Tag: Beth Harwell

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Democratic Blue Wave or GOP Firewall?

In truth, there are several elections on the August 2nd ballot in Shelby County. 

One is a county general election, featuring contests for Shelby County mayor, sheriff, and various other county official positions, as well as for members of the Shelby County Schools board and Shelby County Commission, special elections for three judgeships, as well as a referendum on pay raises for county officials. And, for roughly half the voters of Memphis, a contest for an open at-large position on the City Council. 

Another election, involving primaries for major statewide and federal offices, includes races for governor, U.S. senator, the U.S. House of Representatives, and legislative positions in the Tennessee General Assembly. 

The outcomes of the county general election and the state/federal primaries will not only be consequential in themselves but will have significant barometric relevance to ongoing political currents — local, statewide, and even national. In particular, the most closely watched races will indicate the extent to which the current century’s ramparts of Republican dominance in Tennessee and Shelby County are still at full strength or whether, conversely, the much-rumored “blue wave” of 2018 will signal a Democratic revival.

Certainly, a Democrat — Lee Harris — is regarded as having a fair chance to prevail as Shelby County mayor, the first to do so since two easy victories in 2002 and 2006 by former county and city Mayor A C Wharton. Harris is a former Memphis city councilman and, more recently, the elected leader of the Democrats’ five-member remnant in the state Senate. He is opposed by David Lenoir, a two-term county trustee, who won a three-cornered Republican primary over County Commissioner Terry Roland and Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos in May. 

GOP: Bill Lee, Diane Black, Randy Boyd, and Beth Harwell

The root fact is that the August 2nd county ballot will be the first real test this year of Democrats against Republicans, and might provide a measure of the respective prospects for either party in the months and even years to come.

As it happens, of course, balloting in the county general election, as well as in the state/federal primaries, is already underway, in an official early voting period that began last Friday, July 13th, and will continue through Saturday, July 28th. 

And, because of a controversy over the Shelby County Election Commission’s choice of voting sites that flared up in the couple of weeks before the process started [see Editorial, p. 8], public attention to the process of early voting was whetted to an unprecedented degree.

By the time the controversy was resolved in the courtroom of Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, Democrats and Republicans had seen early voting sites added in pockets of the county dominated by their constituents. The final number of sites was 27, fairly evenly distributed, and five of those sites — also apportioned equably party-wise — were enabled to operate for an extra three days each.

When the Shelby County Democrats for Change PAC held a reception and rally for party candidates in the Serenity Events Center in East Memphis on Sunday, the organizers proudly claimed a 68 percent to 32 percent voting ratio in favor of the Democratic state/federal primary versus the Republican one for Friday’s first day of early voting. If that kind of differential should continue and be reflected in the voting results of the county general election, chances for the putative blue wave would be looking good.

DEM: Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh

The two mayoral contestants will have had several public one-on-one matchups by the time final voting ceases on Election Day. In the first one, held last month at a meeting of the Downtown Kiwanis Club, Republican Lenoir seemed to gain some traction by selectively using Democrat Harris’ legislative record to make a “soft-on-crime” attack.

In the candidates’ second major encounter, held last week by the NAACP and the ad hoc Voting is Power 901 activist group at the National Civil Rights Museum, Harris made pointed efforts to rebut Lenoir’s charge and clearly found the environment more hospitable to his own message of progressive social change. Score it one-to-one as the opponents prepared to square off again this week before the Downtown Rotary Club.

Though this potentially nip-and-tuck mayoral contest will have exposed the two parties’ contrasting attitudes, the real battle was taking place in the political center. 

Lenoir’s pitch, based essentially on his claim of demonstrated competence, was centrist enough, his supporters hoped, to give him the same shot at independents and Democratic crossovers that current GOP Mayor Mark Luttrell enjoyed in two elections. Similarly, Harris’ professional gloss as a Yale Law graduate and his record in office of simultaneously working across the political aisle, and pursuing cutting-edge Democratic goals gave him a good chance to activate his base, demographically presumed to be a majority, while discouraging crossovers the other way.

Even the race for sheriff, not normally one characterized by political extremes, has a discernibly ideological edge this year, as was demonstrated by another NAACP/VIP901 debate last week, this one between Chief Deputy Floyd Bonner, the Democrat, and county homeland security director Dale Lane, the Republican.

Phil Bredesen and Marsha Blackburn

Among other issues, Bonner’s declared disinclination to cooperate with the Trump administration’s roundups of undocumented immigrants, locally, contrasted with Lane’s professed willingness to assist the operatives of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials as “fellow law officers.” (See Politics, p. 7,  for more.) 

Consistent with the blue wave theme, the August 2nd election ballot shows three Democrats running for the office of governor, and only one of them — political unknown Mezianne Vale Payne — has the look of a ringer. The other two Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and outgoing Democratic state House Leader Craig Fitzhugh — are major league, all the way.

Most analysts see Dean as the clear favorite, on the basis of his financial edge and backing from traditionalists in the party network, though Fitzhugh has the declared support of party legislators, educators, state employees, and various other rank-and-file groups.

There are three Democrats vying in the party primary for the U.S. Senate, too, and one of them is former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen. His party rivals, for the record, are named Gary Davis and John Wolfe, but there is no mystery about who the Democratic nominee will be. Bredesen not only has wall-to-wall support from rank-and-file Democrats in Tennessee, he is counted on by national Democrats of all persuasions to contribute mightily to the party revival that Democratic optimists (and numerous media analysts) have been forecasting.

And, just as there is no mystery about Bredesen’s looming victory in the Democratic primary, the identity of his Republican adversary in November, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional district, is also a given, though one Aaron L. Pettigrew also has his name on the primary ballot. Blackburn, who occupies a position on the hard right of the Republican Party, was a Trumpian before there was a Trump, and her all-too-obvious intent to move on to the Senate was probably a major factor last year in convincing incumbent Senator Bob Corker, a Trump critic, that it was time to bow out.

