Tag: Beverly Marrero

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Cattle Calls

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A characteristic of any political season — and a sure sign that one is under way for real — is the proliferation of public forums to which all candidates, of any and all persuasions, are invited. Given the length of most election-year rosters, the invitees to these events usually are given only a minute or two to introduce themselves and talk about their backgrounds and qualifications.

The time constraints are such that not much gets said about platforms, although at least a modicum of lip service is generally paid to the event sponsor and the nature of the audience attracted. During the last week a pair of forums — or cattle calls, as they are inelegantly called in pol-speak — illustrated the principle.

One event, held Wednesday at the Spaghetti Warehouse downtown, was sponsored by Diversity Memphis, and the purpose implied in the organization’s name was paid proper homage in specific statements of the attending candidates, as well as by the fact that they ranged across the political spectrum.

An “open house” for legislative and congressional candidates held Monday of this week by the Sierra Club at Idlewild Presbyterian Church, generated statements of fealty to environmental concerns that ranged from the basic to the elaborate.

But, again, these all-candidate affairs do not function so much as opportunities to itemize platforms as they serve as a means of familiarizing audiences with just who is running and for what. In that sense, they are like job interviews, in which the brevity of a quick impression counts for much. That they are also opportunities for the candidates to size up the opposition is something of an ancillary benefit.

As a campaign year wears on, there are so many of these affairs that the audience consists almost entirely of candidates and their helpers. The participants at such events are speaking to each other, and this fact is often cited as a reason to lay off attending them by more cynical candidates.

Still, in most cases, there is a correlation of sorts between candidates’ participation in public forums and their ultimate success at the polls. And voters who look in on them get a chance to measure candidate versus candidate in key races.

One race of interest — one of few countywide contests on the forthcoming August 4th ballot (the others are de facto special elections involving judges) — was prefigured at the Diversity Memphis affair with an appearance by Ed Stanton Jr., who seeks reelection as General Sessions Clerk. 

Stanton, along with County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson, has been one of the few Democrats to defy the Republican winning streak in recent county elections, and he faces a GOP challenger this year, Richard Morton, a Probate Court employee, who also spoke at the Diversity affair. Ordinarily, Stanton’s incumbency would give him a decided advantage, but Democrats are concerned that the highly contested Republican primary for the 8th District congressional seat will draw a high percentage of GOP voters to the polls.

Another rivalry sure to loom large this year is that between incumbent District 30 state Senator Sara Kyle and her Democratic primary foe, former Senator Beverly Marrero. This is a grudge match of sorts. Marrero previously held the District 30 seat but lost a reapportioned version of it to her then Senate colleague Jim Kyle, Sara’s husband, in 2010.

When Jim Kyle became a Shelby County Chancellor after the 2014 election, his wife was a narrow victor over Marrero in an appointment vote by the Shelby County Democratic executive committee. Complicating the rivalry is the fact that Marrero is a friend and ally of 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who was ever at loggerheads with Jim Kyle during their joint service in the state Senate.

Jackson Baker

State Senate opponents Sara Kyle (left) and Beverly Marrero at the Diversity Memphis forum

Judicial canons forbid Jim Kyle’s taking part in his wife’s reelection race, and Cohen has opponents to worry about in his own contested reelection race, but the shadow of their pre-existing rivalry hangs over the District 30 race.

Sara Kyle and Marrero were in evidence at both the Diversity Memphis and Sierra Club forums, and they are liable to see much of each other the rest of the way.

• Name confusion has played a significant role in many a past election in Memphis and Shelby County. Just ask Roderick Ford, a sometime candidate who has never been elected to anything, although he has netted a few extra votes in a race or two from people who (mistakenly) assumed him to be a member of the long-established Ford political clan.

Or ask William Chism, a novice candidate whose 2014 win in the Democratic primary for Probate Court Clerk no doubt owed much to his last name, identical to that of non-relative Sidney Chism, well-known political broker, former state senator, and, at the time, a prominent member of the Shelby County Commission. 

Those were minor distractions that came to nothing much, bumps in the road compared to the more serious misunderstanding that could confront Democratic voters in state House District 85, where veteran state Representative Johnnie Turner has two primary opponents, one of whom bears a name long familiar within the councils of local public education.

This would be Keith Williams, whose candidacy is indeed focused on education. Sort of. This Keith Williams — identified as a pastor, Memphis parent, and senior adviser for the “Tennessee Black Alliance for Educational Options” — testified to the General Assembly this past year in favor of state vouchers for use in private school.

