesn't look anything like my district, but that Republican represents it. And so, he has to vote a little differently than I do and he votes to represent his district. I vote to represent my district, but the Democrats, they tend to vote like step ideology even when their own district wants them to vote with us on an issue. And so, what that means is that a small majority, you get very little done and that was quite honestly pretty frustrating for a guy like me, I mean, I've been a CEO of a company, I've been a commander in the army, I've been a doc running the code in the ER, you know, I like to see results, so that's very frustrating, but at the same time we need people, you know, in the fight. So, we're going to do another term. Well, I appreciate you stepping back in there and, you know, I know there's a lot of issues that you're dealing with daily and one of them continues to be and it seems like it will be for a long time is the border. So, yeah, you know, kind of give us an update on what's happening there. Well, I think most people understand that when President Biden came in office, he undid all the, I think it was 89 policies of the previous administration and it essentially opened the border. I mean, it opened the border. You come to the border and you immediately get released. There's no detention, which interestingly enough, the law says has to happen, which is why we wound up impeaching mayor because he's just blatantly refusing to enforce the law. But you know, so all those policies get undone and people think, well, heck, we can just come and go right into the U.S. and that's what they're doing and so you got 8.9 million people now from the southern border and another, you know, about a million from the northern border and the country's overwhelmed and we see the results of the drug cartels making billions of dollars from trafficking. We see fentanyl getting into the country. I talk to John Fusan all the time about this stuff and the price of fentanyl has plummeted because the supplies, it's ubiquitous and that's all a result of the open border and that has a change. And then you layer in there, the terrorists that have come through and I just recently caught an al-Shabob terrorist that had been released at the border. It's just Americans aren't safe right now and it's all because of this president. So right now we're trying to negotiate for some border security on some of the funding bill. I don't know how successful that'll be but we're pushing and trying to fight to get it in there. Yeah, we hear, you know, on different news channels, you hear, you know, Congress needs to pass a law for the border, blah, blah, blah, but then on the other hand, you hear, well, the president could do executive orders to shut the border down and I'm probably simplifying it. What does that look like and can a president shut the border down? Well, yeah, the answer to that is an absolute yes, he could do an immediate executive order declaring an emergency, which it is, but for him to do that, he'd have to admit that all of his policy changes at the beginning were wrong, that created the emergency. So I doubt very seriously that this president's going to do that, but he has the power of the authority right now. But truthfully, if they just enforce the rules and the books or reinstated some of the policies of the previous administration, they'd fix the problem. You know, the bill we passed HR 2 a little over a year ago, which is just sitting in the Senate with no actions on it, would also fix the issue. So they have the resources to fix it. They don't want to fix it. This is how they want to fundamentally empower themselves for the rest of, you know, into perpetuity. So, yeah, I mean, they don't want to fix this and they don't care about the human tragedy that it's caused. And that's a that's a crying shame. It's a it's a travesty. Do we still have some of our US military serving on the border? Yeah, there are there are very few active duty. It's mostly national guardsmen and reservists now and some states are actually paying out their own budget to include Tennessee. The governor has done that to send people to the border. There are Tennesseans right now, as we speak on the border, another group that are preparing to deploy. So in that and that's on state orders, meaning the state of Tennessee pays for that. And just to support states like Texas and Arizona that are on the border, getting absolutely crushed. So, so for the time being, we're just going to have to fight with what we've got and hope for the best. Honestly, that with this administration, that's pretty much it. If Congress had its own army, we'd, you know, send them down there to secure the border, but we don't. All we have the power to do is write bills and oversight and that's what we've tried to do. That's what we've done in the in the Republican House and the Senate. They don't seem to care. Well, moving on to something else, you've got some other things you've been working on. You've got, you've got a big bill you're working on that protect America's land act. Tell us, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, the SEC was looking at allowing these companies to actually trade the asset, America's natural assets like our parks on the market, which would allow them foreign companies to come on the market, purchase