August 7th election – Memphis Flyer

In most elections, there is something called a “down ballot,” consisting of races that, for one reason or another, do not draw media or public attention to the same degree as a few widely noticed marquee races.

The August 7th election ballot in Shelby County is the kind of lengthy one that invites such potential lacunae, but be advised: Some of those potentially overlooked ballot matters are crucial indeed.

The best example is the ballot’s final section, headed “Statewide General Election” and consisting of several “retention” choices in which voters are asked to decide whether to retain or to replace members of the state’s appellate judicial core.

At the very top of this list is the most crucial section, featuring the names of three of the five members of the state Supreme Court — Chief Justice Gary Wade and Justices Cornelia A. Clark and Sharon Gail Lee. These three justices, all appointees of former Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, have been targeted for replacement by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey and other members of the state Republican establishment.

A serious and financially well-endowed campaign has been mounted against the three justices by Ramsey et al., abetted by Tea Party backers and other major donors from around the nation. Supporters of the justices, who are enjoined by the canon of judicial ethics from saying very much in their own defense, have organized a counter-campaign, and the fat, as they say, is in the fire.

Should any or all members of the beleaguered trio fail to receive a majority for retention, Governor Bill Haslam has the duty of naming their replacements. Haslam, who has already had the opportunity to name replacements for two retiring judges, has adopted a hands-off position toward the judicial purge campaign, though members of his traditional support group are said to be working against it.

Former members of the state judiciary are opposing the purge campaign more overtly — notably former Chief Justice Mickey Barker of Chattanooga, a Republican, who has appeared in TV ads urging voters to retain the three justices, who have journeyed to Memphis as an ensemble more than once this year and were the guests at a Memphis Bar Association reception last Friday.

Jackson Baker

Justice Sharon Lee addressing Memphis group at Rendezvous

Justice Lee even stayed behind over the weekend to go door-to-door asking voters to vote for retention.

Almost as far down on the ballot as the judicial retention section is a portion listing candidates for seven of the nine Shelby County Schools (SCS) board positions. Most of the races are considered to be tight, notably one for District 1, pitting incumbent Chris Caldwell against his former colleague on the erstwhile 23-member transitional city/county board, Freda Garner-William. They ran against each other once before, in the 2012 election for the original seven-member post-merger SCS board, with Caldwell coming out ahead.

Other contests feature Teddy King, Anthony D. Lockhart, and Stephanie Love in District 2; Scott McCormick and David Winston in District 3; Shante K. Avant (incumbent) and Jimmy L. Warren in District 6; and Roshun Austin, Mike Kernell, and Damon Curry Morris in District 9.

The election is for a new nine-member SCS board, representing only Memphis and unincorporated areas of outer Shelby County, to replace the former SCS board, which covered the entire county. New districts were drawn by the County Commission in the wake of Shelby County’s six suburban municipalities forming their own districts.

Presumably only party activists will be drawn to the section of the ballot consisting of choices for the state executive committee of the Republican and Democratic parties. Suffice it to say that there are a surprising number of contests on both sides of the party line, and, of course, a voter must choose either the Republican slate or the Democratic one. You can’t do both.

The same choice is necessary in deciding on nominees for governor and United States senator, and for the 8th and 9th Congressional Districts.

Though perhaps they should have been, Dana Matheny and John Mills, Republican candidates in the 8th District to oppose incumbent congressman Stephen Fincher were not mentioned in this week’s cover story, nor were Wes Bradley, Rickey Hobson, Lawrence A. Pivnick, and Tom Reasons, Democratic candidates in that race.

That omission is repaired here. Nobody imagines that any of the above have a chance to win, but most of them have been putting themselves, their energy, and their convictions on the line, and they are entitled to recognition of the fact, as is Isaac Richmond, the also-ran in the 9th District Democratic primary.

(Richmond got his unexpected due two weeks ago when incumbent Steve Cohen was asked what he knew of the position his “opponent” had taken on this or that matter. “I don’t know what Isaac Richmond has done,” Cohen answered straight-facedly.)

Voters will also have to choose whether to vote Democratic or Republican on a few contested primary races for the state legislature.

In the Democratic primary for the 84th District of the House of Representatives, longtime incumbent Joe Towns is opposed by Kenneth L. Wells. In the 91st House District, both Republicans and Democrats have choices. Samuel A. Arthur Watkins and Orrden Williams Jr. are the GOP contenders, and incumbent Raumesh A. Akbari, winner of a special election for the seat last year, is opposed by another contender in that 2013 race, Doris Deberry-Bradshaw.

