Category: Editorial

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At Large Editorial Opinion

Smoke on the Water

Try saying Naromiyocknowhusunkatankshunk Brook 10 times fast, we dare you.

Greetings from the shores of Naromiyocknowhusunkatankshunk Brook. Not the literal shores, to be honest. I just wanted to work the name of that stream into my column. I’m actually down the road a couple of miles, near the little town of Sherman, Connecticut, where my wife and I rented an Airbnb for 10 days and are being visited off and on by our children and grandchildren who live in and around New York City. 

Sherman is a quaint village (pop. 3,527) named after Roger Sherman, the only person who signed all four founding documents of the United States, but you knew that. (I think he was also one of the stars of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but don’t quote me.) Anyway, Sherman, the town, has one intersection, a nearby boutique IGA and liquor store, and not much else, except lots of swell-looking white clapboard houses and zillions of orange day lilies everywhere.

According to Wikipedia, Sherman is home to Daryl Hall, Jeffrey Toobin, Diane von Furstenberg, and Rob Zombie, though we have not run into any of them during our stay.

Our Airbnb is pseudo-rustic and has lots of beds and futon couches spread over three levels, plus a couple of big decks to sit out on and enjoy the surrounding forest, so it’s been nice. The temperatures have been wonderful — low- to mid-70s — and the rain sparse enough to allow plenty of beach and fishing time in the crystal waters of nearby Candlewood Lake. I have also spent some time fly-fishing in the melodiously named Squantz Pond, which is either a damn lake or the largest pond in America. Anyway, we are having good times.

Except for the smoke, and honestly, it’s only been really bad for one day. It seems we scheduled our vacation to happen just as those annoying Canadians began wafting wildfire detritus into the colonies again. (We really need to secure that border!) But it didn’t last long, so we held our breath and persevered.

We also timed our vacation to coincide with the hottest day on Earth since record-keeping began more than 40 years ago, according to scientists at the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer project, but that was just luck. Over the July 4th holiday, the global average temperature reached an all-time high of 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit. This followed a June that was the warmest on record, worldwide. The heat index 70 miles south of us in New York City was 100 degrees on Independence Day, even though the actual temperatures in Sherman and New York were not that far apart. The difference being that we were in the woods, near cool water, and under tall, shady trees while New York’s concrete-and-exhaust-filled hellscape was exacerbating the sun’s heat to near-intolerable levels.

And, meanwhile in Memphis …

I pull up some local news sources on my laptop and read that things are pretty much in line with the new normal for summer: 100-degree days, one after another. Oh boy, I think, I cannot wait to get back.

I find myself heat-scrolling on what’s left of Twitter and end up reading a vox.com story called “Bus stops and playgrounds are too damn hot.” It addresses a problem that cities will increasingly deal with as temperatures rise over the next couple of decades: a lack of shade. It sounds simplistic, but it’s true. The temperature difference between the corner of Union and Cooper and the center of Overton Park’s Old Forest — four blocks away — can be more than 20 degrees, according to a study conducted a few years back.

While it’s true that Memphis is blessed with a canopy of trees over much of its landscape, we still need to ensure that public spaces such as bus stops and the like are adequately shaded. That would also include our public parks — making sure canopies, picnic shelters, or other shade options are plentiful, as well as water features such as sprinklers and wading pools. The days of frolicking in a big, open, unshaded space during the dog days of summer are behind us, Memphis. And for what it’s worth, the new Tom Lee Park is looking increasingly like genius — a project that’s gotten here just in time. Take it from Sherman.

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Editorial Letter From An Editor Opinion

Confessions of a Writer Who Does Not Know What to Write

Blobby awakes from his nap. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

I have a confession to make. Well, confession might be too strong of a word. That would connote sinning, and I don’t believe I’ve sinned in this case. Maybe, an admission — yeah, that sounds better. I have an admission to make. Although on second thought, admission reminds me of college admissions, which reminds me of college admissions scandals (re: Aunt Becky). And I’m not about to bring on a scandal in this column — that just might cost me this job, and I have a dog named Blobby to support. So scratch that while I go on to thesaurus.com (as any professional would). Okay, okay, I got it. Proclamation. I have a proclamation to make. Now, doesn’t that sound regal? At last, we’ve settled on the perfect word, but before I proclaim what I’m about to proclaim, I must ask that you not judge me. Good? Okay, here goes nothing … if you can’t tell I’m stalling … because … because I have no idea what to write.

I know, I know, what you’re thinking. Wow, so novel that a writer is afflicted with writer’s block. Boohoo for you. But, yes, boohoo for me. This is supposed to be my thing — writing and all that jazz. Back in the day, I could pull a topic straight out of my ear like a magician pulling out a quarter. I mean, do you see what I’m talking about? I don’t even think that metaphor works, and I sat here at this computer for a full three minutes trying to come up with it. In my youth, which wasn’t that long ago, I could write about anything. Once, I wrote a beautiful essay detailing the strengths and weaknesses of Julius Caesar’s leadership style — with each strength and weakness being compared to a different component of a Caesar salad. Anchovies were a weakness; croutons were a strength; lettuce was Caesar meeting the bare minimum for something or the other — I can’t remember, but I remember I got an A (and a note to maybe not compare Julius Caesar to a Caesar salad on my AP Latin exam).

I just know my younger self would be so disappointed in me. My therapist would call it a symptom of my anxiety — this need to be perfect. But look at all this space I have to fill with my words and thoughts. You’d think at this point that surely — surely — I would have thought of something. Anything. So much is going on with the world. So much. Something’s going on with the debt ceiling, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly. Then there was the season — or is it series — finale of Succession that happened recently, but I’m only on the second season, so I can’t talk about that. Of course, there’s the fact that Tennessee’s “anti-drag” law has been declared unconstitutional! (Yay!) But our reporter Kailynn Johnson has been doing a great job covering it (see p. 4), and I’m not about to compete (see my failed magician metaphor above).

Ummmm, I suppose I could talk about how Covid has been declared over but not really or about how the U.S. Surgeon General has declared a decline in mental health of kids as an urgent public health crisis or about how gun violence seems to be a permanent mainstay on news headlines or about how it’s been almost a year since Roe v. Wade was overturned or about how the WGA strike is still going on or about how Taylor Swift was dating a sleazebag of a man until like yesterday or about how social media is rotting our brains or about how carbon dioxide is growing at a near-record rate which is very much a bad thing or about how Ring cameras have been used to spy on customers which is also bad or about how capitalism sucks and politicians suck and sleazebag men suck, and this is where we end up with a run-on sentence and what we call a negative thought spiral that my therapist would not approve of (though she might approve of the run-on since that breaks the perfectionist tendencies in me, yay me).

I guess I could mine something from my personal life, but not much is going on there — even though everything seems to be going on all the time everywhere. It’s both overwhelming and underwhelming. All I want to do is crawl under the covers and listen to my dog snore, morning, noon, and night.

So I guess I do have something to confess: I have no idea what to write, and the sin of it all is that, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve brought you down with my sinking ship of despair. But I’m not sorry. As I said before, I have to fill this space, so I can keep my job to support my dog, who sleeps by my side as I write this, snoring and wagging his tail as he dreams about who knows what, as if everything is not happening everywhere all the time.

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Editorial Letter From An Editor Opinion

May Flowers

A Santa Fe (not Memphis) skyline. (Photo: Paul Brady | Dreamstime)

Editor’s note: Flyer writers will occasionally share this space.

The stormy spring season has thrown a wrench into my carefully crafted plans this year. Power outages, lost internet connections, new patio furniture hurled from my balcony thanks to strong winds, and rained-out soccer games have been April staples (although my hamstring is grateful for the last one). But as the old saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers.” April has indeed been a bit of a wet blanket, but it’s set to usher in some other notable moments for yours truly.

One such moment is May 12th, a day I’ve had circled on the calendar for the better part of this year. That day, as I’m sure most of you readers are aware, is the official release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, in which the intrepid hero Link will continue to traipse around the wild expanse of an open kingdom of Hyrule. That big mountain off in the distance? You can go there, if you want. The ocean stretching off into the horizon? Go build a boat and sail. Or just fly around the floating island in the sky, soaking up the joy of unparalleled freedom in digital format.