shares of those assets and essentially own part of our national parks are our mineral resources on our national parks. And this is just insane that they would even think about doing this. Now, the public pressure got really loud and that's one thing I have learned in this job is that if you motivate the American people to talk about it, it'll sometimes make a change and that's what's happened here. So the SEC backed down on its change to the rules. But what I did was then said, okay, well, we're going to pass a law that says you can't do this so that no future administration gets crazy and wants to sell America some foreign Chinese government, which is essentially what Joe Biden's SEC tried to do. Well, yeah, you would think we'd try to protect our assets from a foreign adversaries for sure. Yeah, you would think that, but I mean, we're letting last year, we let 28,000 Chinese nationals come into the country. Many of them military age and we have allowed over 20,000 already this year, this fiscal year, you know, since October one. So I'm not sure this administration really, really cares much about defending against China. Well, you know, and we hear just general statements that every state is now a border state and then I heard either last night or this morning that is that the governor of New York is putting some national guard in the subway system. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised what's happened. You know, they they fuss about it in New York course, they're a sanctuary city. They basically said we, you know, if you're illegal, come on, we'll take care of you. And so that's resulted in people wanting to go to New York. And now they're crying foul. And of course, we want the money to take care of them when that only serves as an additional incentive for people to come. So it's, they're getting what they ask for. Unfortunately, now they're asking for the federal government. That means the taxpayers in Tennessee and all across the country to pay that bill and that shouldn't happen. Wow. So, so today's a big day in DC. You've got the state of the union coming up tonight. How do you anticipate comes out of that? Well, I'm sure, you know, Joe Biden's going to sing about his economy, which if he told the truth, it would be one of the worst economies in the history of the country. Gas prices, price of food, all that 18% increase in the cost of basic goods since he's been in office. But he'll, he'll try to spin it somehow. And then, of course, he's going to talk about the need for us to fund Ukraine despite the fact that we've got a wide open southern border. He wants to protect Ukraine's border, but he doesn't want to protect our own border. He'll, he'll talk about, you know, the green new deal and how great they're doing on advancing green science because that's their, that's their religion. And not that I'm a conservationist, I'd like to trout fish and I don't want my fish to glow in the stream and I don't want the woods that I hunt in to be destroyed. So I'm a conservationist, but I mean, some of these guys, they're, they're, they're just rabid environmentalists and, and they're out of control. That green new deal is just that beef prices are through the roof and going to continue to go through the roof because they're just doing a war on the, on the beef farmer, the cattle farmers. But he'll, he'll talk about how great they're doing in that area. And I'm sure he'll mention, you know, what happened in Israel and Gaza just recently in October. And so I'm sure we'll talk about that. Well, you know, it would, it'd be great. And I know you've, you've tried some of your own ways to, to work with the other side of the aisle. It'd be really good if, if for some, you had a magic wand and we could all just sit down together and not be contentious over every topic and just try to come to some decent conclusions for the American people. Yeah. The problem is that for bipartisanship with Democrats, this means you just agree with everything they want to do. And that's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. And I can cite example after example, but yeah, I mean, it's, it is what it is. And we're, we're up here fighting for what, what the people in Tennessee seven want. Yeah. And you, you do have that district seven. So when, when will you be back in the district? And do you plan on doing some town halls, some visits? What's your schedule starting to look like? So right now we're in the approach process and most of my times in DC, but I think Thursday I'm in the district. And yeah, so I'm in the district Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then back in DC. Well, well, you know, I wish you the best and, and, and I pray for our, for the United States and, and all our government officials, regardless of the side of the aisle on their, their on. So thank you for the work you're doing and we appreciate, we appreciate you taking time to, to give us a little update today. Yes, sir. Well, Charlie, good to talk to you. Tell everyone I said hello and we'll see you when we're around. We'll do it. Thank you so much. Yes, sir. Take care. All right. Bye bye. Subscribe to Clarksville conversations wherever you get your podcasts. The views expressed on Clarksville conversations do not necessarily reflect those of the five star media group. Thank you. (upbeat music)