Adrienne Pakis-Gillon – Memphis Flyer

Everybody knows the old saw about the process of legislation resembling sausage-making: meaning you don’t want to watch all the grisly stuff — the bloodletting, the grind, the slop, the drip, the smell — everything that goes on to create your hot dog.

But at least you get a hot dog. What happened at the Monday meeting of the Shelby County Commission was a kitchen mess with no meat to show for it. An anticlimax. A fizzle. A toot. A zip. A swing and miss.

No, scratch that last one. The batter who swings and misses at least is trying to connect. Nobody took the bat off his shoulder on Monday. And we can safely say “he”; the one woman on the Commission, Republican Heidi Shafer, took the day off. She didn’t miss a thing, after all.

Everybody who was there had something to be embarrassed about.

Monday, March 20th, was the last possible day to set up a schedule, pending a special election in June, to name an interim replacement in the current legislative session for state Representative Mark Lovell, the freshman legislator from District 95 in the Tennessee House of Representatives who, amid allegations of sexual misconduct, resigned his seat after serving barely a month.

District 95 is a sprawling area, including hunks of Germantown, Collierville, and Eads. All these are high-growth areas that surely deserve to be served by somebody during the 2017 session of the legislature.

They won’t be. District 95 will not have votes recorded for it on issues of such gravity as Governor Bill Haslam‘s pending gas tax and infrastructure plan, medical marijuana, urban de-annexation, health care, an overhaul of the state’s tax structure, and on so much else.

As bad as that is, that’s not the worst of it. Shelby County at large, by virtue of this abject default on the part of its governing legislative body, has failed to signify any sort of large general will on the issues confronting the state and the county — on all the ones just listed and one more that it had taken special note of and vowed to have an effect on.

This was the issue of school vouchers. A month ago, the commission, all 13 members of it, representing precincts and neighborhoods from the inner city to the outer suburbs, worked themselves into a condition of moral purpose and high resolve and voted resoundingly, without a nay vote, to defend public education by sending someone to Nashville in Lovell’s place who would cast a vote against the annual bill — introduced this year, as usual, by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) — that would authorize the diversion of taxpayer funds from public schools to use as tuition money for private schools.

This year’s version, creating a “pilot program” in Shelby County, was aimed directly at Shelby County Schools, already underfunded and struggling for survival.

A number of credentialed would-be interim legislators were ready to apply and be interviewed by the commission for the right to go to Nashville on behalf of District 95 — even if that meant service only for a week or two. After all, the voucher matter, as the commissioners knew, was usually one of the last things left hanging that late.

Then a group of Shelby County Democrats got the bright idea of prevailing on their party’s technical 7-6 majority on the Commission to get a Democrat up there to represent District 95, arguably the most Republican district in Tennessee. For a scant few days, mind you, hardly long enough to make any sort of dent on behalf of the legislature’s nearly extinct Democratic Party but long enough to potentially antagonize any Republicans straddling the fence on vouchers.

And the naked partisanship of the proposal alienated the commission’s Republicans to the point that they moved away from their previous position of solidarity with the body’s Democrats and convinced themselves that a better course would be to forgo sending any District 95 representative at all. And so it turned out on Monday. As if to mock the presumptuousness of it all, two Democrats used to siding with the Republicans in a pinch had the squeeze put on them and did so again. A majority voted not to make an appointment.

The bottom line: No Democrat and no Republican to represent District 95, nobody at all from the district to vote on vouchers or anything else.

As is pointed out in this week’s Flyer editorial, the Shelby County Commission, the elective body entrusted with budgetary oversight over public education in the county, has made a point of voting unanimously against the school-voucher bill now moving through the General Assembly.

It did so for both financial and philosophical reasons. And the commission’s unanimous vote was reached in full anticipation that the voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), would, as has been the custom in legislation on this subject, be among the last measures coming up for a final vote in the current legislative session, due to expire in April.

