Tag: Bill Haslam

Categories
News The Fly-By

University of Memphis Grad Assistants Demand Health Coverage

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

When Le’Trice Donaldson was a graduate assistant (GA) at the University of Memphis, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. But because the university doesn’t offer health coverage to GAs, and her income from the university was only $900 a month, Donaldson wasn’t sure how she would afford medical care.

“The first thing that came to my mind after my diagnosis was, ‘How am I going to pay for this?'” Donaldson said.

Luckily, Donaldson qualified for a TennCare loophole that only applies to breast cancer patients. But not every GA is so fortunate when he or she gets sick. Around 25 percent of

Bianca Phillips

United Campus Workers demand Medicaid expansion during Bill Haslam’s recent visit to Memphis.

U of M GAs have no health insurance.

Additionally, those whose stipends fall below $11,490 per year don’t qualify for Medicaid or for subsidies through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Had Governor Bill Haslam chosen to expand Medicaid after the ACA was passed, those GAs would have access to health coverage subsidies through the ACA Marketplace.

Now, United Campus Workers has begun putting pressure on the university to provide health insurance to GAs and the state to expand Medicaid.

GAs are employees of the university. While they attend classes toward their own graduate degree, they’re also teaching classes for undergrads or working in research labs.

Since they’re working at the university, their tuition is waived, and they receive a stipend, but the amount of that stipend differs by department. Some make less than $11,000 a year and others top out at $18,000.

They’re not allowed to hold additional outside jobs because, according to Interim Dean of the U of M Graduate School Jasbir Dhaliwal, “they are full-time students, and we want them to focus on their studies.”

Josh Dohmen, a GA in the philosophy department, helped compile a report on how other schools handle insurance for GAs. Of the U of M’s academic peers (schools that are comparable to the U of M based on academic accomplishment), 75 percent offer full health coverage to GAs. Of the U of M’s funding peers (schools with similar financial resources), 50 percent provide full coverage. The University of Tennessee system provides health coverage as part of their GAs’ stipends.

Dohmen’s report, which was compiled last academic year, also surveyed U of M students about their personal health insurance situations — 25.1 percent of the

U of M’s GAs were uninsured; 37.2 percent were on a parent or spouse’s plan; 22.1 percent were on a U of M student plan (but as of this academic year, that student plan no longer exists); and 15.6 percent had coverage under the ACA.

“We brought that report in to the administration of the Graduate School, and we were told that we shouldn’t be asking the university for funding, but that we should be putting pressure on the state to fund the university better,” Dohmen said. “I think it’s the case, if they wanted to, they could give health insurance to their GAs. But if that is legitimately not the case and I’m wrong, they need to be the ones putting pressure on the state. They have lobbyists in Nashville.”

Dhaliwal said, “In a perfect world, we certainly would like to provide health insurance.” But he said funding for GAs is limited.

“If we were to start offering health insurance, the number of GAs we could have would be less,” Dhaliwal said. “We feel there’s a shortage in the community for advanced degrees, and we’re trying to provide as much education as possible to as many people as possible.”

Dohmen said United Campus Workers will continue to pressure the university and the state. Just last week, outside the Shelby County Health Department while Haslam was in Memphis getting a flu shot, they held a protest to demand the state expand Medicaid.

“I plan to take my report [on how other schools handle health coverage] to the administration of the University of Memphis,” Dohmen said. “And I am in talks with University of Tennessee-Knoxville to draft a statewide letter saying [health coverage] is what we need. We need to raise awareness to folks making financial decisions for the state.”

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Tennessee Marriage Equality Case to Be Heard in Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals

Ijpe DeKoe and Thom Kostura

  • Ijpe DeKoe and Thom Kostura

The largest number of marriage equality cases to be heard in a single day will include a case from Tennessee and will be taken up by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on August 6th.

Other cases heard that day will include two cases from Kentucky, one from Michigan, and two from Ohio. The Tennessee case is Tanco Vs. Haslam, which seeks to recognize the same-sex marriages of three couples from Tennessee. One of those couples — Ijpe DeKoe and Thom Kostura — is from Memphis (read more about their story here).

This will be the fourth argument to be heard by a federal circuit court since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) last summer. Since that decision last June, every court that has considered marriage equality cases has ruled in favor of freedom to marry for same-sex couples. Those courts include federal and state courts in Utah, Ohio, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Oral arguments will begin at 1 p.m. (Eastern time) at the Potter Stewart Courthouse in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Deal’s a Deal

But who really came out ahead on this one? It will be remembered that, from last fall through the spring, certain high-ranking Tennessee officials tangled in dead earnest with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union about the prospect of the UAW becoming recognized as a bargaining agent for workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. With some justice, it would seem, the UAW accused Senator Bob Corker, Governor Bill Haslam, and various members of the state legislature of unfair labor practices in the wake of a narrow loss for the UAW in a representational vote held in February of this year.

In the run-up to that election, Senator Corker said publicly, in the face of denials from VW officials, that Volkswagen would manufacture a mid-sized SUV at the Chattanooga plant — so long as the UAW bid was rejected. Bo Watson, speaker pro tem of the state Senate, threatened legislation to withdraw state financial concessions from VW if the union won the vote. And Haslam piled on by saying he thought suppliers would think twice about serving a unionized plant. You wouldn’t want to call that interference or arm-twisting, now, would you? And the state used carrots as well as sticks, reportedly offering Volkswagen an additional $300 million in cash and tax credits, contingent, as The Detroit News put it, on “‘works council discussions between the State of Tennessee and VW being concluded to the satisfaction’ of the state.”

The reference to “works councils” is to the unvarying policy at Volkswagen plants worldwide for workers to be organized as an official part of plant management. Company officials not only had not sided with the naysaying, union-fearing Tennessee officials, they had pointedly welcomed the UAW’s overtures and said publicly that a union at the Chattanooga plant would facilitate the implementation of the aforesaid works councils.

After its defeat in the Chattanooga vote, UAW, armed with the evidence of interference from state officials, initially appealed the election results to the National Labor Relations Board, but, suddenly and surprisingly, withdrew the appeal in April.

Silence, until last week, when several things happened in rapid sequence. First, VW and the UAW announced jointly that the union would establish a local at the plant on the understanding that it would become an official bargaining agent when enough workers signed up for it. As an apparent corollary, the chief UAW bargaining agent was added to the plant’s advisory board. Then, mere days later, VW announced that it would indeed begin building a new SUV line in Chattanooga.

So what’s the deal? Corker et al. used the SUV announcement to claim vindication for their prior position. But, given what some observers say is a better than even chance that the UAW will reach its quota for official representation within a year, the union might equally well claim to have triumphed, however delayed the full fruition of it turns out to be.

It looks to us like one of those deals in which, as the proverb has it, “all have won and all must have prizes.” And that’s okay.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Alexander vs. the NLRB?

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander was in Memphis on Monday for a variety of purposes — one of which, perhaps coincidentally, was to see and be seeen on a day when his chief Republican primary opponent this year, state Representative Joe Carr, was the beneficiary of a Germantown fund-raiser.

Among other things, the senator made a pitch at a noon-time press conference at the University of Memphis area Holiday Inn for his bill to simplify student-aid applications and subsequently helped preside over the presentation of the Dunavant Public Service Awards (to Criminal Court Judge Chris Craft and Collierville town administrator James Lewellen).

In between those events, Alexander was asked about the news that broke Monday morning about the United Auto Workers (UAW) decision to withdraw its appeal to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of a representation vote that went against the union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant earlier this year.

Earlier in the day, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, at a press conference of his own, had expressed astonishment at the UAW action, on the grounds, as the congressman said, that the union had what he thought was a good case.

So did Democratic members of Congress, who had only last week laid the basis for a possible hearing on the Volkswagen/Chattanooga matter in Washington focusing on a UAW contention that Tennessee state officials — notably Governor Bill Haslam and Alexander’s Senate counterpart Bob Corker, along with members of the Tennessee legislature — had interfered with a fair and honest vote through their public statements and implied threats to withhold further state aid from Volkswagen if the union gained representation.

(Volkswagen itself, as Alexander acknowledged, had taken a neutral position — one which many believed favored the union cause.)

The reasons for the surprise UAW decision remained obscure, though rumors flew in some circles that it was all part of a maneuver to put the Haslam administration on the spot if Volkswagen chooses not to proceed with plans to build a new SUV line in Tennessee.

Whatever the case, Alexander professed himself pleased. “The UAW lost the election. Now it’s time to get back to buildng cars,” he said. He declined to comment directly on the union accusations against Corker and Haslam, other than to say he admired both officials and that they had “a perfect right to speak out on behalf of the people of Tennessee.”

Warming to his point, Alexander went on to declare that the UAW’s now-withdrawn appeal had been part of a “political sideshow,” and he professed himself critical about the NLRB itself, which, he said, had been tilting more and more toward the interests of organized labor instead of focusing on its intended purpose as an objective body.

Accordingly, said the senator, he and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Senate leader, were preparing a bill to “restructure” the NLRB. He did not elaborate further.

In other words, the Fat Lady may not have sung the terminal note on this issue.

• For the third election cycle in a row, Congressman Steve Cohen has been endorsed in the course of a contested Democratic primary by President Barack Obama.

Cohen, who is opposed in the primary by lawyer Ricky Wilkins, announced the presidential endorsement — an echo of previous primary-season endorsements in 2010 and 2012 — at a press conference at his Midtown home. Obama’s statement, released later via email, reads as follows:

“Congressman Steve Cohen has been a leader on justice and civil rights issues and has worked tirelessly on behalf of his constituents. His focus on bringing good jobs, affordable health care, and world class education to Tennessee is why I am proud to once again support his re-election.”

The formal response of Cohen, who was an early endorser of Obama’s presidential hopes in 2008, went this way:

“It has been my privilege to work with President Obama to make America more fair and just. Whenever I meet with him, we talk about Memphis and the needs of its citizens. I am always impressed with his compassion, dedication, and determination on our behalf. I appreciate the president’s faith in me. Together, we will continue to work every day to ensure that America is a country where if you work hard and play by the rules you get a fair shot.”

• If there is one thing that suburban candidates for the Shelby County Commission tend to agree on, it is that tax increases are off the table, in regard to both existing problems and to governmental innovations going forward.

That much was made clear Monday night when the four Republican candidates for the new District 3 County Commission seat met at the Bartlett Community Center for a forum conducted by the Northeast Shelby Republican Club’s Frank Colvett.

Early on, all four hopefuls — Sherry Simmons, David Reaves, Kelly Price, and Naser Fazlullah — took the no-new-tax pledge, and when moderator Colvett later turned the screw, asking the candidates how they would decide if faced with a choice of cutting county fire and police services by 5 percent or raising taxes, they all held the line — though with various degrees of unease.

With a regretful look, Reaves said services would have to be cut; Price said essentially the same but promised to work with administrators to make the cuts as harmless as possible; and Fazlullah and Simmons both suggested that more fine-tuning of the budget might allow the choice to be averted.

All except Reaves, who noted that the county tax rate had been increased last year and wanted further cuts, were willing to endorse county Mayor Mark Luttrell’s proposed $1.16 billion budget, however conditionally. Reaves suggested reductions could be obtained by eliminating out-sourcing of food services for county prisoners and instead using existing school nutrition sources and by consolidating IT services, a one-time Luttrell proposal that had proved to be a bugaboo with various turf-conscious department heads.

Another given in Republican circles is skepticism about governmental controls, a fact that elicited outright disapproval from three of the candidates of the currently controversial Common Core proposal for educational standards. Simmons, whose 35 years of teaching experience in Shelby County schools made her the only educator in the group, gave a grudging approval of the concept of uniform standards, provided that students were given time to adapt to Common Core’s testing procedures.

Summing up what seemed to be a group disapproval of subservience to “national models,” Reaves, an exponent of more vo-tech to counter poverty, complained that local school systems “should quit sucking money out of Bill Gates and the rest of his buddies.”

The other three candidates had some one-liners, too. Simmons, agreeing with the others about swearing off free sports tickets and other perks, made a tongue-in-cheek exception for national championship games featuring the University of Alabama. Price, suggesting that recent public-school changes had been mainly cosmetic and not for the better, said that if he changed his name to “Dr. J,” he still wouldn’t be able to play basketball.

For his part, Fazlullah, who proposed creation of a “fund” to assist small business, said that local government in the past had been subject to the Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold have made the rules.”

The candidates were split on some issues, like PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-tax provisions) to attract industry, with Reaves and Simmons approving PILOTs as necessary and Price and Fazlullah expressing doubt about their efficacy.

All in all, however, the quartet stuck fairly close to the traditional GOP talking points of low taxes, less government, and greater efficiencies.

Colvett had cautioned the candidates to avoid “personal” disagreements, and, in fact, the event was devoid of any significant disharmony, though Simmons and Reaves — or, more exactly, their supporters — have hit some sharply competitive notes in social media.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Sickening

Last fall, in our November 21st issue, we surveyed the then-brewing struggle between pro- and anti-union forces relative to the pending worker election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. “Who’s the Laughingstock?” We asked in our headline for that editorial — the reference being to what we had hoped was an off-the-cuff remark by U.S. Senator Bob Corker, regarding the fact that the Volkswagen management, both German and American, declined to be alarmed over the prospect of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union gaining representation at the plant.

VW would become a “laughingstock” if something that dire were to happen, Corker suggested, whereas we saw such a label being more appropriate if affixed to official buttinskies like himself. After all, Volkwagen executives had made it unmistakably clear that a UAW presence at their plant would more likely be beneficial than not — especially since it would make the Volkwagen’s traditional reliance on “workers’ councils,” easier to achieve. “Volkswagen considers its corporate culture of works councils a competitive advantage,” VW spokesperson Bernard Osterloh said at the time, adding, “Volkswagen is led by its board and not by politicians.”

Never mind that the UAW was already an established presence at the General Motors plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Of course, Corker had already distinguished himself (or something) by leading the resistance in 2009 to President Obama’s highly successful plan to resuscitate the then-ailing automobile industry in Detroit, headquarters of GM. But we thought that, having vented his union-baiting opinions and saluted the flag of Tennessee’s sacrosanct right-to-work law, he would settle down and allow the worker election in Chattanooga to be held in peace.

He did not. Instead, Corker placed himself at the head of a quasi-official coalition to stop the potential unionization of the VW plant, by any means necessary. Even as VW’s management was graciously allowing union organizers to address workers inside the plant, Corker et al. launched an execrable threat campaign to intimidate Volkswagen and scare the plant’s workers.

Abetted by such unsavory rightwing outsiders as Grover Norquist and the infamous Koch brothers, the Corker coalition went to its union-busting task. Corker said publicly that VW would manufacture a mid-sized SUV in Chattanooga if the workers rejected the union. (In other words: reject the union, boys, and there’ll be more work for you. Plant manager Frank Fischer promptly disputed the senator’s assertion, and Corker blithely called him a liar. Then Bo Watson (R-Hixson), speaker pro tem of the state Senate, went Corker one better, threatening legislation to revoke the existing state financial concessions granted to VW by the state if the UAW should win the vote. (In other words, “we’ll take away the work you already have if you vote yes.”) And, oh yes, surprise: Our go-along governor said he thought suppliers would think twice about serving a unionized plant.

The bottom line: After all this pressure from officialdom, the UAW bid was narrowly defeated, and Senator Corker actually boasted in a press release that the whole Volkswagen-in-Chattanooga project was hatched around his kitchen table. Fair’s fair: Wouldn’t want to give Boss Bob indigestion, would you?

We, however, are inclined to retch.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Amazon Grace

Tennessee’s tax-free honeymoon with Amazon is officially over.

Tennessee residents will now see an additional charge on their Amazon purchases, as the online retailer is now required by the state to collect sales tax.

For years, Amazon purchases made by Tennessee residents were tax-free at the time of purchase. Emails were sent out annually, letting consumers know how much they had spent on Amazon purchases the previous year so taxes could be filed accurately, but it was up to the shopper to include those taxes in their tax forms.

According to Amazon, in certain states where the website does not have a “physical selling presence” and there are no laws specifically requiring sales tax to be added, the retailer is not required to collect such tax.

That’s due to the Internet Tax Freedom Act that was reenacted by former President George W. Bush in 2007. However, states are still able to enact laws requiring online retailers to collect sales tax.

Senator Jim Kyle of Memphis, who opposed the tax in committee, said requiring the sales tax has not been shown to deter online shopping, and Amazon collecting taxes will not make small businesses more competitive with online vendors.

“It’s still a tax increase that this Republican-led government has brought us,” said Kyle, a Democrat. “You can spin this however you want to, but people like you and me are paying for it.”

Republican Senator Brian Kelsey, who voted in favor of the tax, didn’t return calls for comment.

In Tennessee, the previous deal struck by former Governor Phil Bredesen allowed Amazon to build two distribution centers in the state, creating 1,500 full-time jobs and, despite the “physical selling presence,” the deal made it so that Amazon would not be required to collect taxes.

The current governor, Bill Haslam, signed a bill in 2012 that required Amazon and other remote sellers to not only collect state tax on goods, but also to build a new distribution center and maintain at least 3,500 full-time positions until 2016 — an additional 2,000 jobs than was in the previous agreement with Bredesen.

“There are a lot of contributing factors that go into our thought process as we decide where to place our fulfillment centers,” said Nina Lindsey, a spokesperson for Amazon. “Most importantly, we want to make sure a fulfillment center is placed as close to the customer as possible. We look closely at the local workforce, and we’ve found great talent in abundance across [Tennessee].”

The bill grandfathered in the two distribution centers in Chattanooga and Charleston built in 2011. Distribution centers in Murfreesboro and Lebanon opened last year. Last November, The Tennessee Journal reported an expected $8.8 million increase in revenue from the tax.

Tennessee joins 18 other states in being charged tax on online sales. Mississippi and Arkansas residents, however, remain free from tax collection by the online retailing giant.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Fallout From GOP Falling-Out

Fallout continues from the bitterness that flared up within Republican ranks at the close of the 2013 legislative session on Friday, April 19th, the date pre-ordained by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), speaker of the state Senate and, up until quite recently, the virtually unchallenged spokesperson for the Republican legislative supermajority.

As was chronicled in the Flyer two weeks ago, GOP members of the state House of Representatives vented their anger at domination by the Senate (read: Ramsey) in the session’s last week and made a point of soundly rejecting a judicial redistricting measure that had been personally shaped by Ramsey and was greatly prized by the Senate speaker.

Ramsey retaliated by making sure that a bill to strengthen the state board of education’s control of charter-school authorizations, one tailored by House speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) to counter a local Davidson County situation, was kept from a vote in the Senate.

Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey

The speakers made no effort to hide their exasperation with each other and with the actions of the other chamber, and the usual end-of-session press conference with Governor Bill Haslam was scrapped, replaced by a hastily thrown-together affair in which Haslam met reporters in the company of the House and Senate majority leaders.

This past week, another shoe dropped in the GOP’s intramural feud. The Tennessee Republican Caucus, a fund-raising body that has traditionally raised money and shared it equally with GOP members of the House and Senate, has been dissolved, apparently at Ramsey’s initiative.

Henceforth, the Republican caucuses of the two chambers will be responsible for their own fund-raising. For his part, Ramsey made it known that, with one exception, he will no longer personally assist House Republicans in their independent fund-raising efforts. (The exception is Representative Timothy Hill, who hails from Ramsey’s home town of Blountville.)

Each of the two speakers has also lunched privately with Haslam since the session’s close, but neither has met with the other speaker.

The legislature’s Democrats — a minority of seven in the 33-member Senate and 28 in the 99-member House — are publicly enjoying (and encouraging) the spectacle of Republican falling-out but privately are aware that the schism is of little practical benefit to Democrats, whose underdog status is more or less guaranteed for at least a decade by the redistricting which occurred under Republican auspices after the census of 2010.

The chief practical effect of the GOP schism is to end the brief era — from 2007, when Ramsey ousted Democrat John Wilder from his longtime perch as Senate speaker, to the stormy end of the 2013 session — when Ramsey’s word was law on Capitol Hill, almost literally.

In case after case in recent years, Ramsey — and the Senate — prevailed over the wishes of Haslam and Harwell, most notably in 2011, when Ramsey insisted on attaching the abolition of collective bargaining to the governor’s education-reform package.

A sign of the change to come may have occurred this year when Haslam yanked his pilot bill creating a moderate voucher system for public schools rather than permit state senators Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and Dolores Gresham (R-Somerville) to expand the bill’s reach.

• Memphians are prominent in the membership of a legislative delegation headed this month to Turkey and Azerbaijan, and the trip, reports the Tennessee Journal, is “financed by groups tied to a Muslim leader who runs a network of charter schools in the United States.” The Journal cites Nashville’s WVTF-Channel 5 as the identifying source.

The sponsoring groups are the Turkish American Chamber of Commerce of the Southeast and the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians. Both allegedly are tied to Fethullah Gulen, who became controversial two years ago when former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton cited Gulen’s charter-school network as a possible tie-in with Herenton’s own proposed charter-school network. The former mayor has since recast his proposed charter-school framework without reference to Gulen’s network.

