Tag: Brian Kelsey

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Politics Politics Feature

First Licks in the Tennessee 8th District

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As introductory campaign events go, the forum for 8th District congressional candidates held Tuesday night last week by the East Shelby Republican Club at Germantown’s Pickering Center was somewhat tentative — as most such debut cattle calls are — but it contained plenty of foreshadowing of the slings and arrows to come.

Four of the main GOP players were there — state Senator Brian Kelsey, radiologist/radio executive George Flinn, Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, and advertising man/consultant Brad Greer of Jackson. Missing among the touted contenders were former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The outlier of the group, both geographically and, to a large extent, philosophically, was Greer, whose chances for prevailing are maybe not quite as good as those of then state Senator Marsha Blackburn when she ran for the 7th congressional seat in 2002 against three Shelby Countians— the aforesaid Kustoff, then Shelby County Commissioner (now state Senator) Mark Norris, and then Memphis City Councilman Brent Taylor. 

Blackburn, whose home base was Brentwood in Williamson County, campaigned well across the 7th District, even in Shelby County. She would win easily, taking advantage of the split vote among Shelby County natives, none of whom exactly ran like a house afire anyway.

But if Greer’s public image is not as well honed as was Blackburn’s, who at the time was one of the preeminent leaders of the anti-income tax movement in Tennessee, he has even more opponents from Shelby County than had Blackburn in 2002, and thus can count on an even more advantageous split.

Jackson Baker

(l to r) Brad Greer, George Flinn, Brian Kelsey, and Tom Leatherwood in Germantown

Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood (to list them in the order of their campaign financial holdings) could very well divide the vote in their home county of Shelby, wherein resides 55 percent of the 8th District electorate. And that could pave the way for an upset victory for Greer, whose Madison County bailiwick is closer to the traditional heartland of the District, which since 2010 has been served by Crockett County resident Stephen Fincher, who is voluntarily relinquishing the seat.

That might especially be the case if the 8th District votes according to the same pattern as in March on Super Tuesday, when the distribution of votes for the hotly contested Republican presidential primary was, according to Greer, 60 percent in the non-Shelby part of the district and only 40 percent in the Shelby County bailiwick of Flinn, Kelsey, Kustoff, Luttrell, and Leatherwood.

To be sure, Greer has some competition of his own among fellow Jacksonians Hunter Baker, David Bault, and George Howell, none of whom, however, have raised much money at this point or figure to run well-supported races. And prominent Madison County kingmaker Jimmy Wallace, a major force behind Fincher, is putting his eggs this time in the basket, not of Greer, but of Kelsey, who also has good support and fund-raising potential in the Memphis area.

For the record, candidate cash on hand, as of the first-quarter reporting period, was: Flinn, $2,930,885; Kelsey, $439,005; Kustoff, $319,682; Luttrell, $144,570; and Greer, $103,713. No one else had amassed $100,000, or anything close to it. (And Flinn’s total should be taken with a grain — or perhaps an airplane hangar — of salt. Like Donald Trump at the presidential level, he is wealthy enough to self-finance, and, unlike The Donald, actually does so to a substantial degree; he does minimal fund-raising as such.)

All of the foregoing is a recap of the basic paper facts. Last week’s forum at the Pickering Center gave a partial foreshadowing of how the race might be run and of some of the intangibles involved. Herewith are some (admittedly sketchy) reviews of how and what the participating candidates did:

First up was Greer, who established the fact that he represented rural Tennesseans and had handled 18 West Tennessee counties in the 2006 U.S. Senatorial race for Republican victor Bob Corker. He distinguished himself from the others when an audience member asked about trade policy, and Greer wasted no time blasting away, Trump-like at the purportedly ruinous effects of various free-trade pacts on ordinary working folk. “I don’t give a good rat’s ass about other countries before my fellow countrymen,” Greer declared, in what may have been the line of the night.

Flinn was next, and right away declared his fealty to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump. He went on to express, as he does in his now-frequently-appearing TV ads, some of the well-worn GOP shibboleths of recent years, fretting that “we’re being killed by entitlements,” and promising to “represent you to D.C., not D.C. to you.” (I can’t help fantasizing about what would happen if the genial and accomplished Flinn dispensed with such pedantic bromides and let fly something defiant about the independence secured by his self-financing, a la “If you like Trump, you’ll love me!”)