That’s something that is pure anathema to another and much better-known Keith Williams (Keith O. Williams, more fully) who has served as both chairman and executive director of the Memphis/Shelby County Education Association and who is a vehement and vocal opponent of school vouchers. To compound the potential confusion, Keith Williams of the MEA ran unsuccessfully last year for the Memphis City Council, and the presence on this year’s election ballot of someone with the same name could be a real voter snag.

Turner, a former teacher and a decided opponent of school vouchers herself, says that Keith Williams of the MSCEA has pledged his support to her and will do what he can to clear up such voter confusion as might be.

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Politics Politics Feature

As Early Voting Starts, a Burst of Kumbaya

CREDIT: JB

Toward the end of Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission, which had featured the final resolution of a month-long stand-off on approval of Chairman Justin Ford’s appointment of committee chairs, Commissioner Mark Billingsley, a Germantown Republican, conferred praise on the relative bipartisan unanimity of the day.

Billingsley went on to offer kudos for the inaugural “coffee and conversation” event sponsored by Ford last Friday, involving commissioners and guests at large, which he termed the kind of “positive” news often overlooked by the media. 

Indeed, there was a fair amount of kumbaya on the political scene last week, a modest cessation of conflict, even as the calendar slipped into the final month of the fall political campaign and early voting began on Wednesday of this week. 

One example of concord took place last Thursday at the Madison Hotel in a forum on Constitutional Amendment 2, one of four amendments on the November 4th ballot. The participants in the event, sponsored by the Federalist Society were Republican John Ryder and Democrat Steve Mulroy, both lawyers and both well-known for their partisan political involvement.

Ryder is a GOP national committeeman from Tennessee and general counsel of the Republican National Committee, and he was the chief architect of his party’s national redistricting efforts after the census of 2010. Mulroy, a Democrat and law professor, recently completed two terms on the Shelby County Commission and was a candidate earlier this year for his party’s nomination for Shelby County mayor.

Yet, both had no problem agreeing on the need for Amendment 2, which would constitutionally authenticate a variant of the oft-contested “Tennessee Plan” for appointment of state appellate judges. Like Governor Bill Haslam and former state Supreme Court Justice George Brown of Memphis, who had appeared at a public forum at the Kroc Center earlier in the week, both Ryder and Mulroy saw Amendment 2 as balancing the need for judicial independence with that of citizen input.

Essentially, the amendment provides for gubernatorial appointment of appellate judges, coupled with a need for ratification by both houses of the General Assembly. Judges would be subject to retention elections every eight years, as they are at present.

Along with the requirement for legislative approval (within a 60-day window for response), the amendment would do away with the current judicial nominating commission, which has previously been charged with making suggestions to the governor on the front end of the appointment process.

Ryder and Mulroy agreed, as had Haslam and Brown at the earlier forum, that direct election of appellate judges would introduce too much political involvement and financial influence into the naming process — a result of what Ryder called “an excess of Jacksonian democracy.”

While Amendment 2 has its opponents (notably lawyer John Jay Hooker of Nashville, who for years has litigated in favor of direct election of appellate judges), the most hotly contested of the four constitutional amendments on the ballot is unquestionably Amendment 1, which has generated considerable political activity and big-time war chests on both sides of the issue.

Basically, Amendment 1 would nullify a 2000 state Supreme Court decision, which provided protections of abortion rights that in some ways were stronger than those afforded by the federal courts. Opponents of abortion welcome the amendment, while supporters fear the “slippery slope” effect of its language allowing potential legislative action on abortion, even in cases involving rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

JB

Director Ashley Coffield, Congressman Steve Cohen, and honoree Beverly Marrero at Planned Parenthood event

Planned Parenthood of Memphis, which is aggressively resisting Amendment 1, honored former state Senator Beverly Marrero at a fund-raising event for the its campaign last Thursday night. •  Realistically, the battle for leadership on the Shelby County Commission is over for the time being — or at least in remission. By a vote, on Monday, of 11 for, one opposed, and one abstaining, the commission formally sustained Chairman Ford’s choices for committee chairs and thereby ended any immediate prospect of a challenge to his leadership. Monday’s vote was a reprise of a preliminary vote in Ford’s favor at last Wednesday’s committee meetings.