While the game and its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, do capture a freedom unlike anything else in the medium, such wanderlust was a big part of my live, non-digital time growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The views from our patio unfolded endlessly into an expanse of snow-capped mountains, infinite blue skies, and rollicking fluffy clouds. And the recurring pastel sunsets, I must inform you all, put Memphis’ to shame. That little peak jutting up way in the distance? Well, odds are that you can probably head over, hike up to the top, and catch a different view of the sunset.

I picked up a friend before heading to the Porter-Leath Rajun Cajun Crawfish Festival this past weekend, and she stopped by my car trunk for a few beats. “Why do you still have your New Mexico license plate?” she asked, with a mixed look of both interest and distaste. And that proved to be an excellent question. This summer marks the start of another year in Memphis and as a citizen of the Mid-South. And I don’t regret a second of it, learning about the city, finally having a professional basketball team to root for, and having close proximity to the best kind of barbecue. But as I’ve settled into the humdrum routine of life as an adult in a city that requires a car for traversal, it has sometimes felt like a balancing act of absorbing the influences of my new city and holding on to that fleeting feeling of freedom from my Santa Fe years.

No longer can I step outside and immediately set foot onto an interconnected series of complex mountainous hiking trails or turn to my left and see someone walking their llama up a dirt road. The yellow license plate, complete with the requisite Zia symbol in the middle, has always been a pleasant reminder of the sky-blue desert days before I begin a journey to work Downtown that requires nimble maneuvering through myriad speed bumps, construction zones, and our patented potholes. This might all sound a bit negative, but I love my new city. I wouldn’t change a thing about my time here and hope to have many more memorable Memphis years.

But my pieces of Santa Fe have been drifting away in the past couple years. My New Mexico driver’s license disappeared along with my entire wallet at a Grizzlies playoff game last year (still worth it), and now this summer, the state of Tennessee is insistent that my NM license plate finally be replaced with one of their own. The dilly-dallying of our county clerk has given me a little extra time with my beloved yellow plate, but my last material connection to New Mexico isn’t long for this world. It’s been a steady companion over the years, as I’ve navigated some mild fish-out-of-water feelings while functioning alongside many friends and colleagues who have personal and long-standing connections to Memphis and the Mid-South. I’ve always wondered when I can truly call myself a Memphian, or perhaps that benchmark was passed long ago. Again, I love being part of the 901 and all it entails. But letting go of the yellow license plate has just been that little bit harder than I thought.

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Editorial Opinion

Bill Lee’s Surprise

During the 2018 governor’s race in Tennessee, the leading candidates were thought to be Diane Black, the ultra-conservative Congresswoman from the state’s Sixth District, and Randy Boyd, the affable social engineer and idea man behind many of then-Governor Bill Haslam’s governmental innovations.

Black had no trouble presenting herself as the right-wing politician and outright Trumpian that she was — supporting huge tax cuts for the wealthy, bashing immigrants, and expressing desires to curtail the EPA. Boyd was almost necessarily a moderate, given the progressive nature of the institutions he created — Tennessee Promise, Drive to 55, etc. — and their modest but real claim on the state’s exchequer.

But a strange thing began occurring during the gubernatorial race that year. Under pressure from his campaign advisors, Boyd began releasing ads and campaign bromides — loaded with hard-edged innuendo about the Second Amendment, potential welfare cheats, and illegal immigrants — that cast him in an altogether new light as some kind of hard-edged reactionary, determined to out-Black Black, or even to out-Trump Trump.

Meanwhile, on the stump, Boyd continued to talk reasonably about such subjects as education, health care, technology, immigration, workforce development, transportation, and urban strategies. Asked about his newly adopted public persona, Boyd said, “If I’m running to be the Republican nominee in Tennessee, I want Republican voters to see that I’m one of them.”

In the end, Republican voters failed to see either Black or the redesigned Boyd as “one of them,” opting instead for political newcomer Bill Lee, a Middle Tennessee industrialist/rancher who smiled winningly, avoided ideological abrasiveness in his speech, talked up his faith, and remained difficult to pin down on specific issues. A third-place candidate for most of the race, Lee became an obvious option to the mud-slinging match between Black and Boyd and ended up an easy winner, triumphing as well in the general election over Democrat Karl Dean.

So here we are in the second year of Governor Lee, no longer the Great Unknown. It turns out he has a few ideas, but most of those he has are far to the right of the spectrum — pushing school vouchers, vowing to end abortion, renouncing Medicaid expansion, denouncing “socialism,” rejecting adoption rights for LGBTQ parents, and — most recently — calling for “open carry” gun legislation, or “constitutional carry,” as advocates of unrestricted weaponry call it.

Cry your eyes out, Diane Black and Randy Boyd! Bill Lee out-Trumped both of you, even if it seems he did so by stealth. In a time when random gun violence increases apace, Tennessee’s governor has basically just called for more guns and the de facto elimination of curbs on their presence in the public sphere. Almost immediately, law enforcement officials, both locally in Shelby County and elsewhere in the state, expressed opposition to the proposed new legislation, and we fully support them. It will require serious effort in the legislature and luck, besides, to overcome this new threat. And let us hope, a la some famous musical advice, we don’t get fooled again.

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Editorial Opinion

Arithmetic Don’t Lie

Former President Bill Clinton is considered to have given former President Barack Obama a serious boost toward re-election at the Democratic National Convention of 2012. That was by means of an elongated  address, both eloquent and something of a vamp, in which Clinton, among other things, credited his fellow Democrat with possessing a sagacity, one lacked by the competing Republicans, in dealing with the ravages of the then-recent economic crash.

Clinton said he could sum up the difference in one word: “Arithmetic!” The line brought down the house, but it was more than good theater. There was a sense in that statement that made it more than a punchline, that in fact summed up one of the fundamental differences between the two major parties in their recurrent debates over fiscal policy, wherein the Republicans talk (but don’t necessarily practice) solvency, while the Democrats prefer to emphasize (not always wisely) financial remedy.  

There came a similar point of epiphany Monday night in the official Democratic response to Republican Governor Bill Lee’s 2020 State of the State address, delivered by state Senate minority leader Jeff Yarbro of Nashville. It is worth quoting at length. In one of his several concessions to the principle of governmental activism, Lee boasted about the $117 million he proposed adding to the salaries of the state’s teachers. “$117 million,” Yarbro mused. “That’s just a little bit more than the $110 million that vouchers are supposed to cost the state once they’re fully implemented. So in a lot of ways, we’re not even sure if we caught up with last year’s losses before we we start filling in the holes.

“So it’s good news. But it’s not clear that we’ve really made the steps that we need to. Tennesseans don’t expect their state government to spend foolishly; they expect us to live within our means. But just imagine how much more we could afford if we weren’t wasting money on private school vouchers. If we weren’t sending almost $1 billion of childcare TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] funds back to the federal government, if we weren’t sending $1 billion a year worth of Medicaid funding  back to the federal government.

“And this is a big deal. The governor announced a lot of initiatives tonight focused on mental health care and substance abuse, and make no mistake about it, some of those ideas are great, ideas that we all support. But here’s the reality: Tennessee  could spend less money to reach more communities and help more people if we just simply join the other 36 states that have expanded Medicaid. That $300 million in initiative could go toward shoring up TennCare, providing new access and safety nets and pilot projects. That’s $300 million that could have gone straight into public education, if we had just expanded.”

Back in 2012, we found Clinton’s point to make good sense, and we find what Yarbro had to say on Monday night just as agreeable. In the jam-packed week of public events we’ve just gone through, we were mightily impressed by Shakira’s rendition of “Hips Don’t Lie” at halftime of the Super Bowl. And Yarbro’s numbers: They don’t lie either. Less sexy, maybe, but profoundly more serious.

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Editorial Opinion

On Following the Law

Where matters of law are concerned, it is obviously useful to have a consensus on what this or that law or legal regulation means. We say this at a time when, at the national level of government, we see diametrically opposite approaches to matters of standard legal procedure.