Kelsey was third to speak, and in his allotted two-minute introductory spiel, he must have used the self-defining phrase “proven conservative” perhaps 50 times. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but variations on the phrase dominated his brief remarks to an overwhelming degree. In fairness, he did get to elaborate on his record during the Q-and-A portion of the evening, touting his sponsorship of a constitutional amendment to ban a state income tax and his enmity-to-the-death for Medicaid expansion.

Most compellingly, Kelsey signaled his willingness and intent in the future to attack the absent Luttrell, a supporter of Governor Bill Haslam’s ill-fated “Insure Tennessee” proposal: “We have Republicans in this very race who supported extending Obamacare.” And later: “As I mentioned before, we have Republicans who want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.” 

And there was Leatherwood, whose hold on his county register’s job owes much to a neighborly demeanor and a competent, customer-knows-best attitude but who, when running for offices of partisan consequence, prefers to present himself as some kind of avenging Robespierre of the Right. He vies with Kelsey in his contempt for “socialism” and regard for “free enterprise” and, on matters of education policy, gave notice of his wish to purify both state (“Frankly, TNReady is merely Common Core by another name”) and nation, promising to support the abolition of the Department of Education.

In brief, Flinn, Kelsey, and Leatherwood all essentially stuck to well-worn Republican talking points, and Greer evinced at least some disposition, in this year of Trump and Sanders mass assemblies, to go yellow dog.

The next forum for these Republican contenders is scheduled for this Thursday night in Dyersburg.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Poll shows large Luttrell lead over other Shelby Countians in 8th District race.

A po

Luttrell

ll completed by the Remington Research Group of Kansas City shows Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell to have a commanding lead over other Shelby County candidates in the 8th Congressional District Republican primary.

The poll, conducted on February 29 and March 1 involved “686 likely Republican primary voters,” with a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percent, according to Remington director Titus Bond.

Below is the tabulated response to the question, “ If the candidates in the Republican primary election for United States Congress were Brian Kelsey, David Kustoff, Mark Luttrell, George Flinn, Tom Leatherwood and Steve Basar, for whom would you vote?.”

Mark Luttrell: 26%
George Flinn: 11%
Brian Kelsey: 9%
David Kustoff: 8%
Tom Leatherwood: 7%
Steve Basar: 1%
Undecided: 38%

The press release announcing these results said further:

“In addition to his ballot strength, Luttrell possesses the strongest image rating of all the potential Republican candidates. 43% of likely Republican primary voters view him favorably with only 5% viewing him unfavorably. This is by far the strongest image rating of the field by more than double his nearest competitor.
“Luttrell enjoys massive support in the Memphis media market where he receives 33% support. The Memphis media marketanchors the district, comprising more than 71% of Republican primary voters.

“’Mark Luttrell holds a strong advantage in the early stages of this race. In a winner take all primary, other candidates will have to spend significant sums just to match Luttrell’s current ballot position and favorability,’ said Titus Bond, Director of Remington Research Group. ‘Mark Luttrell is the heavy early favorite in this Republican primary.’”

Asked the obvious question about the poll — whether he or his campaign had commissioned it — Luttrell said no.

There was no explanation as to why several declared candidates from outside the Shelby County area were not included in the questionnaire.

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Politics Politics Feature

Matters of Tenure on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Walter Bailey

No suggestion at Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission could have been treated with more courtesy than the request by long-serving Democratic member Walter Bailey for an ordinance to amend the County Charter so as to eliminate all reference to term limits for county officials.

And no suggestion had so little chance of passage as Bailey’s ordinance, which, on the first of three readings, gained the votes of only three members — Bailey and fellow Democrats Justin Ford and Van Turner — on the 13-member body. 

The ordinance allows for a public referendum of county voters, and that provision allowed several members to abstain from voting on the premise that they would meanwhile consult their constituents, but this was largely a face-saving mechanism for Bailey and perhaps for themselves.

The fact is, as a number of commissioners say privately, and as David Reaves said out loud on Monday, most members of the current commission would not have been able to run successfully for their seats on the body if term limits had not been imposed.

In arguing for the ordinance, Bailey noted for the record that members of Congress and the state legislature are not bound by term limits and that the imposition of them on the commission arbitrarily deprives the public of needed experience on the part of members. Bailey himself, a member of a distinguished political family that included his late brother, author/civil rights icon D’Army Bailey, is the longest-serving member of the commission and, as he put it last week in committee, where his ordinance was first vetted, maybe the longest-serving public official in the state. He won office first in 1971, has served as chairman twice, and has served continuously, with the exception of four years, from 2006 to 2010, when the charter’s then-new term-limit requirement caused him to step down temporarily.

