When and if the Shelby County Commission is required to
name someone as an interim appointee to the Distict 29 state Senate seat, what
will its members do?
To judge by a sampling of commissioners’ opinions taken
Wednesday, that jury is still out and will likely remain so until the moment of
decision is at hand. With the exception of current commission chairman Tom Moss,
a Republican who told reporters he would gladly nominate party-mate Terry Roland
for the job, most commissioners hedged their bets.
Roland, of course, is the plaintiff in the ongoing case to
unseat Democrat Ophelia Ford, who was certified last fall by the Shelby County
Election Commission as the winner over Roland – by 13 votes – to succeed her
brother John Ford, who had resigned the seat after being indicted in the FBI’s
Tennessee Waltz sting.
Charging various frauds and improprieties, including voting
by felons and votes in the names of dead people, Roland and his legal
representatives have challenged the outcome, in and out of court.
To the surprise of many, the state Senate – which is the
ultimate arbiter of its own membership — cast a preliminary
committee-of-the-whole vote Tuesday to void the election results , a
circumstance that, if formally ratified Thursday when the body meets again, will
vacate the seat and make it necessary for the commission to appoint a temporary
successor.
Normally, a gentleman’s agreement prevails whereby an
interim appointment goes to a member of the same party which customarily
controls the district. There is no disputing that District 29, which hugs the
Mississippi River line, is heavily African-American and traditionally
Democratic.
Arguably mitigating that fact, however, are the results
of last year’s special election, in which Ford and Roland essentially ran
neck-and-neck. Not only Moss but two other Republican commissioners, George
Flinn and Bruce Thompson, suggested Wednesday that no party label should be
taken as automatically applying. Both Flinn and Thompson made it clear that they
were open to a variety of choices, irrespective of party-line or racial factors.
Two black Democrats, Cleo Kirk and Walter Bailey, insisted
just as strongly that an interim appointee should be an African-American
Democrat, in keeping with the district’s tradition and, both noted, the relative
dearth of black legislators in the General Assembly. Kirk specifically called for
the reappointment of Ophelia Ford.
But neither Kirk nor Bailey seemed prepared to draw a line
in the sand on the matter. Bailey said that a black Republican would be worth
his consideration and that he could live with whatever the commission – divided
7-6, with Republicans in the majority – ended up deciding.
Though no consensus had yet developed among commissioners,
there seemed to be developing sentiment for a compromise choice of some sort.
Whether coincidentally or not, one name being mentioned was that of Sidney
Chism, an African-American Democrat who last year served a term as interim
senator for the District 33 seat ultimately won by Democrat Kathryn Bowers in a
special election.
It wasn’t so much that Chism himself was being touted for
another go-round in Nashville as that he was the type of nominee who might be
able to get a crossover vote among commissioners.
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