There is something of a coin-toss situation among Republican gubernatorial candidates.. Considering the fact that three of the six GOP aspirants — entrepreneur and former state economic development Commissioner Randy Boyd, 6th District U.S. Representative Diane Black, and Williamson County businessman Bill Lee — are multi-millionaires, that metaphor is almost literal. The fourth serious candidate in the GOP primary, state House Speaker Beth Harwell, has been hampered by her relative lack of financial resources.

Though only Black has a political profile arguably close to Trump’s (she’s an advocate for building “the wall” on the nation’s southern border, and she veers hard right on most other issues), all of the Republicans call themselves “conservatives” and are at pains not to put too much public distance between themselves and the president.

Boyd, in particular, seems determined in that respect, running ads that seem designed to depict him as more rigidly conservative than Black, though in person he is soft-spoken and thoughtful, a near clone in his thinking to current Governor, Bill Haslam, for whom Boyd designed such arguably forward-looking programs as Drive to 55 and Tennessee Promise. 

Lee, a genial man who campaigns heavily on his Christian faith and his rebound from family tragedies, is clearly a generic conservative, though one with few hard and fast positions. By general consensus (and such reliable polling data as exists), he has been running third and hoping for a stumble by one or both of the acknowledged GOP front-runners, Boyd and Black.

There are those who see Lee’s real purpose as building a profile for some future race. Harwell’s is more a case of sink-or-swim in a possible last hurrah, though she is well-liked enough to be called upon for further public duty, possibly by someone’s appointment.

In any case, Bredesen vs. Blackburn and the eventual gubernatorial matchup in November will measure the contrary tides of political sentiment in Tennessee. Apropos prospects for a blue wave, a look at the legislative races on the ballot, with Democrats vying for every available position and there being numerous races for which no Republican is contending, would almost suggest that Shelby County has returned to the circumstances of the old Solid Democratic South of the pre-civil rights era, in which the GOP was an outlier party.

That, to say the least, would be misleading. What the dearth of Republican candidacies, almost entirely in predominantly black areas, does represent, however, is a continuing lack of indigenous support in the inner city of Memphis, as well as a serious downturn in the party’s outreach results, whether through lack of serious effort or simple failure. In theory at least, the party is still trying, as would be indicated by the presence on the GOP ballot once again of Charlotte Bergmann, an African-American activist and a perennial candidate, once again seeking the 9th District Congressional seat.

The omnipresence of Democratic legislative candidates, meanwhile, signals a rekindled zeal among rank-and-file Democrats as well as in the leadership of a local party which was reorganized in 2017, after internal disunion and chaos resulted in the state party’s lifting its charter in 2016. 

Longtime observers of local and state politics recall a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the Republican Party, then a definite minority organization in both Shelby County and Tennessee at large, began fielding candidates in established Democratic fiefdoms. Largely unsuccessful at first, the GOP efforts eventually bore fruit, and, when social changes (most of them national in origin) began to weaken ancestral voting habits, today’s wall-to-wall GOP state government emerged.

Locally, though, the situation is far from being static. It should be remembered that the Republican sweeps and near-sweeps in the county elections of the 21st century are counter-demographic, in that they have occurred at a time when Shelby County’s emergent non-white majority has been ever enlarging. If the new flood of Democratic candidates in the suburbs can stimulate a dormant activism there and meanwhile activate the party’s urban base, generally somnolent in non-presidential election years, the political power ratio could transform quickly.

Or, as Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills put it, in a cautionary message to his party-mates back in February: “Since 2010, we’ve been lucky in Shelby County. Thanks to the leadership we’ve had, we’ve had good organization and we’ve had good candidates. The Democrats, on the other hand, have had just the opposite. They haven’t had good candidates and they haven’t had good organization. But for the first time in a long time, they have both of those things. They have a good organization. They have a good leader. And they have decent candidates at the top that’ll drive all the way down to the bottom. So we have got to turn our voters out.”

There are three state Senate seats at risk in the primary, and there are interesting contests in all of them:

In State Senate District 29, Tom Stephens is a token Republican entry. The real race is in the Democratic primary, between outgoing County Commissioner Justin Ford, a member of urban Memphis’ best-known political clan, and current state Representative Raumesh Akbari, a rising legislative star who won her House seat in a 2013 special election over Ford’s cousin, Kemba Ford.

Three Democrats are on the ballot in Senate District 31, where David Weatherspoon, a chaplain at Le Bonheur Hospital, seeks the party nod over Gabby Salinas, a cancer survivor and scientific researcher. A third Democrat is M. Rodanial Ray Ransom.

Salinas’ history of personal triumph over difficult odds makes for a compelling backstory, but Weatherspoon has a serious financial edge and support across party lines. Both Weatherspoon and Salinas are committed to supporting Medicaid expansion, which Republican incumbent Brian Kelsey, unopposed in his primary, has stoutly resisted.

No Republican is running in Senate District 31, perhaps because Democratic incumbent Reginald Tate is well-known for his close cooperation with the GOP leadership in the legislature. That fact has also generated a stout challenge to Tate in the Democratic primary from nursing entrepreneur Katrina Robinson, who is supported by several name Democrats, including current state Senators Sara Kyle and Lee Harris.

Of Shelby County’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives, only five have races on the ballot, and all these races are between rival Democrats. In House District 85, there is a four-way contest involving Jesse Chism, Ricky Dixon, Brett N. Williams, and Lynette P. Williams. In House District 86, long-term Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper has two primary opponents: Amber Huett-Garcia and Jesse Jeff. In House District 90, things begin to get truly interesting. Here incumbent John DeBerry — who, like the aforementioned Reginald Tate, is considered by many of his party-mates to be too cozy with Republicans — is challenged by Torrey Harris, a small-business owner. 

House District 91, vacated by Akbari, is being fought over by Democrats Doris DeBerry Bradshaw, Juliette Eskridge, and London P. Lamar, while House District 93 incumbent Democrat G.A. Hardaway has a contender in the Democratic primary, Eddie Neal. In House District 99, Antonio “Two-Shay” Parkinson,  is being challenged by fellow Democrat Johnnie Hatten.

House District 99 has a special distinction as a result of the recent untimely death of Republican incumbent Ron Lollar. It was too late to change the ballot; so Lollar’s name remains. Before the November election, the Shelby County Republican Party will be entitled to name a replacement. Some of the Republican names in play: county commission Chair Heidi Shafer, Shelby County GOP Chair Mills, Bartlett Alderman David Parsons, and County Commissioner David Reaves.

And David Cambron, the Democratic mainstay and ace recruiter who is as responsible as anyone for the stepped-up party showing, has a shot at winning a seat himself. He’s unopposed to be the Democratic nominee in House Disrict 99.See ‘Politics,’ , for more election preview.

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Politics Politics Feature

Big Week for Shelby County Politics Features Joe Biden

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

What a week! What a weekend! Local political junkies of every stripe had plenty of occasions to nourish their activism. In addition to several fund-raisers and meet-and-greets for specific candidates in this year’s elections, there were debates, forums, and other kinds of smorgasbords featuring several at once.

The highlight of local Democrats’ week was surely the appearance on Friday night of former Vice President Joe Biden, who brought his “American Promise Tour” to the Orpheum. Biden’s visit, a ticketed affair, was part revival and part book-tour stop (for Biden’s new volume, Promise Me, Dad: a Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, about his son Beau’s illness and ultimate death from brain cancer.)

With his regular-guy persona and tell-it-like-it-is style, Biden inarguably kindled the kind of political enthusiasm that Hillary Clinton could have used in 2016 and that Biden seems eager to deploy in 2020 against Donald J. Trump.

Not that Biden talked up a race; in fact, he got one of his most animated reactions when he complained about the unnamed Washington scribe who suggested that his book was a calculated bid for sympathy prior to a presidential run. The crowd’s murmur of outrage morphed into delighted laughter when Biden muttered something about administering a personal corrective to “the sonofabitch.”

Biden’s appeal is based partly on that kind of plain talk and partly, too, on his ability to revivify a kind of unpretentious patriotism that is either left unsaid these days or is more often obscured by the gaslight of insincere platitudes.

When host Terri Lee Freeman of the National Civil Rights Museum asked Biden what he had meant by writing that he was nostalgic for the American future, the author of that seemingly oxymoronic sentiment furrowed his brow as if wondering himself what he had meant by the line. But what followed was a wonderfully developed disquisition on the process of regaining the forefathers’ democratic dream of a just and honest realm that resolved the paradox perfectly.

On Saturday morning, Republicans turned out en masse for the opening of the party’s 2018 campaign headquarters in the Trinity Commons shopping center. Shelby County party chair Lee Mills introduced GOP candidates in the forthcoming county general election and federal and state primaries on August 2nd.
Partisans of both political parties got close-up looks at the rival candidates for Shelby County mayor and Tennessee governor when Republican mayoral candidate David Lenoir and Democratic candidate Lee Harris squared away on Wednesday at the Kiwanis Club. And four candidates for governor appeared on Thursday at a forum on legal issues before members of the Tennessee Bar Association.
At the mayoral event, moderated by WREG-TV anchor Stephanie Scurlock at the University Club, Lenoir put forth his standard goals of “great jobs, great schools, and safe streets” while boasting his achievements in managing Shelby county’s financial assets as trustee for the last eight years. Harris said he intended to focus on the themes of poverty, injustice, and residual segregation, and recounted occasions when he took the lead in resolving difficult issues as a city councilman and as state Senate Democratic leader.

Participating in the bar association event at The Peabody were Democrats Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh, as well as Republicans Beth Harwell and Randy Boyd. The candidates were interviewed sequentially by Commercial Appeal editor Mark Russell on such issues as criminal justice reform, judicial redistricting, and the desirability of changes in school-zone drug laws.

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Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee’s Gubernatorial Candidates Make the Rounds in Memphis

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

With the coming of bona fide summer weather, the governor’s race has heated up accordingly. Last week in Shelby County saw numerous comings and goings of candidates. On Friday, Republican candidates Bill Lee and Beth Harwell checked in, Lee with a “town hall” at the newish Houston Levee Community Center, Harwell with a fund-raiser/meet-and-greet at the Holiday Inn Express in Millington.

Franklin businessman Lee, who has been running, in effect, as a fallback alternative to the heated race going on now in the GOP primary between poll leaders Randy Boyd, the former state Commissioner of Economic Development, and U.S. Representative Diane Black, is so far avoiding making precise policy commitments. But at his Friday appearance in Shelby County, Lee left little doubt that he is to be numbered among the conservatives on the Republican ballot, responding to a question about how to solve the gun-violence problem by touting the Second Amendment itself as the solution.

Harwell, whose slow start in the race has left her needing to be a late bloomer and a sort of fallback candidate herself, is, like Lee, taking overtly conservative positions — opposing in-state tuition privileges, for example — but her general demeanor tilts somewhat more toward the moderate side than does Lee’s.

Meanwhile, candidate Boyd took his 95-county bus tour to Millington on Monday for an early-morning meet-and-greet and then launched out on a round of stops eastward, beginning in Fayette County.

Friday saw Democratic gubernatorial candidate Craig Fitzhugh receive the endorsement of the Legislative Black Caucus at Fitzhugh’s Poplar Avenue headquarters, and the candidate from Ripley, who is retiring from his position as Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives, was back again on Monday for a fund-raiser at the East Memphis residence of well-known activist Jocelyn Wurzburg.

In addition to the Black Caucus boosting, Fitzhugh has also received endorsements of late from the Tennessee State Employees Association and the Tennessee Education Association. His Democratic rival, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, meanwhile, got an endorsement from the Win Back Your State PAC of former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley that carries with it a commitment from the erstwhile also-ran in the Democratic presidential primaries of 2016 to campaign in Tennessee for Dean, who has raised far more money than has Fitzhugh.