He is now serving his second term since being returned to the commission in 2010 and faces another mandatory withdrawal from service. • More local backdrop for the 8th District congressional race: As indicated last week, a victory by Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell in the crowded Republican primary field would occasion some frenetic maneuvering on the part of the county commissioners, inasmuch as Luttrell would thereby vacate his county position, opening it up to a reappointment process.

Luttrell, if  victorious in the congressional race, would presumably resign his mayoralty sometime between the general election in November and his January swearing-in in Washington. Meanwhile, the commission would have selected a new chair in September, according to its normal schedule. And whoever is chair when Luttrell ceases to be mayor automatically becomes interim Shelby County mayor for a maximum of 45 days, after which the commission will select a new one by majority vote.

As Commissioner Mark Billingsley of Germantown reminded his colleagues with copies of a handout he distributed Monday, the county charter makes no provision for an election to fill a vacancy in the mayor’s office “until a successor is elected and qualified at the next countywide election allowed by the state election laws.” Hence, whoever is selected by the commission upon the completion of the interim mayor’s service will serve as a fully pledged county mayor until the county general election of 2018.

There is no doubt that current commission chairman Terry Roland, a Millington Republican, wants to be the next county mayor. His intentions of running for the position in 2018 have been clear for months, and, in case anyone should forget the fact, he announces it periodically during meetings of the commission. (Roland pointedly did so at last Wednesday’s committee sessions and did so again at Monday’s regular commission meeting.)

It now appears, however, that Roland sees no need to seek reappointment to a second consecutive term as commission chairman in September (as numerous commission chairs have done in the last several years, with former member Sidney Chism, a Democrat, having brought off the trick). Roland is content to allow things to take their natural course in September, with Democratic member Turner the favorite to become the next chairman.

But Roland is certain to be front and center as a candidate for appointment as mayor when the commission convenes, sometime early in 2017, to serve as a successor to Luttrell through the election of 2018. And word has it that he believes he already has most of the votes in hand to overcome other candidates, including possible opponent David Lenoir, the county trustee, who intends to run for the office in the regular 2018 election cycle. Another possible contender for the commission’s mayoralty selection would be GOP Commissioner Steve Basar, whom Roland bested for the chairmanship last year in a hastily called revote after Basar had held the position for roughly an hour.

All of this would be moot, of course, should someone other than Luttrell win the congressional race. There are five other Shelby County Republicans in the field — Basar; radiologist/broadcast executive George Flinn; state Senator Brian Kelsey; County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood; and former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff.

And Jackson businessman Brad Greer must be delighted at the prospect that so many Shelby Countians in the race, dividing up the local vote, creates the real mathematical possibility of his winning. (Something like that happened in the 7th District congressional race of 2002, when Kustoff, then city council member Brent Taylor, and then County Commissioner Mark Norris split the Shelby County vote, allowing for an easy victory by Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County, who still represents the 7th District.)

Outlook on Convention Delegates

Some 400 Democrats betook themselves to First Baptist Church Broad last Saturday to make themselves eligible for formal Shelby County conventions on Saturday, March 19th, that will select from this pool of eligible members the delegates to the Democratic National Convention at Philadelphia this summer.

Yes, there will be two conventions on March 19th — one to be held at First Baptist Broad that will determine the identity of the delegates and alternates who will go to Philadelphia to represent the 9th Congressional District; and another, to be held the same day in Jackson, that will determine who goes to the national convention to represent the 8th Congressional District, which takes in a generous hunk of eastern Shelby County.

At both locations, the delegates to be selected will conform to the pattern of the two districts’ voting in last week’s “Super Tuesday” presidential primary in Tennessee, with the lion’s share of delegates and alternates going to Hillary Clinton, who won the primary vote handily, and a handful going to Bernie Sanders. 

In the case of the 9th District, that would be six delegates and one alternate for Clinton, with one delegate apportioned to Sanders. In the case of the 8th, it’s four delegates for Clinton and one for Sanders. Insofar as the math permits, the delegates are apportioned, half and half, by gender.

For the record, Clinton beat Sanders statewide by a two-to-one ratio. The ratio in Shelby County, whose African-American demographic (generally very supportive of Hillary Clinton) is higher, was four to one: Clinton, 66,465; