Category: Politics Feature

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Catching Up

Protesters gathered on President’s Day to condemn President Donald Trump and his administration. (Photo: Chris Davis)

The Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility had good news last week for Shelby County DA Steve Mulroy regarding four distinct matters charged against him by his persistent adversary, state Senator Brent Taylor, who had included them in his proposed resolution to seek legislative removal of Mulroy. 

The board found Mulroy legally blameless in:

1) His decision to take the death penalty off the table in the murder case of Michael Sample, when two different experts concluded that the defendant was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible, under the law, for the death penalty.

2) His decision not to oppose a reduction of a 162-year sentence for a string of nonviolent forgeries in the case of Courtney Anderson. 

3) and 4) Two separate allegations that he had engaged in improper “ex parte” communication with a presiding judge outside the presence of opposing counsel. 

OUTMemphis placed third at the 12th Annual TEP Gumbo Contest. (Photo: Courtesy Jonathan Cole)

• The OUTMemphis organization, whose booth is pictured here, was one of several winners in the annual fundraising gumbo contest sponsored by the Tennessee Equality Project.

The 12th annual TEP event was held Sunday at the Memphis Sports and Events Center at Liberty Park, drawing a large crowd of entrants, attendees, and public figures who braved the frigid weather.

Proceeds from the event support a variety of projects which, in the words of TEP, “advance the well-being of LGBTQ people and their families here at home in Tennessee.”

Among the elected politicians on hand were state Senator Raumesh Akbari and state Representative Gabby Salinas. Senator Akbari served as one of five primary judges for the event.

This year’s event was held amid several pending developments in both state and national government of direct interest to the LGBTQ community and on the eve of hearings in the state General Assembly on HB 315/SB 0737, the “Tennessee Covenant Marriage Act.”

That legislation, as described by its chief sponsor, state Representative Gino Bulso (R-Williamson), would allow marital unions “between a man and a woman,” requiring compulsory counseling and excluding “irreconcilable differences” as reasons for divorce.

Bulso said the bill would also challenge the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that enabled same-sex marriages.

• President’s Day weekend was notable in other ways as well. On Monday, a sizeable crowd of protesters gathered Downtown to convey their sentiments regarding ongoing actions by the Trump administration.

Former Flyer staffer Chris Davis was there and took the photo below. 

(Photo: Chris Davis)
Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog Politics Feature

Political Dominoes

(left) Marsha Blackburn; (right) Bill Hagerty (Photos: United States Senate, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)

To remind the faithful readers of this space: In our year-end issue, we offered forecasts about the shape of things to come in the political arena.

One circumstance noted for the record was the fact that both of Tennessee’s incumbent U.S. senators — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty — would strongly consider running for governor in 2026.

That is what our pipeline said, and that is what we reported, even though it seemed passing strange, even to us. Why? Because the customary rites of passage flow in the opposite direction — with the gubernatorial office more often serving as a springboard for Senate, than vice versa.

That is definitely the pattern in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where such eminent recent members of the Senate as Dale Bumpers and David Pryor (both now deceased) served what amounted to apprenticeships as governor before going on to become senators.

To be sure, ambitions may figure differently in the Land of Opportunity than in the Volunteer State, but Lamar Alexander ran first for governor and then for senator. And one recalls the unhappy, arguably tragic fate of Democrat Frank Clement, who served several terms as the state’s governor before meeting his Waterloo in two successive failed runs for the Senate.

(Interestingly, Clement’s second and final failed try, in 1966, resulted in the election to the Senate of Republican Howard Baker — the forerunner of what, in the course of time, would become the wall-to-wall ubiquity of GOP state officials.)

In any case, both of Tennessee’s current Republican senators have floated unmistakable trial balloons regarding gubernatorial races in 2026, and both seem dead serious. It may be far-fetched to imagine a competitive race between the two, but, my, wouldn’t that be an attention-grabber!