Another campaigner this week was state Representative Dwayne Thompson, who held his own town hall at the Houston Levee center on Saturday, a day after Lee. An audience member at the affair was Patricia Possel, who is vying with Scott McCormick in the Republican primary for the right to challenge Democrat Thompson, an upset winner in 2016 over then GOP incumbent Steve McManus. Possel, an advocate of measures easing the process of suburban deannexation from Memphis, grilled Thompson on the issue but seemed not to succeed in establishing much distance between her own positions and his.

• M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams, a frequent and so far unsuccessful candidate for public office, won a signal victory last week in the courtroom of Chancellor Walter Evans, who ruled that Williams was improperly prohibited by the state Democratic Party from running as a Democrat in his planned primary race against 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen. The controversy had been accompanied by accusations of racism against Cohen and state Democratic chair Mary Mancini from such backers of Williams as Lexie Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party’s primary board. Resolution of the case restores Alexandria-Williams’ name to the ballot.

UPDATE: Carter argues convincingly that she did not make the indicated adverse comments about Rep. Cohen, though she acknowledges being critical of Mancini and Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democrats..

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Politics Politics Feature

Dogs and Ponies

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

It is still 2017, which means that candidates for election in 2018 see their task as introducing themselves to the electorate and, when gathered together on the same stage with their declared primary opponents, are still making nice with each other, more or less.

Such was the case this past Friday night at a gubernatorial forum arranged for GOP hopefuls during the annual convention of the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women, a weekend affair held at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn.

There are six declared Republican candidates to date, and they all sat together in a row on stage, ready to be evaluated by several hundred women from Republican clubs across the state. Although a few of them may have appeared together on ad hoc occasions before, this was evidently one of the first times they were all assembled en masse, and the semiotics of the affair were such as to put them all — four women and two men — on an artificially equal footing.

In fact, three of the female candidates — 6th District Congressman (she prefers the term) Diane Black, state Senator Mae Beavers, and state House Speaker Beth Harwell — all wore nearly identical shades of red. The fourth, Kay White, a Johnson City activist, wore a dun-colored outfit, and that shade of difference, no doubt a happenstance, happened to coincide with her status as an outlier of sorts, with nothing like the name recognition or advance ballyhoo of the others.

The two men — former state Commissioner of Economic Development Randy Boyd and Franklin businessman/farmer Bill Lee — both wore standard blue jackets, though Boyd’s belonged to a suit and Lee’s to an informal outfit that included khaki pants and an open-collared shirt.

Jackson Baker

Karl Dean waits turn to speak at a Democratic meeting

Here, too, in a way, medium was message: Boyd, the earliest declared candidate, looked like what he was, a key member of Governor Bill Haslam‘s state government, the deviser of Tennessee Promise, Drive to 55, and numerous other Haslam initiatives. Lee, by contrast, sported a folksier look consistent with his professed persona as a non-politician type, a Cincinnatus ready to put down his plow and come to the aid of the commonwealth.

Interestingly, both men are doing idiosyncratic turns on a venerable Tennessee tradition — the solitary cross-Tennessee trek, whereby a candidate goes from place to place, starting at one end of the state, usually East Tennessee, meeting and greeting all the way, and ends up with a ceremonial final splash in Memphis. That was the literal finale for then-gubernatorial candidate Lamar Alexander in 1978, who walked his way across Tennessee in a plaid shirt and took a tentative dip in the Mississippi River at the very end.

Lee, in fact, had formally arrived in town only the previous day, via tractor (though he is basically a cattle farmer), concluding a “95-Counties-in-95-Days” pilgrimage begun in Mountain City on the North Carolina border. He got here in time for a Thursday night riverboat ride sponsored for the GOP rank-and-file by the Shelby County Republican Party, then met up with some local folks in Millington on Friday at a pizza cafe.

Boyd, who has been in Memphis a multitude of times already, is theoretically still on his way here. A veteran marathoner, he is about mid-way on a run across the state, doing eight miles a day and then holing up in this or that township, making a point of greeting as many local folks as he can before moving on. He went back to his route after Saturday’s forum, though he is liable to be in town a few more times for fund-raisers and such before he technically concludes his trip.

At this stage, the differences between candidates on issues can largely be divined by reading between the lines. On Friday night, all were professed conservatives (as, indeed, all Republicans describe themselves, even the few bona fide moderates in today’s right-tilting GOP), all are four-square for traditional values, all are budget hawks, all want government to create a climate propitious for business.

The most zealous partisans seemed to be Black, who began her political career as a state legislator opposed to TennCare; Beavers, a self-styled “Christian constitutional conservative” with low tolerance for taxes or diversity on social issues, and White, a veteran Tea Partier and former Trump campaign official (who, paradoxically, had kind words for Democratic icons JFK and Harry Truman).

The closest thing to a one-on-one clash was Black’s questioning of optimistic Tennessee employment figures immediately after Boyd had enumerated them, though she did not call him out by name.

The forum was what cynics might call a dog-and-pony show, in that there was more show than substance, though there were ample opportunities for seasoned members of the audience to let their imaginations do some divining. 

The GOP gubernatorial primary will be a hard-fought affair, with several of the candidates able to boast both personal wealth and significant financial support, and the eventual nominee will no doubt win by a plurality, probably a narrow one. In such circumstances, major disagreements are inevitable, and the polite relations of Friday night almost certainly will be just a memory.

• Meanwhile, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, one of two declared Democratic candidates for governor (the other is state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley) turned up at a well-attended district meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Party in Collierville, touting three issues in a brief speech: education, jobs, and health care.