Take the word “subpoena,” derived from Latin roots meaning “under penalty,” as in “under penalty of law.” If you and I receive a subpoena to appear in court, we had best have our buttocks down there on a bench or we’ll likely end up sitting on a concrete slab in a jail cell. The word — and the authority behind it — has historically been regarded that way in Washington, as well. When President Nixon was suspected of running afoul of the law, several important members of his administration received subpoenas to appear before a specially appointed congressional investigating committee. They showed up. We still remember the names: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and many more. Nixon himself was never asked to testify. He resigned before the then-ongoing impeachment process could compel him to do so.

One of his successors, President Bill Clinton, did testify in his own impeachment matter, albeit voluntarily. Had he not — had he declared himself inviolable to the investigatory process — he would likely have been not only impeached (as he was), but convicted by the Senate.

Fade to today, when a president suspected of criminal behavior, along with every member of his administration, are total scofflaws to the legal process, treating legitimate congressional subpoenas as (in President Trump’s words) “cookies,” to be taken or rejected at one’s pleasure.

Slatery

It was in the shadow of such shameless contempt that the chief legal officer of the state of Tennessee, Attorney General Herbert Slatery, came to Memphis this week to address the Rotary Club, and though Slatery never addressed the national impeachment crisis, he clearly made a point of underscoring the sanctity of the legal process that is being so flagrantly violated in Washington.

Slatery said enforcing the law is not a matter of right vs. left, but of right vs. wrong. He discussed several ongoing legal cases before the state — Mississippi’s suit against Memphis and the state of Tennessee regarding the water aquifer that the Magnolia State claims for itself; the opioid crisis, in which several overlapping jurisdictions have a stake; and several pending capital cases.

With regard to the latter matter, Slatery said that the state constitution and legal precedent mandate that his office “shall” set dates to carry out the sentence of execution, not that it has free will in the matter.

Clearly, opinions differ on the viability and morality of capital punishment, and, just as clearly, the issue is always going to be thoroughly litigated. But, whatever the outcome, the attorney general’s opinion is that he has no option but to follow the law. And what’s true in a matter of life and death surely applies as well to the survival of a presidency.

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Editorial Opinion

Thing One, Thing Two

On November 14th, the citizens of two Memphis City Council districts will have an opportunity to finish up with the business of selecting their representatives to serve on the council. As grateful as we are that the current electoral system allows this opportunity to perfect the people’s will, we’ll say again, as we’ve said in the past, this is a lousy way to do it.

By the time that runoff election date rolls around, the always chancey Memphis weather will have had ample opportunity to turn sour on us, discouraging turnout, and it’s already a given that runoff elections are notoriously poorly attended even in the best of conditions.

We have no reason to expect otherwise for what amounts to judgment day for council Districts 1 and 7 — and an important judgment day at that. Depending on the outcome, there could be two council incumbents returned, with a disposition to continue the governing pattern of the past, or two new faces, those of candidates whose campaign rhetoric at least obliges them to consider serious change in the way city government does its business.

An even split between these prospects is also possible. Our concern does not necessarily lie with a commitment to either point of view or to any of the four candidates. What we worry about is the fact that the honest will of the people may not factor into the truncated totals of a runoff election — one in which the outcome could be decided by the weather or by the electorate’s lapsed attention, or, even in the best-case scenario, by the superiority of one campaign organization or another in forcing their cadres to the polls.

The solution to the runoff dilemma is no secret: It is the election process known alternately as Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff Voting. This process has twice been approved by a large majority of Memphis voters — in a 2008 referendum and in another one in 2018. The process has so far been sabotaged by holdover council members who refuse to authorize the county Election Coordinator to employ it, and by state election authorities, who have intervened against its use. Come to think of it, that’s another good argument in favor of the new faces on the runoff ballot.

Regardless of what happens on November 14th, an event scheduled for the previous day, Wednesday, November 13th, also will have serious import for Memphis’ political future. On that date, retired Circuit Court Judge William B. Acree of Jackson convenes a hearing in Memphis to decide on the ultimate fate of bogus sample ballots that falsely claim to represent the endorsement choices of local political parties. For several election cycles, local entrepreneurs have been in the habit of fobbing off these travesties to local voters at election time.

The scandal is that an outside judge had to be called in to hear the case, since the judges of Shelby County have been as guilty as any other candidates in paying their way onto these fraudulent ballots and thus had to recuse themselves. It is for their sake and ours that we hope Judge Acree will see fit to decree an end to this fraud against democracy.

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Editorial Opinion

Despicable: The Madness of King Don

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Here’s a new illustration of the meaning of “despicable.” The current inhabitant of the White House had this to say via tweet, after a solid week of Turkish atrocities in northern Syria — atrocities that were the result of the president’s ordering

American troops to stand down and allow Turkey to invade the Syrian-Turkish border:

Greg Cravens

“After defeating 100 percent of the ISIS Caliphate, I largely moved our troops out of Syria. Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land. I said to my Generals, why should we be fighting for Syria and Assad to protect the land of our enemy? Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!” 

How many things are wrong with this absurd and heartless braggadocio? First of all, U.S. forces did not defeat ISIS. That victory — unhappily incomplete but still substantial enough to bring final triumph to the very brink — was largely the work of the Kurds, the one ethnic force in the Middle East with the vigor and resolve to attend to such a difficult task. The Kurdish people have been allied with the United States’ efforts from the beginning of this country’s commitment to the region. Their losses in battles with ISIS forces have been correspondingly great, amounting to 11,000 casualties in the last five years of combat.

The Kurds are up against it again, this time against our so-called Turkish “ally,” which these days is under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a strongman of the sort our man in the White House is unable to resist, just as he is unable to resist the charms of such others as Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Kim Jung Un of North Korea is thus far mostly an honorary member of the fraternity of bully boys who have Trump’s number, but he’s surely on the cusp of full membership.

Who are the Kurds? Besides having been a faithful and courageous American ally doing the dirty work of fighting ISIS, they are a valiant democratic-minded nation-in-being that has so far not been allowed to be. Sold out in the international wheeling and dealing that followed both world wars, the Kurdish population endures in its hopes for the future — once again endangered by the current attempt at ethnic cleansing by the Turks, who resent the appeal of Kurdish nationhood to that portion of the Kurdish diaspora that is trapped in southern Turkey.

And who are Russia, China, and Iran? All nations that, one way or another, are considered bona fide adversaries to America. And Assad, the dictator of Syria? Yet another strongman, and one whom an impulsive Trump once hurled missiles at to prove his manhood.

The only silver lining to the current situation for us Tennesseans is the fact that three of Trump’s staunchest Republican congressional allies — Senators Marsha Blackburn and Lamar Alexander, and Representative Mark Green — have condemned his actions in Syria. That’s the merest sort of crack in local GOP solidarity with Trump, but it’s a start.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis City Council: Circumventing the People’s Will

On a preceding page of this issue, law professor Steve Mulroy, who paid his political dues as a two-term member of the Shelby County Commission, exhorts the candidates in this year’s city election to attend to certain overdue tasks.

One of those is that of reviving the efforts, sabotaged at two governmental levels, including by the current Memphis City Council, to institute Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in local elections. One of the scandals of the year just passed has been a successful joint effort by the aforesaid incumbent council members and the office of the Tennessee Secretary of State to suppress what had already been planned as a trial of RCV during the now ongoing Memphis municipal election.

Their efforts included, on the council side, the patently illegal use of taxpayer funds to compensate city lobbyists in Nashville for supporting legislation to ban RCV (also known as Instant Runoff Voting) in all state elections. The council further authorized the use of more public money to pay a public relations agency for advertisements advocating a “No” vote on a citywide referendum last year to uphold previous voter support of RCV.

The first such public referendum vote occurred in 2008 and was lopsidedly in favor of RCV. A second referendum in 2018 should have been unnecessary, but, once held, at council direction, it, too, passed overwhelmingly. As we noted editorially at the time, our own elected city council was using our own taxpayer money in an effort to cancel out what had been our duly authorized vote in favor of Ranked Choice Voting.

Nor has the council majority ceased in its efforts to strike down a public initiative. Council attorney Allan Wade has been directed by the incumbent council members to seek further legal “remedies” to counteract the people’s will.

Allan Wade

Meanwhile, the state Election Coordinator, which is a part of the publicly endowed Secretary of State’s office, issued a ruling, citing a hodge-podge of questionable reasons, why it regarded the RCV process as “illegal” and imposed a directive on the Shelby County Election Coordinator, Linda Phillips, not to follow through on this year’s or any other future implementation of RCV.

Ranked Choice Voting, it will be remembered, calls upon voters to rank their preferred choices, usually in a 1-2-3 sequence. Should there be no majority winner for an election position, the votes of runner-up candidates would be given appropriate weight and reassigned to the top two finishers in accordance with the preferences established in voters’ rankings. Eventually a majority winner would be declared thereby.

The method saves time, money, and effort, and makes unnecessary follow-up runoff elections that, in the case of the October 3rd council district elections, would be scheduled for late November, at a time when the interests of the voting public would have shifted elsewhere, resulting in miniscule turnouts with inevitably misleading final results.

It would seem to be a small thing to ask — that our elected officials observe the people’s will in such matters as public referenda. The fact that they have not and that they have pursued under-handed means of counteracting those expressions of the democratic process is an embarrassment and an outrage.

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Editorial Opinion

Heartbeat Bill Goes From Bad to Worse

One of the standard ways in which the Tennessee legislature can dispose of troublesome legislation — the kind that has an active constituency that needs propitiation but is booby-trapped with unwanted controversy — is to send it to “summer study.” In most cases, that amounts to putting the inconvenient measure into a kind of limbo, from which it normally doesn’t return. Such is not the case, however, with House Bill 77/Senate Bill 1236, the so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill that was introduced in the 2019 legislative session, passed the House, and was seemingly on the verge of passage in the Senate as well when, at the apparent instigation of Senate Speaker Randy McNally, it was deferred from final consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee and routed to summer study.

McNally, it should be noted, is not, in the lexicon of our times, a “pro-choice” legislator, opposed to curbs on legal abortion out of some fealty to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision or as an advocate that women should have control of their bodies. McNally’s objections to the fetal heartbeat bill hinged on his doubts that the bill could withstand constitutional tests in court while meanwhile running up ruinous legal bills for the state of Tennessee.

The bill, versions of which were passed last spring in other states, would prohibit abortion once evidence of a fetal heartbeat could be detected medically.

McNally, a professed foe of abortion, lent his authority instead to a “trigger” bill — one that would automatically ban abortions in Tennessee if and when the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse Roe v. Wade, which, at present, guarantees the right of legal abortion nationwide. That bill passed both houses and was signed into law by Governor Bill Lee.

Meanwhile, this week, the fetal heartbeat bill came up for its reckoning before the Senate Judiciary summer study session in Nashville and, as a capacity audience looked on, turned out to be not only live and kicking but metamorphosed into a more direct threat to constitutional precedent than had the original version that was shelved last spring.

An amended version of the bill, sponsored by Senator Mark Pody (R-Lebanon), would go the “fetal heartbeat” route one better, proclaiming abortion illegal as soon as a woman knows she is pregnant. In the recast bill, the fact of pregnancy itself, not any determination of fetal functioning, would prohibit abortion.

Based apparently on some obscure interpretation of  “common law” rights purportedly granted by the 9th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the backers of the amended bill are basically calling for an out-and-out ban on abortion.

Senator Katrina Robinson (D-Memphis), a Judiciary Committee member, called the amended bill “idiotic” and “completely unconstitutional,” but the Republican committee majority is likely to have its way and to resurrect the already flawed bill in its newly perverse and aggressive form for reconsideration in the legislative session of 2020.

McNally has said he is opposed to the new version, and that’s a hopeful sign. But if there’s anything experience has taught us about the Tennessee legislature, it is that good sense and proper caution are not guaranteed among its members.

Quite simply, this new version of an already bad bill deserves an early-term abortion.