More likely, forces in the Republican Establishment — most notably Donald Trump — would probably dictate the choice of one over the other. (Either could make a plausible claim of loyalty to the president and to the MAGA agenda.)

And, given the high probability of success for the ultimate GOP nominee, one can imagine a domino-like chain reaction of opportunities opening up for other upwardly mobile Tennessee Republicans.

If Hagerty makes a governor’s race, he could either run for both governor and re-election as senator simultaneously, or go ahead and shed his Senate seat (his term would expire in 2026, anyhow) while campaigning for governor. In that latter eventuality, a race for his departed seat would occur in 2026, with a high probability that 8th District Congressman David Kustoff would be a candidate.

Kustoff’s seat, in turn, might then well be targeted by, say, the preternaturally ambitious state Senator Brent Taylor, in which case his seat would open as well, with possible aspirants for it including former city councilmen Kemp Conrad and Frank Colvett, and maybe even state Rep. Mark White. (A White race would create yet another vacancy and another domino.)

If Blackburn runs and wins, she would keep her Senate seat until being sworn in, in which case either she or a lame-duck Bill Lee would appoint a temporary Senate successor, with a special election for a permanent senator to be held in 2028.

The same sort of sequence as mentioned above for a Hagerty win might then occur, involving the same or a similar cast of characters, though everything would happen at a later remove in time.

Got all that straight, gentle reader? Probably not, though it could be worse. There are other permutations and possible complications we’re sparing you from.

The bottom line is that some shock and awe seems certain for the state’s political calendar in 2026, along with a potentially dizzy round of dominoes.

And who knows? Maybe some as yet unknown Democrat comes out of nowhere to spoil the party at some point along the succession line. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Rumors and Reality

JB Smiley Jr. (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Okay, we are at that stage of political and public developments in which rumors, which have been flying fast and furious, are yielding to reality and tying disparate events together.

To start with what would be newsworthy on its own, the ambitions of various would-be candidates for the office of Shelby County mayor in 2026 are crystallizing into direct action.

As noted here several weeks ago, the list of likely aspirants includes city council member and recent chair JB Smiley Jr., entrepreneur/philanthropist J.W. Gibson, Shelby County commissioner and former chair Mickell Lowery, Assessor Melvin Burgess Jr., Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn, and county CAO Harold Collins.

Smiley, Gibson, and, reportedly, Lowery are basically declared and actively nibbling at potential donors. Smiley in particular has been soliciting funding and support in a barrage of text requests.

For better or worse, meanwhile, the erstwhile council chair finds himself also at the apex of events stemming from the ongoing showdown between now-deposed schools Superintendent Marie Feagins and the Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) board.

A suit against the board by Feagins quotes Smiley as having angrily responded to Feagins’ petition last summer for a legal order of protection against influential commodities trader and political donor Dow McVean, with whom Feagins had feuded.

The suit alleges that, in a phone call, Smiley “shouted at Dr. Feagins, ‘Don’t you ever file a f***ing police report in this city again without telling me first. … You don’t know these people. … My funders are on me now telling me she has to go because they know I supported you. … They are telling me to get rid of you.’”  

Smiley was also quoted in the suit as telling a third party, “We are coming after [Feagins].” 

• A bizarre sideline to the Feagins controversy: During a lull in last week’s proceedings of the local Republican Party’s chairmanship convention at New Hope Christian Church, a rumor spread in the church auditorium’s packed balcony that had astonishing implications.

It was that Feagins was the daughter of one of her predecessors and a well-known one at that — none other than Willie Herenton, who served a lengthy tenure as schools superintendent before serving an even longer time as the city’s mayor. 

A tall tale, indeed. As it turned out, the rumor was based on someone’s hasty reading of a line in The Commercial Appeal’s account of the heated school board meeting at which a MSCS board majority voted Feagins out.

The line read as follows: “Prior to reading off her prepared statements, Feagins acknowledged her father and former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who were in the audience.”