The commission’s vote was a clear signal of its attitude toward vouchers, and it was made in anticipation of the fact that it would soon have the opportunity to designate an interim successor in state House District 95 to Mark Lovell, the Republican representative who, faced with allegations of sexual misconduct, was recently forced to resign by the leadership of his party.

While a special election to replace Lovell is set to conclude on June 15th, well after the completion of the General Assembly’s work, the commission made haste to set up machinery for the interim appointment whereby applications would be made available from March 21st to March 27th, interviews would be conducted March 29th, and an appointment made April 3rd, in time for the eventual appointee to be serving in the House for the duration of the current session.

Estimates of how long that period could be range from a week to the greater part of a month, but the assumption, again, was that the interim state representative-designate would have an opportunity to vote on the voucher question.

That was how matters stood until a move was initiated among various local Democratic activists to take advantage of the commission’s current composition — seven members elected as Democrats and six elected as Republicans — to appoint a Democrat as the interim state representative from District 5.

That initiative was first made public in a letter sent to the commission’s seven Democrats by Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club and a member also of the 13-member ad hoc group appointed recently by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville to revive the Shelby County Democratic Party. (For a variety of reasons, including what Mancini called “many years of dysfunction,” the dissension-prone local party was formally decertified by the state Democratic executive committee last year.)

Cambron’s letter began with a clarion call: “We have a unique opportunity to send a new progressive voice to the state capitol from Shelby County.” Cambron made the case for local party activist and state Democratic committee member Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, “a leading progressive activist, a club member, and a staunch Democrat who will not hesitate to stand up for the values that we are.”

Cambron said it was “critical that Adrienne is chosen to fill the vacancy for State House District 95” and went on to contend that four of the commission Democrats had committed to support her candidacy, while three — he named Eddie Jones, Justin Ford, and current chairman Melvin Burgess — had not.

“This is simply not acceptable,” Cambron wrote. “Our Democrats must be unified and stand up against the radical right-wing agenda coming out of the State Capitol.”

In reality, not all of the four Democrats Cambron claimed as committed to Pakis-Gillon would confirm the fact, and at least one made it clear that he resented being put on the spot, as did one of the three Cambron mentioned as uncommitted.

The Republican members who had put themselves on the record against vouchers began to react negatively to what they saw as the introduction of an extraneous partisan factor. Several of them noted the availability of anti-voucher Republicans among potential applicants for the interim position and said they saw the move to appoint Pakis-Gillon as a conscious rebuff to the constituency of District 95, one of the more consistently Republican-voting areas in the state.

A motion by GOP Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to forgo the previously agreed-on appointment schedule achieved only a tie vote in committee and therefore technically failed, but it picked up support from Republican David Reaves of Bartlett, a former Shelby County Schools board member who had spearheaded the commission’s move to appoint an anti-voucher interim state representative.

As of this week, the situation was fluid, with neither Democrats nor Republicans having a unified position on the matter, and with the body’s previous solidarity on the vouchers issue so riven by disagreement on the partisan issue that there is now serious doubt as to whether an interim appointment can even be made.

The situation will have to be resolved on March 20th, the date of the commission’s next public meeting, or there will not be time for the appointment process to be carried out. Not only would District 95 lack a vote on a matter which is predicted to have a close final outcome, but the commission’s original intent to use the appointment to make a statement on vouchers will be surrendered as well.

Only once before has the commission broken with the tradition of filling a vacancy with a member of the same party as the person being replaced. That was in 2009 when a majority of seven Democrats chose fellow Democrat Matt Kuhn as an interim commissioner to replace Republican David Lillard, who had left to become state treasurer.

That move produced an immediate fallout in Nashville, where Republican legislators from Shelby County protested by imposing a stall on the commission’s legislative agenda, grudgingly relenting somewhat later when Republicans like then GOP Commissioner Mike Carpenter and then District Attorney General Bill Gibbons made public pleas for action on the agenda.