A more closely observed race is taking place for the right to represent District 29 of the state Senate. Two Republicans are running, James R. “Jim” Finney and Anthony D. Herron Jr. but the real contest is on the other side of the party line in this heavily Democratic south-side district.

Jackson Baker

Ophelia Ford with supporters

Ophelia Ford, a member of the extended Ford political family, has held sway in the 29th since eking out a win in a 2005 special election to replace her brother, former state Senator John Ford, in the wake of the Tennessee Waltz scandal.

That race, against Republican Terry Roland, produced scandals of its own, notably when it was confirmed that a pair of dead people had somehow managed to vote for winner Ford. The seat was declared vacant, and Ford won the revote with room to spare.

But her tenure has been plagued with long absences and with Ford’s occasionally bizarre behavior, both in and out of the Senate chamber. All of this presented City Council member Lee Harris with an opportunity, and Harris is running hard to unseat Ford in the District 2 Senate primary. He takes care not to impugn the Ford family or tradition, even conferring occasional praise on both, but he stints no words in pointing out his opponent’s notorious absentee record, one which he says ill serves the district.

Should he win, Harris would become the first person to unseat a Ford-family member running for reelection, and it is undoubtedly in recognition of that fact that members of the Ford clan turned out en masse for a rare recent public event of the Senator’s. Also present, surprisingly, was erstwhile GOP foe Roland.

Finally, in addition to the judicial retention races late in the ballot, there are contested races for trial judges listed further up. There are some 81 candidates in all vying for positions in Circuit and Criminal Court, Probate Court, Chancery Court, and the civil and criminal divisions of General Sessions Court.

A good deal of controversy has arisen regarding the plethora of endorsements made in the judicial races by this or that self-serving group, including the local Republican and Democratic parties. Both political parties laid primary stress on the real or imagined political loyalties of potential endorsees, and the Democrats in particular found themselves engaged in mutual recriminations over alleged lapses and misjudgment in their final endorsee list.

Even more questionable are the several endorsement “ballots” being circulated by private individuals, who customarily charge candidates substantial sums for the right to be included (or, alternatively, to have their opponents excluded).

Once again this week, readers will find on page 18 of the Flyer a race-by-race evaluation of the contenders by members of the Memphis Bar Association, whose members presumably have the best and most objective vantage points in sorting out the candidates from one another.

For a look at what the August 7th ballot looks like, try this online link: http://shelbyvote.com/DocumentCenter/View/9863.

One of the truly amazing spectacles of the current election season is the ongoing parade of judges and judicial candidates for public inspection at cattle-call events that are held several nights each week, it would seem, by various organizations around Shelby County.

It is a phenomenon that occurs every eight years, as all trial-court judges — and that includes members of the bench in Circuit, Criminal, Probate, and Chancery Crourt, as well as Juvenile Court and General Sessions Court, civil and criminal divisions — are required to stand for election, along with a goodly number of candidates, including some ex-jurists looking for new venues, who seek to take their places.

Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Janice Holder

This year’s election date for judgeships is August 7th, simultaneous with the county general election and with primaries for state and federal offices.

Including incumbents and challengers, there are some 81 candidates seeking voter approval to don judicial robes and make crucial decisions affecting citizens’ safety, livelihoods, fortunes, and freedom. Even, at times, whether they live or die. Just now, however, it is the voters who get to sit in judgment.

And to watch this vetting process in action, this humbling of authority, is a strangely empathetic process. It needs to be remembered that most of the men and women on display at these judicial forums have either been lawyering all day and all week or sitting on the bench presiding over cases.

Given the crush of competition for most judicial positions, and keeping in mind what is at stake, they not only have to spend their evenings, lunch hours, and weekends at such judicial forums as are offered, but they also turn up at various other political candidates’ fund-raisers and meet-and-greets for a chance to stand up and state their name and what judgeship they’re running for, on the chance that this or that stray voter might be influenced in their favor.

Never mind that most of the attendees at these events, including the forums per se, are other candidates and their helpers; often such folk are the sole attendees. Yet it still pays to be there somehow. Or so the candidates believe.

A case in point is Janice Holder, the outstanding, well-credentialed Memphis jurist who first won election to Circuit Court in 1990 and went on to serve on the state Supreme Court, becoming ultimately its Chief Justice. Holder, who decided to retire rather than participate in a retention election this year, competed in a crowded field the year of her first election, showing up at every scheduled event, large or small.

It paid off. Holder won. She didn’t know why, but her always being there — everywhere — for whatever audience there was, may, as she and those who watched her do it suspect, have made the difference in a close race.

The sponsors of these events run the gamut of civic, legal, and, yes, political organizations. Judicial elections are formally nonpartisan, but the two major political parties, as well as various political clubs and ballot-hustlers make endorsements and publish them one way or another.

The Midtown Republican Club has, in successive months, held forums for judicial candidates, dividing them by civil and criminal categories. The Germantown Democratic Club utilized the same formula this week on successive nights, calling their events, held in the Great Hall of Germantown, “Just Desserts.”

That name was more than an interesting pun; the participating judges and contenders who took part were asked to bring actual dessert samples for attendees to munch on or take home — a nifty innovation and, er, as tasteful a way as any to go about the pandering that is an inevitable part of the democratic process.

Keep in mind, however, that candidates for judgeships have to undergo their election-year obstacle course in shackles that candidates for regular political offices don’t have to worry about. Judicial canons of ethics forbid them to make promises, state their opinions on legal cases or issues, or do much more than recite their professional qualifications.

And, keeping in mind, too, the old saw that money is the mother’s milk of politics, judicial candidates have to be milk-drinkers like everybody else, but they are not allowed to participate directly in fund-raising. That’s the business of quasi-separate support committees.

The special restrictions on judicial elections stick in the craw of some of the participants. At such gatherings, Lee Coffee, judge in Criminal Court, Division 7, can and does boast an impressive background: Graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law schools; in practice for 32 years; service in the offices of the District Attorney and U.S. Attorney and as a Public Defender; involved in more than 600 jury trials during his time as lawyer and judge.

“Experience does count,” he told the audience at Germantown’s Great Hall Monday night, but he went on to add, “Tennessee has a really strange law. It says that to run for judge you have to be 30 years of age, you have to live in the state for five years, you have to live in the [judicial] district for one year. You have to demonstrate competence by having a license to practice law.

“There are literally certain people running for judge who could not try certain cases as lawyers but are asking for your votes to try cases as a criminal judge.” That, Coffee said, was “an insult to the administration of justice.”

Variants of that statement have been made here and there by judicial candidates during this year’s forums. They are made all the time in private conversation, particularly by sitting judges who see their professional careers endangered by a process involving political tides and too much sheer chance.

Still, that’s the law, and the law is something that lawyers and judges, actual or aspiring, have to respect. And so they soldier on, in forum after forum, making appearances at political clubs and politicians’ events, not to be seen again in such circumstances — most of them, anyhow — for another eight years.

As one judicial candidate noted Monday night, the Memphis Bar Association will soon perform a service it renders every eight years on the occasion of judgeship elections in Shelby County. Sometime before the end of June, the association will publish on its website, memphisbar.org, the results of a “judicial qualification poll” taken of members of the bar, regarding all contenders for judicial positions on the August 7th ballot.

• Also, on the score of judges facing judgment, there is much statewide interest — as was mentioned in last week’s column —in the forthcoming retention elections scheduled for three members of the state Supreme Court: Chief Justice Gary Wade and Justices Cornelia Clark and Sharon Lee.

Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, a Republican, has launched a campaign for a ‘no’ vote on the three justices, all of whom were appointees of former Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat. Numerous members of the state’s legal community have professed themselves alarmed about the interjection of partisanship.

Memphian Holly Kirby, who was recently named by Governor Bill Haslam to succeed the retiring Holder on the High Court, was asked her opinion on the matter during her attendance at last Friday night’s “Statesmen’s Dinner” in Nashville, the annual gala of the Tennessee Republican Party.

While Kirby shied away from expressing an opinion on the merits of the justices or of Ramsey’s campaign, she was willing to say for the record that the unusual degree of attention now focused on the matter had a positive side. “It’s good that people realize that these retention votes are bona fide elections, not just a matter of rubber-stamping something.”

Kirby also said she supported the Judicial Selection Amendment on the November 4th statewide ballot, which eliminates nominating commissions and provides for direct gubernatorial appointment of all state appellate judges, who would then be subject to regular retention elections.