The tell-tale word “were” is the key to the misreading. It indicates clearly that Feagins’ citation of the individuals was plural and not at all of the same person. But, coming late in the sentence, the verb seems to have been overpowered by the previous yoking of “her father and former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton.”

“Were” got read as “was.” And all of a sudden, a short-lived cause célèbre got birthed.

• For that matter, the conflict between schools superintendent and board in Memphis seems to have caused an equally over-excited reaction in the state capital of Nashville, where state House Speaker Cameron Sexton, well-known already for his frequent designs upon what remains of home rule in Shelby County, let loose with brand-new threats against the autonomy of the elected MSCS board.

As noted by various local media, Sexton announced his intention for a state-government takeover of the local schools system. Radio station KWAM, an ultra-conservative outlet, had Sexton on their air as saying, in a guest appearance, that “plans are being drawn up to declare the local school board ‘null and void’” and that “the state will take over the school board.” [Sexton’s emphasis.]

More of all this anon. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

State Party Transitions

Worth Morgan (Photo: Memphis City Council)

In the political sphere, both major political parties chose new leaders over the weekend. 

The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party (TNDP), meeting in Nashville on Saturday, elected Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga the party’s new state chair. Campbell, currently chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, defeated state Representative Gloria Johnson, the party’s unsuccessful 2024 candidate for the U.S. Senate, and three other candidates.

The election required two ballots, with Campbell ultimately winning over runner-up Johnson by a margin of 43 to 22. One of the issues militating against Johnson was a concern that, as an elected state official, her direct involvement in fundraising campaigns would be limited by restrictions set by the state Election Registry.

The TNDP elected Nathan Higdon of Blount County as vice chair.

And in Shelby County, also on Saturday, a few hundred delegates turned out for the local Republican Party’s biennial convention at New Hope Christian Church in Bartlett, electing former Memphis city councilman Worth Morgan Shelby County Republican chair over party vice chair Naser Fazlullah.

The contest had generated a fair amount of friction in local Republican circles, some of it carrying over to the convention itself, largely on account of Fazlullah’s charge that Morgan had been insufficient in his support of President Donald Trump.

Fazlullah repeated the charge to the convention attendees on Saturday, and for his pains heard himself being hooted at from the floor by supporters of Morgan, one of whom hurled the deadly epithet “Rino” (for Republican in Name Only) at Fazlullah.

The tally results — 307 votes for Morgan, 100 for Fazlullah— indicated that the advance Sturm und Drang, which was considerable, had been wholly disproportionate to the actual alignment of forces in party ranks.

Morgan’s campaign, run under the rubric “25 [for 2025] to Revive,” had been well organized and clearly included in its ranks a lopsided majority of local GOP influencers.

Patti Possel, a veteran of the erstwhile deannexation-from-Memphis movement in the suburbs, was elected local GOP vice chair.

Jim Kyle (Photo: Tennessee Courts)

• Jim Kyle, the onetime Democratic leader in the state Senate, who gave up his legislative seat a decade ago to make a successful run for Shelby County chancellor, made his retirement from the bench formal last week. 

Some months ago, Kyle had been forced to step down from his judicial duties because of the debilitating effects of CIDP (chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy). Lawyer Jim Newsom was appointed special judge, a temporary successor to Kyle, by Governor Bill Lee. 

Kyle reports progress in what has been a difficult rehabilitation period, one which has severely restricted his movements and confined him to a wheelchair. He is looked after by his wife, state Senator Sara Kyle, by other family members, and by various ad hoc helpers.

Gamely, Kyle says he is greatly buoyed by the imminent birth of a grandchild to his son James Kyle Jr. and by devoted watching of the televised games — “good, bad, and ugly” —of the Grizzlies basketball team. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A GOP Grudge Match

Naser Fazlullah with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security nominee and last year’s Lincoln Day keynoter. (Photo: Naser Fazlullah | Facebook)

The race for chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party, due to be resolved at the local party convention on Saturday at the Venue at Bartlett Station, has turned into a real donnybrook, with potentially divisive consequences.

As noted previously in this space, the two candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan, the beneficiary of an intra-party “Revive” campaign supported by numerous prominent party members, and longtime activist Naser Fazlullah, whose nose-to-the-grindstone party activities have won him a sizable grassroots constituency. 

Underlying the surface aspects of the race are conflicts and rivalries involving other party figures and a myriad of issues.

Morgan’s most significant supporter is undoubtedly state Senator Brent Taylor, who claims credit for having recruited Morgan, an unsuccessful candidate for Shelby County mayor in 2022, to seek the chairmanship. Taylor won election to the state Senate that same year, claiming the seat vacated by former incumbent Brian Kelsey, who was forced out by legal problems. Since then, he has gone on to generate an amount of attention for himself unusual for a first-term legislator.

That’s partly due to the fact that Taylor, wealthy from the sale of his extensive funeral home network, has personally endowed numerous GOP candidacies and party events, both statewide and locally. And he continues to attract publicity for his aggressive efforts, in and out of the legislature, to impose stronger state control over law enforcement in Shelby County.

The most recent manifestation of what Taylor calls a “Make Memphis Matter” campaign is his ongoing attempt to force the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, whom he accuses of lax crime control. The senator has initiated a legislative procedure that would ultimately require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature to oust Mulroy.

As it happens, Fazlullah opposes that effort, on the grounds that using legislation to remove a legally elected local official is unjustified overkill.

That’s one reason for Taylor’s animus toward Fazlullah and his recruitment of Morgan as a rival candidate. Another is his assertion that, at last fall’s Germantown Festival, Fazlullah strenuously urged GOP state Representative Mark White to oppose Taylor’s reelection in 2026. White acknowledges that Fazlullah made such an approach, which he politely turned aside.

Says Taylor: “Naser should never be party chairman after trying to recruit a candidate to run against a sitting state senator in a primary who happens to have been the largest contributor to the Republican Party while he was vice chairman. Two can play at this game!”

Meanwhile, Fazlullah has allies who hold grudges against Worth Morgan. One is Terry Roland of Millington, a notable GOP conservative who regards Morgan as a lukewarm Republican, a “Never-Trumper,” and a potential advocate of city-county consolidation.

Roland sees Morgan as a tool of party “elitists” and reproaches the chairmanship candidate for allegedly “boycotting” the local GOP’s 2022 Lincoln Day banquet, which was keynoted that year by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The showdown over the chairmanship reflects a complicated pattern of conflicting loyalties, with GOP moderates and conservatives to be found on both sides.

• You saw it here first, in our year-end forecast of future political events: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn is seriously considering a race for governor in 2026 and has so informed an increasing number of her fellow Republicans statewide. 

Glenn Jacobs, the Knox County mayor who was previously regarded as perhaps the leading Republican gubernatorial hopeful, has energized Blackburn’s likely candidacy with a formal endorsement. 

The Republican nomination, though, will apparently still be contested by U.S. Representative John Rose of Cookeville, a multi-millionaire with the capacity to self-fund. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Punching Down

Brent Taylor (Photo: Senator Brent Taylor | Facebook)

It surely hasn’t gone unnoticed that state government is continuing to flex its muscles vis-à-vis local government in Memphis and Shelby County. 

Officials aligned with the administration in Nashville are threatening outright takeover of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) system at the same time that state Senator Brent Taylor and helpers continue to implement their would-be coup d’état against the county judiciary and the office of District Attorney Steve Mulroy.

In the case of MSCS, the sudden out-of-nowhere power struggle between an apparent school board majority and first-year superintendent Marie Feagins has prompted what amounts to an ultimatum from Governor Bill Lee and the presiding officers of the state legislative chambers: Keep Feagins or else!

And Taylor has enlisted the same officials in his campaign to oust Mulroy, involving them in his bill of particulars against the DA at a press conference last Thursday that followed by a day a quickly improvised “summit” called by the senator to consider the case for a new crime lab in Memphis, something Mulroy has put forth as a major need for facilitating effective local law enforcement.

The list of invitees to the crime lab conference, styled as a “roundtable discussion,” included Tennessee Bureau of Investigation director David Rausch and a virtually complete roster of public figures, state and local, who could be considered stakeholders in the matter of law enforcement.

There was one glaring omission, however: DA Mulroy, who was not only not invited; he was not even informed of the meeting, which was held at the City Hall of Germantown and concluded with Taylor suggesting an ultimate consensus that processing of local crime data in sensitive cases could be easily expedited via an existing crime lab in Jackson, obviating the need for a new Memphis lab.

A cynic could be pardoned for assuming that the entire thrust of the meeting in Germantown was to undermine the absent DA’s call for such a lab.

There was no doubt about the senator’s minimizing motive in his press conference the next day at the Memphis Police Association headquarters. It was overtly to “reveal the causes to be considered for the removal of District Attorney Steve Mulroy.”

Taylor’s bill of particulars against Mulroy was a duke’s mixture of complaints, ranging from prerogatives asserted by the DA that could be, and in several cases were, countered by ad hoc state legislation to innovative procedures pursued by Mulroy, some of them reflecting purposes that Taylor acknowledged sharing himself.

A case of the latter was an agreement reached by the DA with Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon to allow trial court judges access to Juvenile Court records. Taylor had sponsored a bill to do just that in last year’s session of the General Assembly.

A similar instance was Taylor’s inclusion in his list of Mulroy’s declared support of gun safety referenda placed by the Memphis City Council on the 2024 general election ballot and overwhelmingly passed.

“Many of us” could sympathize with the referenda points, Taylor said, but his point was that the referenda — calling for local ordinances on behalf of gun permits, an assault rifle ban, and judicial confiscation of firearms in at-risk instances — ran counter to state law.

Sponsors of the referenda had made it clear that they called for “trigger” laws that could be enforced only if and when state law might be amended to allow them.

And there’s a further anomaly here, given Taylor’s stated goal to “Make Memphis Mattter” and safeguard the city from crime.

One has to wonder why he isn’t pursuing an altogether different strategy, one calling for a legislative “carve-out” of Shelby County from current state law prohibiting the immediate implementation of the ordinances called for by the referenda.

Such a course would be consistent with the principle of home rule; it would also be supportive of a position taken by Mulroy’s Republican opponent in the 2022 DA’s race, then-incumbent Amy Weirich, who inveighed against the iniquitous consequences of the state’s increasingly permissive stripping away of gun safety regulations. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Early Heat

Terry Roland (Photo: shelbycountytn.gov)

As no one needs to be reminded, the year 2025 is starting off with near-arctic temperatures, but enough political action is ongoing or forthcoming in the near future to generate a bit of heat.

• The executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party will convene in Nashville on Saturday, January 25th, to pick a new chairperson, and no fewer than seven candidates have been nominated for the honor. They are:

— Rachel Campbell of Chattanooga, currently serving both as party chair of Hamilton County and vice chair of the state party. She is one of two co-favorites in the race.

— Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a state representative and, most recently, the Democrats’ unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024. The other co-favorite, she has good name recognition and a residual network within the party, but there is some question as to whether her legislative service would disqualify her from the fundraising duties required of a chair.

— Brian Cordova of Nashville, the state party’s current executive director, and a veteran of numerous Democratic electoral campaigns. In the event of a deadlock between Campbell and Johnson, he is seen as a possible fallback choice.

— Vincent Dixie of Nashville, another state representative and a former chair of the party’s legislative caucus. Like Johnson, he, too, might be conflicted on the issue of fundraising.

— Alec Kucharski, a veteran of Tennessee political campaigns and currently a resident of Chicago, where he serves as a liaison with the Democratic delegation of the Illinois legislature.

— Todd Frommeyer of Pulaski, an activist, lawyer, and Navy vet.

— Edward Roland of Chattanooga, said to be a salesperson. 

All these candidates will participate in a forum at 1 p.m. on Saturday, to be streamed on Facebook via the Tennessee Democratic County Chairs Association.

• It will be noticed, by the way, that this fairly sizeable field of Democratic candidates contains no aspirants from Memphis.

One longtime member of the Democratic state committee from Shelby County, David Cambron, takes note of this, saying in a text, “We are not Big Shelby any more.”

Cambron maintains that the Memphis area’s “last chance of relevancy” was lost in the 2006 U.S. Senate election, which saw Democrat Harold Ford Jr. lose to Republican Bob Corker.

And, in Cambron’s view, the problem has bipartisan dimensions. “It’s the same reason every statewide discussion of possible Republican gubernatorial candidates doesn’t mention Brent Taylor.” 

The reference is clearly to state Senator Taylor’s seemingly nonstop campaigning for more assertive state authority over law enforcement in Memphis and Shelby County. Often, such intentional omnipresence in media attention bespeaks an intention to seek higher office.

Yet, as Cambron points out, Taylor’s name is rarely to be found in public speculation about the 2026 governor’s race.

(In fairness, it should be pointed out that when the Flyer queried Taylor about a possible ambition to run for governor, the senator replied, “The short answer is no. The long answer is hell, no.”)

• As it happens Saturday, January 25th, is also the date for a GOP chairmanship decision, this one for the leadership of the Shelby County Republican Party, the issue to be decided at the Venue at Bartlett Station.

The two declared candidates are former Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan and longtime GOP activist Naser Fazlullah. As noted previously in this space, Morgan has been the beneficiary of a hyped-up PR campaign involving numerous public endorsements from influential local GOP figures.

All of that has gotten the goat of one prominent Republican, however. Former County Commission Chairman Terry Roland of Millington, who praises Fazlullah’s “selfless” service to the local party, denounces the pro-Morgan faction’s “Revive” campaign as nothing more than an “elitist” plot to suppress grassroots Republicans.

And Roland, who has headed up local campaign efforts for Donald Trump from 2016 on, levies what may be the worst charge in his vocabulary against Morgan, whom he calls a — wait for it — “Never-Trumper.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Preamble Year

Photo: Anuchit Singkham | Dreamstime.com

The year that just passed promised at various points to be one of dramatic change in this or that public sphere, but such changes as did occur fell way short of transformative.

A new order was unveiled in the city government of Memphis with the inauguration of Mayor Paul Young, for example, but the dominant issue of Young’s first days in office — that of police authority vis-à-vis the citizenry in a climate of anxiety about crime — remains mired in uncertainty a year later.

Young’s reappointment of MPD Police Chief C.J. Davis was rejected by the city council, for example, and she still lacks that validation, serving in an interim capacity. Her second-in-command, Shawn Jones, turned out to be ineligible as a Georgia resident, and the mayor’s announcement of a new public safety director continues unfulfilled, although a “consultant” on the subject got added to the patroll..

The shadow of the Tyre Nichols tragedy lingers on at year’s end, reinforced by harsh judgements levied against the MPD by the U.S. Department of Justice, and state government continues to impose its iron will on local law enforcement, countering the brave stands taken by the city’s voters in referenda intending to assert the city’s own efforts at self-protection.

Those referenda, all essentially meant as rebukes to state policies favoring gun proliferation, were a highlight of the election season, which otherwise saw the status quo reassert itself. Though Democrats held on to their legislative seats in the inner city and fielded plausible candidates in races for the United States Senate and a key legislative district on the city’s suburban edge, the ongoing metamorphosis of Tennessee into red-state Republicanism continued more or less unabated.

In the presidential election, Shelby County reasserted its identity as a Democratic enclave, one of two statewide, the other being Nashville. Unlike the capital city, whose electoral districts had been systematically gerrymandered by the General Assembly’s Republican supermajority, Memphis could still boast a Democratic congressman, Steve Cohen, a fixture in the 9th Congressional District since 2006. The adjoining, largely rural, 8th District, which takes in much of the Memphis metropolitan area, continued to be represented by Republican David Kustoff.

