Tennessee’s new Attorney General, a former Memphian, is holding to the same conservative partisanship as his predecessor.
Jonathan Skrmetti was sworn in as Tennessee’s 28th Attorney General on September 1st, beginning an eight-year term. He was appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court in August.
Skrmetti follows the death-sentence pushing, private-school-voucher loving, gender-identity discriminating, cannabis-law over-reaching, vaccine-mandate fighting, election-meddling, and gay-marriage opponent Herbert Slatery.
From some of the first news releases (i.e. the stuff he wants the public to know about), Skrmetti seems like he’ll continue Slatery’s work. While the news release from his swearing-in ceremony had Skrmetti proclaiming he’d advocate “for the rights and freedoms of all Tennesseans,” he quickly went to work against some Tennessee school kids.
Skrmetti carried on Slatery’s fight against a set of Biden-Administration rules that would allow federal protections for gender identity in school programs. Instead of fighting for “all Tennesseans” — like trans kids — Skrmetti claimed the protections would “promote sex-based discrimination and threaten constitutional rights.” The argument made it pretty clear Skrmetti aimed to fight for only some Tennesseans.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee stopped the rules from going into effect in July. The U.S. Department of Education paused the regulations for a two-month period of public comment. Last week, Skrmetti led 19 other state AGs (from the usual bastions of “freedom for all” like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) in a letter to the feds, blasting the proposed rules.
He said expanding Title IX, the landmark rule that bans sex-baed discrimination in schools, state university employees would be forced to use “certain pronouns and other referential terms.” This would violate the First Amendment, Skrmetti claimed.
His letter wrings hands over who can play on what sports teams, giving science-sounding arguments on the differences in human bodies, and that new rules “would not be fair to female athletes.”
As for “student and faculty safety,” Skrmetti’s letter contains the word “bathroom” 24 times. He frightens with some news stories and some court records that apparently prove that “public toilets … are often the locale of [numerous crimes].” He notes the Education Department “fails to recognize that its new rules will enable this nefarious conduct.”
Three days after attacking school equity, Skrmetti joined another multi-state effort to “demand” President Joe Biden label fentanyl a “Weapon of Mass Destruction.” While this move may be a bit more bipartisan (it had support form AGs in Guam, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Connecticut), the Bush-era language made it sound conservative.
Fentanyl is a cheap, lethal synthetic opioid that is widely spreading and killing thousands. The AGs’ motivation to get the feds to help them stop its spread is plain. Their strategy to get there is not. They know this. In the letter, they said they understand the criticisms. It’s a drug control problem, not a weapons problem. Also, other than one Russian incident, no one has yet weaponized fentanyl.
However, “the fact that classifying fentanyl would have an ancillary effect of preventing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans would be an additional, beneficial reason to classify fentanyl,” the letter reads. “Given fentanyl’s lethality, low cost, and abundant availability, waiting for some state or non-state actor to utilize it as weapon before it is classified as such seems to be the same type of reasoning that kept the government from investigating foreign nationals learning to fly, but not land planes in the lead up to September 11th.”
On Tuesday, Skrmetti was back on the partisan front lines, this time protecting gun owners from credit card companies.
Skrmetti and 24 other AGs warned American Express, Mastercard, and Visa that their creation of a merchant category code for firearms “is potentially a violation of consumer protection and antitrust laws.”
“Giant financial companies must not use their combined market power to circumvent our representative democracy,” Skrmetti said in a news release. “As Attorney General, I protect the people of Tennessee from corporate collusion that threatens to undermine their constitutional rights. Working together with my colleagues from other states, we will marshal the full scope of our lawful authority to stop this abuse.”
Skrmetti spent a lot of time in Memphis. He was a federal prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division and then served as Assistant U.S. Attorney here. He was a partner at Butler Snow in Memphis. He then went to work as Chief Deputy Attorney General and as chief counsel to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.
Skrmetti, his wife, and their four children now live in Franklin and attend Harpeth Hills Church of Christ, according to a news release from his office.