Given that last week’s vote had been similarly lopsided, there was very little fighting left to do at the regular commission meeting, and Democrat Walter Bailey, who had been the chief Ford resister, was content to cast his no vote, the only one against the appointments, as quietly and uneventfully as possible. The only other break from unanimity was an abstaining vote from Democrat Van Turner, chairman of the general government committee, which handled the appointments matter. 

The lack of drama reflected the currently anti-climactic state of a controversy that had seen Ford’s appointments blocked and referred back to committee by a 7-6 vote — six Democrats and Republican Steve Basar — on a motion made by the disgruntled Bailey at the regular Commission meeting of September 22nd.

And the relatively matter-of-fact denouement occurred, despite some serious prodding from others, on both sides of the issue, who evidently thought the contest was still on. 

Over the weekend, Norma Lester, a vocal Democratic representative on the Shelby County Election Commission, released the text of an “open letter” to fellow Democrats. The letter expressed Lester’s view that Ford, who was elected chairman of the reconstituted commission last month on the strength of his own vote, plus those of six Republicans, had subsequently fulfilled GOP wishes in the manner of the committee chairmanships.

Lester echoed Bailey’s charge that a “deal” had been cut on the chairmanship appointments between Ford and the GOP members who supported his chairmanship bid. Particularly controversial was the naming, for the second year in a row, of Republican member Heidi Shafer as chair of the commission’s budget committee.

Bailey had slammed what he called “political machinations” involved in both Ford’s election and his subsequent naming of committee chairs. Lester’s weekend letter seconded Bailey’s accusations of deal-making and “getting in bed with Republicans,” and made a charge of “blatant betrayal, which is what happened with young Ford and [is] the basis for the contempt amongst fellow Democrats.”

A visibly subdued Bailey restricted his objections on Monday to asking that the two appointments issue items be pulled off the commission’s consent agenda, leaving them potentially subject to debate.

But all Bailey had to say was “I again voice my objection.”

JB

Political activists turned up en masse for Saturday’s nuptials of well-known blogger Steve Ross and Ellyn Daniel, daughter of former state Rep. Jeanne Richardson.

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Opinion

Former Prosecutor Tim Discenza Revisits Memphis

CREDIT: Stephen Sondheim

Tim Discenza

  • Steven Sondheim
  • Tim Discenza

Former Assistant U.S. Atty. Tim Discenza, who prosecuted John Ford and Roscoe Dixon in Operation Tennessee Waltz, was back in Memphis Sunday to talk about his new job investigating ethical complaints against judges.

Discenza now lives in Nashville where he is chief disciplinary council for the Court of the Judiciary. He was on a panel on conflicts of interest hosted by the Public Interest Forum at the main library, along with state senator Beverly Marrero and state representative Mike Kernell.

Discenza said the greatest number of complaints that come to him involve domestic cases, usually divorces or child custody.

“I have never seen such bitterness,” said the former federal prosecutor for 30 years.

He said those making the complaints “are mad at me, the spouse, and the judge” and that security of court officers is a big concern.

The second greatest number of complaints come from prisoners, many of whom mistakenly believe that the Court of the Judiciary has the powers of the state Court of Appeals.

Discenza knew as much about the down and dirty of politics and government as anyone, but he shakes his head over the current political climate in Nashville.

“When you see what has happened to state government, it’s scary,” he said.

He says he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican partisan, but he has been struck by the willingness of the supposedly anti-government Tea Partiers to try to override local ordinances they don’t like. And he sympathized with Marrero’s complaint that lawmakers are inundated with bills filed late in the session and often drafted by lobbyists.

Tennessee Waltz was founded on a bogus computer recycling company set up by the FBI. Investigators introduced bills “that made no sense” (and withdrew them before action could be taken) and found that “good honest lawmakers” signed on without reading them because they were swamped.

I always disagreed with Discenza on the believability of the bogus company. I thought the idea of a computer-recycling company that shipped high-tech junk to a Far Eastern site for salvage was very believable and, in fact, it was more or less the business model for some going concerns including one that made The Wall Street Journal during the Dixon trial. As a columnist, I have learned that humor and satire must be broad, not subtle, because people tend to take reporters seriously (I know what you may be thinking). And I suspect that goes for legislation too.

Anyway, I’m glad Discenza is on the job in any capacity. Can’t see much going on in the federal prosecutor’s office these days in the way of corruption investigations.