As always, the Memphis area serves as an incubator of individuals with clear potential for further advancement. Among them are Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, a prolific deviser of developmental projects; state Senator Raumesh Akbari, a shining light both in Nashville and in national Democratic councils; and Justin J. Pearson, a member of the “Tennessee Three” who famously galvanized the case for gun safety legislation in the Tennessee House in 2023 and who added to his laurels with rousing appearances at the 2024 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Meanwhile, amid rampant speculation as to the identity of contenders for the Tennessee governorship in 2026, two surprising new names were added to the list — those of the state’s two Republican senators, Bill Hagerty and Marsha Blackburn.

An unexpected situation began to simmer late in the year with a virtual mutiny of members of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools system against first-year superintendent Marie Feagins, who was threatened with a rescission of her contract with the board. Action on the matter was postponed until January, but, coming on the heels of the ouster of her predecessor Joris Ray due to a personal scandal, it was clear evidence that major things were amiss on the schools front, which had been a highly politicized landscape a decade earlier and could well become once again.

All in all, 2024 seemed destined to go into the history books as a time of preamble, with weighty circumstances likely to follow in its wake. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Seeing Red

The 2024 presidential election results by precinct (Photo: Courtesy Don Johnson)

The Shelby County Republican Party is scheduled to hold its biennial convention in January, and the party has a bona fide chairmanship race on its hands.

One candidate is Bangladesh-born Naser Fazlullah, manager of a food-and-beverages firm and the local party’s vice chair, who has been highly active in Republican outreach efforts over the years. Most unusually, he professes a desire to “bring both parties together” for the benefit of Shelby County and has numerous friends both inside and outside GOP ranks.

The other candidate is insurance executive Worth Morgan, the former city council member who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for county mayor and had been rumored as a possible candidate for Memphis mayor the next year before deciding not to make the race.

Both candidates are running as the heads of slates for a variety of other party offices.

Morgan’s campaign in particular, run under the slogan “Revive,” is in the kind of high gear normally associated with expensive major public races and has employed a barrage of elaborate online endorsements from such well-known party figures as state Representative Mark White, state Senator Brent Taylor, and conservative media commentator Todd Starnes. 

The GOP convention is scheduled for January 25th at The Venue at Bartlett Station.

• Morgan’s choice of the campaign motif “Revival” is interesting. Not too long ago, Republicans dominated county government, but demographics now heavily favor Democrats in countywide voting. As one indication of that, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris outdistanced the GOP’s Donald Trump in November by a margin of 201,759 to Trump’s 118,917. 

In a series of post-election analyses, however, veteran Republican analyst Don Johnson, formerly of Memphis and now with the Stone River Group of Nashville, has demonstrated the GOP’s supremacy virtually everywhere else in Tennessee. He has published precinct-specific maps of statewide election results showing areas won by Trump in red. Patches of Democratic blue show up only sporadically in these graphics and are largely confined to Memphis, Nashville, and the inner urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Even Haywood County in the southwest corner of the state, virtually the last Democratic stronghold in rural Tennessee, shows high purple on Johnson’s cartography.

Post-election analysis shows something else — a shift of the Republican center of gravity eastward, toward the GOP’s ancestral homeland of East Tennessee. For the first time in recent presidential elections, Republican voting in Knox County outdid the party’s totals in Shelby County.

Looking ahead to the 2026 governor’s race, it is meaningful that a recent poll of likely Republican voters by the Tennessee Conservative News shows two Knoxvillians — Congressman Tim Burchett and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — leading all other potential candidates.

• The Shelby County Commission ended its year with a full agenda of 89 items, several of which were matters involving schools and school funding. The commissioners navigated that agenda with admirable focus and aplomb, considering that the bombshell news of Tuesday’s scheduled Memphis Shelby-County Schools board meeting regarding the potential voiding of superintendent Marie Feagins’ contract exploded midway through their discussions.

• One of the more inclusive political crowds in recent history showed up weekend before last at Otherlands on Cooper to honor David Upton on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Upton is the proverbial man-behind-the-scenes in Shelby County politics and has had a hand — sometimes openly, sometimes not — in more local elections and civic initiatives than almost anybody else you could name. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Slowdown Coming

Photo: Georgios Kollidas | Dreamstime.com

With pressure building for potential tax increases in Memphis city government, the outlook for additional aid from state government took a hit Monday, as the State Funding Board acknowledged weaker-than-expected revenues and set a deliberately slow growth rate.

The board, composed of the state’s three constitutional officers and the state finance commissioner, set a growth rate in general fund revenue of 1 percent to 2 percent and total tax growth at 1.25 percent to 2.15 percent for fiscal 2025-26. That is on the heels of an estimated total growth rate projection for fiscal 2024-25 of -1.68 percent to -1.34 percent. 

Economic growth has ground down considerably in Tennessee after a double-digit revenue windfall of two years ago. Among other factors, the state is facing a $1.9 billion business tax reduction stemming from legislative approval of Governor Bill Lee’s proposal to eliminate the property portion of the state’s franchise and excise taxes. That move followed additional tax breaks for businesses the previous year. The Department of Revenue has processed nearly $900 million in rebates this year, and more are expected.

On the eve of the oncoming 2025 legislative session, the weak budget outlook could affect lawmakers’ decisions, leaving in the lurch not only localities’ requests for aid but funding requests from state agencies totaling over $4.2 billion. The revenue forecast isn’t expected to come close to matching that figure, even with anticipated federal funds covering some of the costs.

• Two Memphians are finalists to succeed soon-to-be-retiring state Court of Appeals Judge Arnold Goldin of Memphis: Shelby County Circuit Judge Valerie Smith and interim Memphis Chancellor Jim Newsom. A third candidate is Jackson Chancellor Steve Maroney, a former chair of the Madison County Republican Party.

Smith was a member of a three-judge chancery court panel that dismissed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the state’s school voucher program. The decision was later reversed by the Court of Appeals. 

Newsom was named in 2015 to a Chancery Court position by former Governor Bill Haslam but was defeated for re-election in 2016 by current Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins. He was reappointed interim chancellor this past summer by Governor Lee to assume the duties of Chancellor Jim Kyle, who has been disabled by illness.

• The three gun-safety measures approved resoundingly by Memphis voters earlier this month via ballot referenda have predictably come under legal challenge. The Tennessee Firearms Association has filed a lawsuit in Shelby County Circuit Court seeking to block city government from activating the measures. 

In a sense, the gun-lobby group’s suit is pointless, in that backers of the referenda conceded that voter approval of the measures was conditional on the will and pleasure of state government, which had made clear that state policy at this point would disallow the implementation of the three measures.

State House Speaker Cameron Sexton had angrily opposed the referenda as antithetical to state law and threatened to retaliate by cutting Memphis off from various state-shared revenues if the measures were enacted.

The measures, certified for the ballot by the city council, would re-institute a requirement locally for gun-carry permits, ban the sale of assault weapons, and enable the local judiciary to impose red-flag laws allowing confiscation of weapons from individuals certified as risks to public safety.

Mindful of Sexton’s attitude, backed by Governor Lee, the Shelby County Election Commission originally acted to remove the referendum measures from the November ballot, but they were approved for the ballot by Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson.

• It begins to look as though the beleaguered Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert will survive various ouster attempts and will survive in office until the election of 2026, when she will be term-limited.

Her latest reprieve came from Circuit Court Judge Felicia Corbin-Johnson, who disallowed an ouster petition from attorney Robert Meyers, ruling that such an action had to be pursued by Shelby County Attorney Marlinee Iverson, who had recused herself.

Judge Corbin-Johnson had previously disallowed an ouster attempt from Hamilton County District Attorney Coty Wamp, who was acting as a special prosecutor.