Unlike the Republicans, who tended to talk up their opposition to Common Core, Dean emphasized a need to raise teachers’ salaries. And he won tumultuous applause with a promise to pursue Medicaid expansion, something no GOP candidate is likely to entertain.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Tennessee GOP Hopefuls Aim at Governor’s Office

The process of giving elective birth to Tennessee’s 50th governor got underway this week, with the first filings of campaign financial disclosures. At this embryonic stage of the race, Randy Boyd, Knoxville multi-millionaire businessman and former commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD), shapes up as the gubernatorial frontrunner among Republicans — which means frontrunner generally, in our red state.

Governor Bill Haslam is a Boyd buddy and appointed him to the ECD, providing a statewide stage to perform to the general applause from the state’s politically astute business leaders.

Randy Boyd

Boyd has hired veteran political operative Chip Saltsman to run the campaign, has lined up public support from a bunch of mayors and a few legislators (mostly East Tennesseans), is working hard and can self-finance — putting in $2 million in direct funding rather than the traditional loan — while collecting another $2.3 million from other donors.

The lame duck governor, of course, isn’t publicly endorsing anyone in the primary, but many of his best political friends see the election of Boyd, who’s already facing attacks from arch conservatives, as the next best thing to a third term for the mild-mannered and moderate incumbent.  

At the other end of the spectrum, politically and financially, is Republican state Senator Mae Beavers of Mount Juliet, who has the strongest right-wing credentials in the field and a small corps of devout followers. Theoretically, if she can maintain that status, Beavers might have at least a long shot at winning the nomination. But she’s not known statewide and reported just $56,721 raised in her first disclosure, including $20,000 transferred from her state Senate fund.

U.S. Representative Diane Black of Gallatin, the House Budget Committee chair, has told a lot of folks she wants to run but is hesitant while serving as moderator in federal funding fights among Washington GOP factions. The delay in a campaign kickoff has already hurt her prospects, and a budget blowup could hurt more — or help, if everything falls into place. She and her husband, David, are multi-millionaires and reportedly ready to spend whatever it takes in playing hard-ball catchup. Black is a formidable campaigner who has a past that includes surviving bitter political clashes and overcoming personal problems. Her overall prospects in a governor’s race are something of a mystery at this point.

Senator Mae Beavers

House Speaker Beth Harwell has already earned a note in state political history by becoming the first woman elected to lead a chamber of the General Assembly. She touted two decades of political experience in announcing her candidacy, having toyed with the idea since at least 2009. That experience, though, has brought negatives as well as positives as Harwell — usually rather reluctantly while striving for some middle-ground stance — chose sides in GOP super-majority squabbling.

In January, she came within 10 votes of losing reelection as speaker, and another roll of the dice at that table would be risky. To the gubernatorial table, she brings about $1 million in seed money available in existing accounts, some self-funding capability, and a long list of potential donors — enough for a respectable run to wind up a political career one way or the other.

Bill Lee, a multi-millionaire Franklin businessman and cattle farmer, is generally regarded as an extreme underdog in making his first run for political office, despite almost matching Boyd in money matters with about $1.4 million collected from friends and a matching amount loaned to his campaign. Lacking an established political base, Lee has been making a pitch to evangelical Christians and presents himself as to the right of Boyd, though not nearly as much in that direction as Beavers — so far. His candidacy threatens to drain some votes from others, but probably not enough to do more than gain experience for another run somewhere down the road.

President Trump’s move to put Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris on the U.S. District Court bench, rather than leave him to follow through with talk of running for governor, means no major candidate from West Tennessee to enjoy that geographic loyalty Boyd seems to be developing in the eastern part of the state. So Boyd enters the western arena on equally unknown footing with the others, all from Middle Tennessee, and maybe benefits a bit.

Arguably, Harwell does, too, since the two legislators run in the same legislative political circles.

Tom Humphrey, formerly with the Knoxville News Sentinel, is a contributing editor of the Tennessee Journal. See Politics, p. 8, for his musings on Democratic gubernatorial candidates.

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Politics Politics Feature

Closing Out the Session in Nashville

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The 2017 session of the Tennessee General Assembly, which came to an end last week, was one of the more momentous in recent years, as measured by the triumph of Governor Bill Haslam‘s “IMPROVE Act,” which levies significant gasoline and diesel price increases to begin the long overdue process of rebuilding and renovating the state’s thoroughfares.

There were fewer novelty bills and crank measures than usual, particularly in the area of social issues, though, unsurprisingly, a few measures friendly to the gun lobby found their way to passage — notably one entitled the Tennessee Hearing Protection Act, which basically removes restrictions from the sale of silencers for firearms.  

And Memphis, along with the state’s other urban centers, experienced a shot fired across the bow with the Senate’s passage, on the session’s last day, of a de-annexation measure by Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson). As originally submitted, the bill was a far milder version of the sponsor’s 2016 bill that would have given residents of areas annexed since 1998 an easy route to severance from the annexing cities. The new version requires that an approving referendum must be held, not just in the territory seeking de-annexation, but in the municipality at large. 

Another proviso, apparently shepherded into the bill by state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville), would have given cities with their own de-annexation formulas (like Memphis’ “right-sizing” plan) almost unlimited time to carry them out. But sharp questioning on the point by Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) forced a last-day amendment that compelled that such plans be carried out within a year after an enactment deadline of January 1, 2018.

The House will no doubt act on its version of the bill in the 2018 session.

• Two of the five Republicans who conducted the annual end-of-session press conference in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the Capitol in Nashville last Wednesday continue to figure in speculation about the 2018 governor’s race, and the time is growing nigh for them to make a definitive decision. The candidacy of one of the two, Norris, is a fairly sure thing. Anybody who drives a car in Shelby County has been exposed in recent weeks to Norris’ billboards looming over major thoroughfares. The billboards are also up in various other locations in West Tennessee. But Norris contended in Nashville last week that his purpose in having the signs erected had been merely to further legislation in the respective areas mentioned.

Right.

The other possible gubernatorial entry at the end-of-session press conference, House Majority Leader Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), continues to be noncommittal about a governor’s race, which would find her up against several multi-milionaires in the Republican primary. She’s between a rock and a hard place, with her speakership coming under annual challenge from members of her party’s ultra-right wing, who depict her as that most unfashionable thing for Republicans, a moderate. But it is that very identity, more accurately described as centrism, that helps give her a shot at the governorship.

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Politics Politics Feature

Key Political Moves Underway in Memphis and Nashville (UPDATED)

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A statement made by state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) in Nashville last week all but put the Senate Majority Leader in the running for the governorship in 2018.

Norris, who for years has made no secret of his gubernatorial ambitions, told reporters that he was “more than mulling” about a race and was actively making plans, though he emphasized that he still had a job to attend to in the legislature. He later told the Flyer that he had discussed organizational plans with a local campaign consultant but had not yet finalized a deal.

Norris, as a sitting state legislator, is prohibited from active fund-raising for the duration of the current session of the General Assembly, just convened. So are two potential rivals for the Republican nomination, state Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksville), who has declared his intentions of running, and Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), speaker of the state House of Representatives, who held a recent pre-session fund-raiser at $2,500 a head.

Other Republicans known to be considering a race are Nashville industrialist Bill Lee and Randy Boyd, who just announced that on February 1st he would take leave of his current position as state commissioner of Community and Economic Development. 

Though most attention has so far been focused on the possible GOP candidates, there are no fewer than four Democrats who are considered possible entrants in the governor’s race, as well.

One is wealthy real estate tycoon Bill Freeman of Nashville, who has served as the state Democratic Party’s treasurer and for years has been a major donor to numerous Democratic campaigns and causes. Freeman, who ran unsuccessfully for Nashville mayor in 2015, made a trip to Memphis last year on behalf of Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign that doubled as a fund-raiser for state Senator Lee Harris (D-Memphis) and functioned also as a scouting expedition for a governor’s race.

Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has traveled widely in the state after leaving office and is thought to be serious about a governor’s race. 

Two other Democrats frequently mentioned as possibilities are state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), a highly regarded party figure who would also have to vacate his legislative seat to make the race, and Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, a former state senator who is now running for reelection.

• Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who has taken the lead in trying to create a seat for suburban Shelby County on the MLGW board, has switched tracks on that initiative. Confronted by city of Memphis resistance and stymied by a split between city and county members from including the matter in the county commission’s official legislative request package, Roland wants to put the matter before the Tennessee Regulatory Authority.

Meanwhile, state senators Norris and Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) are studying the option of taking the matter up legislatively.

Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a supporter of Roland’s initiative, said the matter wasn’t dead but was sure to surface again, “when the weather for it is right.” (See Editorial, p. 10.)

Even if the issue of county participation on the MLGW board ended up not being a part of the official county wish list approved by the county commission for its legislative package, other once controversial matters have apparently made the package.

Foremost among them is a call for a limited but profound change in the status of marijuana. In the language of the final commission resolution: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly, Governor Bill Haslam, and the federal government to authorize medical marijuana in Tennessee.” There are at least two bills to that effect already introduced in the General Assembly, both from mainstream members of the Republican super-majority.

A concomitant resolution by the commission reads: “The Shelby County Board of Commissioners urges the Tennessee General Assembly and Governor Bill Haslam to implement or expand a second-chance program for individuals using less than half an ounce of marijuana.”

These are first steps, to be sure, but meaningful ones that could not have been anticipated even a few short years ago.

[UPDATE: The words “have apparently made the package”in the paragraphs about the Commission’s attitude toward medical marijuana and second-chance legislation were, as it turms out, premature. In committee action on Wednesday, sponsor Terry Roland successfully moved for a deferral on voting for those parts of the legislative package.]

 

• Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen joined civil rights icon John Lewis (D-GA) and what may be a substantial number of other political figures in announcing Monday that he will not attend the Friday inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

Cohen, who has represented the 9th District since 2006, made the announcement Monday morning at Mason Temple of God in Christ during a commemorative celebration on MLK Day.

Telling the Flyer that a series of insulting tweets from Trump about Lewis became “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Cohen praised the Georgia congressman as someone who had “risked his life” for human rights, adding that Trump’s attacks on Lewis were particularly egregious coming on the eve of the Martin Luther King weekend. Cohen cited “an accumulation of distressing remarks, actions, and appointments” on Trump’s part, including “his questioning President Obama’s birth, the racist, misogynistic statements he made during the campaign, his inability to tell the truth, and his mocking of a disabled person,” as well as the President-elect’s attacks on Senator John McCain and actress Meryl Streep.

“This is a president who does not act presidential.” Cohen said. Cohen said further he had attended confidential briefings about Trump’s compromised behavior and circumstances and said that “there’s more to it than Russia.”

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Rep. Durham Expelled from State House by 70-2 Vote

Durham in the dock of the House on Tuesday

The first of two important objectives of this week’s special session of the General Assembly was achieved in Nashville on Tuesday — the formal expulsion from the legislature of 
accused sexual predator Jeremy Durham.

Technically, the action against Durham, achieved by a 70-2 House vote in favor of expulsion, was an add-on to the special session, which had been called by Governor Bill Haslam to amend a new state law that had raised permissible alcohol-level units from youthful drivers and threatened thereby to cause a loss of $62 million in federal funding.

But the Durham matter dominated public attention and was acted on first.

Durham, a Republican from suburban Franklin, had represented House District 65 but had already been overwhelmingly defeated in the August 4 primary election by political newcomer Sam Whitson after widespread publicity about improper behavior toward women working in Legislative Plaza, culminating in a state Attorney General’s report alleging 22 known cases.

That report had followed year-end disclosures in the Nashville Tennessean of untoward activity by Durham, resulting in his forced resignation from a position as GOP legislative whip and later in his ousting from their party caucus by House Republicans, after the House’s minority Democrats and state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini had begun making Durham something of a negative cause célèbre.

