John Gillespie, the Republican incumbent in state House District 97, has kept a relatively moderate profile in the two terms he’s served since winning his seat over Democrat Gabby Salinas in 2020, focusing on non-ideological matters like drag-racing bans and deviating from GOP orthodoxy on gun legislation.
But all that may be changing. Gillespie is now following the lead of the House Republican leadership and another Shelby County GOPer, state Senator Brent Taylor, in sponsoring hard-line crime legislation destined to strip away local law-enforcement prerogatives.
A controversy arose last week after a cell phone video was circulated of a conversation in Nashville in which Gillespie appeared to be assuring the visiting parents of the late Tyre Nichols that he would hold up on seeking an immediate vote on his bill to nullify city council restrictions on the kind of preemptive traffic stops that would end in the savage beating death of young Nichols by MPD officers who are now facing trial for murder.
Instead, Gillespie put the bill on the floor for a relatively quick party-line passage.
The incident may loom large in this year’s legislative elections, in which Gillespie will be opposed by businessman Jesse Huseth, a Democrat who has already released a statement deploring Gillespie’s conduct of the matter.
• Tami Sawyer, recent winner of the Democratic nomination for General Sessions Court clerk, is keeping her activist’s hand in, blogging her discontent with both a pending appearance at the University of Memphis by Kyle Rittenhouse, the youth acquitted of killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest event, and Rep. Gillespie’s short-circuiting whatever commitment he may have given on rolling his bill.
• A hat tip to my daughter Julia Baker of The Daily Memphian for noting that the aforementioned Brent Taylor, notorious for his constant verbal and legislative targeting of local DA Steve Mulroy, is on the same page as Mulroy regarding the need for a new crime lab in Memphis.
• Veteran watchers of presidential State of the Union addresses over the years are used to seeing 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen ready on or near the aisle for banter or conversation as the president — of whatever year or whatever party, for that matter — is either headed to the podium or finishing up afterward and headed out.
Those aisle seats have to be staked out well in advance, and Cohen, using staffers early on to help hold down a place, is something of a master of the art.
Sometimes he shares local artifacts with the passing chief executive. In 2008, he was seen on national television handing George W. Bush a University of Memphis booster’s cap to be autographed. Watching at home, then Tiger basketball coach John Calipari saw it all and later got in touch with Cohen, putting in a bid for the cap and pledging to get it into the U of M Sports Hall of Fame. Cohen turned it over, but the cap never made it to its intended destination. Not long afterward, Coach Cal — cap presumably in tow — decamped to the University of Kentucky.
Always Cohen manages to have something to say. Last Thursday night, he caught Biden going in and took the time to encourage the president to pitch his remarks to the Democratic side of the assembled audience of lawmakers and to give the Republicans hell. Presumably Biden already had that strategy in mind. In any case, that’s what happened.