Memphians making the trip are state senator Kelsey, representatives Mark White, Antonio Parkinson, Joe Towns, Johnnie Turner and state safety commissioner Bill Gibbons.

• As noted last week in both this space and the Flyer editorial, Maxine Smith passed from the mortal realm into the immortality that history confers on those adjudged to have rendered significant service.

Smith was properly appreciated by a celebration of her life at the Jesse H. Turner St. Freedom House on Vance Avenue on Friday and by a memorial service and all-day visitation at Metropolitan Baptist Church on Walker Avenue on Saturday.

The service at Metropolitan was presided over jointly by the Rev. Billy Kyles, a civil rights icon in his own right, and by the Rev. Rosalyn Nichols of Freedom’s Chapel Christian Church, Smith’s own, where a smaller, private service was held for her on Friday night.

Smith was known to enjoy a good laugh, and the service at Metropolitan, where humorous anecdotes and reminiscences were encouraged and abounded, reflected that fact. At one point, industrialist/philanthropist Pitt Hyde concluded a heartfelt tribute with the notion that Smith’s arrival at the Pearly Gates would be certified by St. Peter as proof of Martin Luther King’s celebrated statement regarding the content of one’s character outweighing the color of one’s skin.

Hyde slipped somewhat in the pronunciation of “skin,” making the phrase sound like “the color of one’s sin.” The audience in the packed church roared its appreciation of the inadvertent double entendre. As one attendee said later, “Maxine would have loved that.” Ninth District congressman Steve Cohen, who followed at the dais, looked back at the seated Hyde with a mischievous smile, and said, “Pitt, I promise you, I won’t tweet that.”

Hyde, Cohen, and others who offered recollections about Smith teared up, as well, but the sorrow was leavened with laughter. Call it the joy of remembrance.

• Even as Smith was being extolled and remembered, another death of some consequence occurred late last week — that of Jerry Cobb. The unofficial leader of what amounted to a permanent dissenting minority in the Shelby County Republican Party, Cobb was well-known as a gadfly’s gadfly — a term he came to embrace once he was made aware of its connection with Socrates, a previous disturber of the peace.

Cobb, a general contractor who continually sought maximum transparency in the bidding for public construction projects, was sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left of his party’s mainstream. He was rarely in its center, inasmuch as he saw his main mission as being that of challenging the status quo. Survived by his wife Edna, who sustained him in life, he was well liked, even by his adversaries.

• A resolution which ostensibly would have put the Shelby County Commission on record as supporting the Second Amendment was rejected on Monday by the commission, a majority of whose voting members saw it as going much further than its stated purpose.

Speaking for the majority, Commissioners Walter Bailey and Steve Mulroy both argued that the resolution contained clauses suggesting that county government could and should “nullify” federal statutes and urging local law enforcement officials to take the lead in doing just that.

The resolution’s sponsor, Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, stunned the audience at one point by saying, “If I come to Memphis, Tennessee, I’m packing heat. So anybody out there listening, if you want to try something, it’s on you, but I’m packing heat.”

Speaking for the resolution, Commissioners Heidi Shafer and Wyatt Bunker said its chief purpose was to encourage support for the Second Amendment and to make citizens aware of their rights, not to challenge the federal government. Various amendments to soften the language of the resolution were considered but rejected. The resolution was defeated by a vote of five for and six against, with one abstention.

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Haslam Signs Pro-Discrimination Bill

Bill Haslam

  • Bill Haslam

Governor Bill Haslam signed the “Special Access to Discriminate” bill into law yesterday, preventing city and county governments from passing ordinances requiring contractors to treat LGBT employees equally.

The law will overturn a recently-passed Nashville ordinance that required local government contractors to enact non-discrimination ordinances, and it will prevent the Shelby County Commission or the Memphis City Council from ever passing similar ordinances.

“Discrimination should have no place in the Volunteer State and the [Tennessee Chamber of Commerce’s] opposition to this law sent a strong signal that corporations are on the leading edge of positive change,” said Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese. “In contrast, Governor Haslam has put discrimination ahead of the state’s values and even business interests by signing this horrible legislation.”

Major corporations against the bill included Aloca, FedEx, AT&T, KPMG, UnitedHealth Group, Whirlpool, and Comcast.