In particular, Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell, under persistent challenge by the Democrats for alleged inaction, assumed an increasingly aggressive posture toward Durham and, after public circulation of the AG’s report, banished Durham from Legislative Plaza except during actual sessions, removed his office to an adjoining building, and prohibited any interactions of his with female staffers without third-person supervision.

Meanwhile, Governor Haslam, state Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, and other leading Republicans joined Harwell in calling for Durham to resign from the legislature.

Not even Durham’s defeat by Whitson quelled the furor, inasmuch as the defeated one-term representative still remained eligible for a modest annual state pension. That fact was the proximate reason for the expulsion action, which GOP state representative Susan Lynn of Mt. Juliet announced that she intended to introduce on the special session’s first day.

Somewhat unexpectedly on that first day, various Democratic House members, including Memphians G.A. Hardaway and Larry Miller, joined Republican Rick Womick in raising objections to the expulsion process, based on various procedural issues and a professed concern for due process.

From the Democrats’ point of view, that was a strategy designed to prolong discussion of the Durham matter — and the consequent embarrassment to Republicans, whom Democrats intended to charge with negligent oversight and early attempts to suppress awareness of Durham’s derelictions. The strategy was amended overnight, however, as public reaction to it seemed clearly averse.

On the second day, key Democrats like caucus chair Mike Stewart of Nashville joined with Republicans in making something of a prosecutorial attack on Durham, who made an effort, for at least the first hour of the Tuesday session, to defend himself, though without specifics and without offering credible reasons why he had failed to offer evidence in his own defense during the Attorney General’s investigation.

State Rep. Johnnie Turner of Memphis provided one of the signal moments of Tuesday’s session — and a turning point of sorts — when she eloquently contrasted the plight of Durham’s female victims with what had been abstract debate about legal niceties and the format of the expulsion process.

Though there were a fair number of absentees from the expulsion vote and several members abstained from voting, Durham in the end had only two votes against his expulsion — Republicans Courtney Rogers of Goodlettsville and Terri Lynn Weaver of Lancaster — and the 70 votes to expel him were four more than the two-thirds figure of 66 needed.

In apparent anticipation of the result, Durham had already departed the chamber and the Capitol building. His chapter of the special session was over — along, it would seem, with his public career.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Fix Tennessee’s Healthcare System

Tennesseans have a strong sense of pride when it comes to valuing things like hard work and personal responsibility. People who work hard to provide for their family and contribute to their community help make Tennessee great. So, while it’s unfortunate that too many of Tennessee’s working poor are struggling to access affordable healthcare coverage, it’s encouraging to know there is a robust discussion being led by House Speaker Beth Harwell’s 3-Star Healthy Project Task Force aimed at addressing this problem.

Adam Nickas

Right now, hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans, of which more than 67,000 are residents of Shelby County, are living without access to care, falling into what’s called the “Medicaid gap.” These individuals earn too much to qualify for TennCare, our state’s Medicaid program, but too little to afford healthcare coverage on the federal insurance exchanges. These are people trying to make an honest living — three-quarters of them have worked in the last year.

Memphians never hesitate to give a helping hand, instead of simply a handout, to hardworking folks, and improving access to health care for this population does exactly that. The task force, which was established in April, is focused on finding sensible and financially responsible solutions to Tennessee’s healthcare problem. In just a few weeks, the task force will present their recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, D.C. 

In 2015, Governor Bill Haslam proposed a health-care plan, known as Insure Tennessee, to the Tennessee General Assembly. This program was designed as a for-Tennessee, by-Tennessee plan that promoted personal responsibility, imposed no new taxes, and would result in significant economic gains for our state. While the legislature did not accept the original proposal, there has been progress with the announcement of the task force to prepare a solution that increases access to affordable coverage for Tennessee’s uninsured population.

There are two critical items we hope the task force considers as they continue their work.

It’s important that any recommended solutions be comprehensive in scope. Limiting the scope of access to coverage to a segment of the Medicaid gap population leaves thousands of hardworking Tennesseans without access to affordable healthcare. A path to comprehensive coverage for this population is needed in order for the state to fully realize the economic gains from increased insurance coverage. A Tennessee study found that Insure Tennessee would create more than $1.1 billion in new health-care spending, $909 million in new income, and 15,000 full-time equivalent jobs for Tennessee residents.

One of the key drivers of these potential economic benefits is the fact that a comprehensive solution would help reverse deep cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates for Tennessee hospitals that were a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The numbers tell a striking story: Our hospitals are projected to lose $292 million this calendar year and $8.2 billion by 2024. With the closing of three hospitals in Tennessee since the beginning of 2016, we have all become acutely aware of the negative impact of those closures. Hospitals are economic engines within our communities, providing over 35,000 jobs in Shelby County and 630,000 jobs across the state. A plan that increases access to affordable healthcare can help to offset these cuts and protect our hospitals.

That’s why any recommendation from the task force must secure approval from federal officials. Without that approval, millions of dollars will continue flowing out of Tennessee and into states like California and New York. To be clear, the money being cut from our hospitals isn’t going to another Tennessee program. It is going to states that have implemented similar efforts to cover those in the Medicaid gap, and we need to bring these tax dollars back home.

The 67,000 Shelby County residents, some of whom are veterans who bravely served our country, carpenters who are building homes in our communities, and waiters and waitresses who serve us at local restaurants, deserve a solution.

Governor Bill Haslam’s 2015 proposal for Insure Tennessee provides a strong blueprint for a solution, as it would extend coverage to an estimated 280,000 of our hardworking friends and neighbors currently struggling in the Medicaid gap.

As the task force presents its recommendations in Washington later this month, we hope they bear in mind our recommendations so that their proposal aligns with Tennessee values and leads the way to a responsible, healthy future for our communities.

Adam Nickas is the executive director of Tennesseans for a Responsible Future, a nonprofit organization that supports efforts to improve the health and prosperity of Tennesseans through the promotion of sound health-care policies.

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Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee Democrat and Republican Parties Both Facing Change

CREDIT: Nancy Chase

Even as the nation’s two major political parties, on the eve of their quadrennial confrontation, each struggle on a national scale with the task of redefinition, so do the same two parties in Tennessee.

In the nation at large, Democrats are still (technically) in the act of choosing between two would-be exemplars — one, Hillary Clinton, a seasoned and well-known figure touting the values of diversity and equal opportunity; the other, Bernie Sanders, a self-defined Democratic socialist focusing on the need for a “political revolution” to moderate the economic inequalities of a system rigged to benefit the wealthy.

Here and there, the differences between those two candidates (who, it should be said, have much in common) is seen clearly. In that sense, the Democrats are lucky. The Republicans have, in the course of primary races that were both numerous and confusing, found their choice ready-made — in Donald J. Trump, a wildly successful Manhattan real estate billionaire and a man whose views and attitudes toward most policy matters are, for better or for worse, vague and ever-fluctuating, clearly subordinate to the dictates of an undeniably unique personality.

The two state parties have, both within the last week, just concluded their annual banquets in Tennessee, events which are meant to define them to their respective constituencies. Paradoxically, each of the Tennessee parties veered in a rhetorical direction counter to that of the national parties they represent.

The Democrats held their annual Jackson Day Dinner in Nashville, Saturday before last, and their keynoter, the well-known consultant James Carville, made no mystery about who was likely to emerge from the ongoing Clinton-Sanders contest.

Nancy Chase

Carville at Nashville

Recounting for the party faithful at the state capital’s impressive new Music City Center a public encounter he had just had with a GOP opposite number of sorts, Karl Rove, Carville related how he teased Rove with the statement, “I believe the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party has the experience, the temperament, and the judgment to be president of the United States from Day One” (clearly a description of former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Clinton) and followed that up with a challenge: “Karl, tell us about the Republican nominee.” In Carville’s telling, anyhow, Rove could not respond in kind, but merely sputtered out the familiar attack phrases which Republicans habitually aim at candidate Clinton — FBI investigation, emails, Benghazi, etc.

The Republicans had gotten themselves “stuck” with Trump, a political anomaly, as a direct consequence of their having misled their basic constituency for a generation, Carville said, mentioning such notions as that President Obama was born in Kenya, that the planet Earth dated back only 5,000 years, that there was no such thing as global warming, that there had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that giving millionaires tax cuts would balance the budget.

“When people rise up and start believing all this nuttiness, why are you surprised? Let them believe whatever they want to. And anything Trump says, they believe it because they’ve been conditioned to believe it.”

Carville proclaimed that “our diversity is our strength.” He expressed pride that “my party nominated the first African-American candidate for president and will nominate the first woman.” He followed that with another dig at the GOP: “And no, you don’t get credit for Sarah Palin. Sorry.”

Carville’s de facto celebration of Clinton, his party’s still unchosen but likely nominee, contrasted with the Tennessee Republicans’ mum’s-the-word approach, at their annual Statesman’s Dinner at the selfsame Music City Center, this past Friday, toward Trump, a candidate whose nomination is virtually signed, sealed, and delivered already.  

Tellingly, in view of Carville’s apotheosis of Clinton, the Republicans’ choice of a keynoter was another woman, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an unmistakably conservative office-holder but one who, in her own way, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, also stands for diversity, and who, in the past year, has made headlines by a) removing the Confederate flag from its former place of honor at her state Capitol building, and b) refusing, so far, to endorse Trump.

And, though he was the elephant in that room as in the nation’s media, Trump was roundly ignored in the evening’s rhetoric. The late U.S. Senator Fred Thompson was honored with due praise, as were the two living GOP Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, as was Governor Bill Haslam and the retiring Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, and as were numerous exemplars of the party’s legislative super-majority and command of the state’s congressional delegation.

Though he surely had support here and there in the room, Trump remained at best an X factor, an unknown on the other side of whom, chronologically, were such future-tense bench hopes as Haley.

Though she did not refer to the fact, keynoter Haley was the avowed target, outside the arena, of protesters, garbed in Confederate gray and waving rebel battle flags to demonstrate their outrage at her apostasy. The Republican brass inside surely had to be pleased by this semiotic hint that — on this matter, anyhow — they were on the right side of history.

Whatever its fate in the nation at large (“We’re looking at a 162-year-old political party literally cracking up right in front of us,” Carville said), the GOP seems destined to remain the ruling force in Tennessee for some time to come, though the Democrats had scored a coup of sorts by giving one of their major honors, the Anne Dallas Dudley Political Courage Award, to a couple who had distinguished themselves by fighting hard on behalf of Insure Tennessee, a Medicaid expansion plan proposed by Republican Governor Haslam but so far rejected by his party mates in the General Assembly.

For all their different directions — the Tennessee GOP still hewing to its historic distrust of social programs and ameliorist government in general, their Democratic counterparts continuing to see themselves as tribunes of the powerless — there are points of contact in the political middle. If the GOP members of the Tennessee General Assembly should, post-presidential-election, see fit finally to humor Haslam on the health-care matter, it will be through the medium of a task force appointed by Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell, whose power moves will doubtless fill some of the vacuum left by Ramsey’s departure.

Harwell, who is rumored to have gubernatorial ambitions, may, in fact, become the face of the Tennessee Republican Party in much the way that Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini (whose GOP opposite number is Ryan Haynes, a male genotype) has become that of her party.

The Tennessee GOP boasts a fair number of women in office, although, truth is, it is miles behind the Tennessee Democratic Party in forms of diversity having to do with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Still, there is a political middle, and, with any luck at all, it may get filled up at some point in the respective reconstructions just now beginning to occur in the two major political parties. 

There are signs of changes in both, locally as well as nationally. The GOP’s dominant business-minded faction is under challenge from the very uprooted populists it has seduced away from the Democrats, while the Clinton/Sanders yin-yang will play out for years — a difficult wrangle but, in the end, a necessary one.