Month: October 2012

• State Election Coordinator Mark Goins

Whatever the final disposition of the library-card controversy in Memphis, it has so far affected a very small percentage of those voting locally, according to Shelby County Election Commission chairman Robert Meyers, who says that only 19 provisional ballots have so far been issued out of more than 151,000 persons voting early in Shelby County.

And Meyers does not believe that all 19 of those cases involved voters arriving at polling places armed with library cards to satisfy requirements of the state’s Photo-ID law.

Controversial from the time of its passage in the Republican-dominated 2011 session of the Tennessee General Assembly, the law is now the subject of fresh contention. A decision by a state appellate Thursday had apparently reversed an earlier ruling in Nashville Chancery Court which upheld state election officials’ judgment that the library cards were an invalid credential for voting purposes.

But state Election Coordinator Mark Goins wasted no time in instructing the Shelby County Election Commission that, pending resolution of a fresh appeal by his office to the state Supreme Court, local polling officials should continue, as they had been doing, to give provisional ballots to persons presenting library cards.

Goins has contended that the pending appeal constitutes a de facto stay.

The Coordinator’s directive, which had been sent to SCEC administrator Rich Holden as well as to Meyers and the other four Commission members, was immediately transmitted by Holden to all local polling officials. This occurred, Meyers said, little more than an hour after he had sent an email to the same officials instructing them to comply with the findings of the appellate court.

The Goins directive in effect canceled out his own email, Meyers said. Asked how many people might have voted in the interim after presenting library cards, Meyer said, “I doubt there was enough time for many, if any, to have done so. One thing came very quickly on the heels of the other.”

Asked if he regarded himself as merely “following orders,” Meyers at first responded firmly, “No sir,” as if in recognition that in modern times that idiom has taken on an unfavorable connotation. But after a pause, he acknowledged, “I was following instructions. Yes.”

Meyers, a lawyer, said he had not fully analyzed the situation from a legal point of view.
Meanwhile, the City of Memphis has filed a brief with the state Supeme Court contesting Goins’ appeal on the basis that the Memphis library cards, the result of an initiative by Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, had been adjudged by the state Appeals Court to be in compliance with the state Photo-ID law. In the same ruling, the Appeals Court had ruled the law to be valid.

Also, on Monday, the City of Memphis dispatched a letter to state Attorney General Robert Cooper demanding that he enjoin Goins and other officials that “the state immediately cease and desist its unlawful refusal to accept Memphis photo library cards as acceptable proof of identity for voting.”

• State Senator Brian Kelsey in action

Even as a pending expansion of Medicaid services for poorer Americans is being highlighted as a political issue by observers like columnist Paul Krugman, who writes about it this week, a Tennessee state senator from Shelby County is proposing legislation to prohibit expansion of the program in Tennessee.

Passage of such legislation would presumably bind the hands of Governor Bill Haslam, who has been non-committal about whether the state should accept add-on federal funds for Medicaid expansion under terms of the Affordable Care Act.

Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) said in a press release on Monday that on Wednesday, November 6, the day after next week’s election, he will introduce a bill to prevent the expansion of Medicaid called for by the Act. Kelsey’s co-sponsor in the House would be Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin), who has not been formally elected yet but it unopposed on next week’s ballot.

As Kelsey noted in his release, the same U.S. Supreme Court decision which upheld the Act last July struck down a provision of it which mandated such expansion and left it to the states to decide whether to revamp their Medicaid programs.

Under the Act’s provisions, the federal government would initially pay all the cost of expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty level. A state’s share would slowly rise to 10 percent of the cost by 2020. But Kelsey casts doubt on the reliability of the federal government’s commitment to its ultimate 90 percent share of additional expenses.

“Unlike Washington, Tennessee balances its budget every year,” Kelsey said. “Tennessee taxpayers cannot afford this expansion of spending. The federal government may be promising money today, but with sixteen trillion dollars of debt, those funds will not be there tomorrow.”

As GOP opponents of the Affordable Care Act often do, Kelsey quoted an initial reaction former Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, when the Act was first being considered in 2009. Bredesen referred to it then as “the mother of all unfunded mandates,” and, according to Kelsey, estimated that it would impose a $1 billion burden on Tennessee taxpayers.

Proponents of the Act and of its Medicaid provisions see thingsdifferently. In his column on the subject this week, Krugman insists that Medicaid actually lowers overall costs by eans of greater efficiencies. “While costs grew rapidly in 2009-10, as a depressed economy made more Americans eligible for the program, the longer-term reality is that Medicaid is significantly better at controlling costs than the rest of our health care system.”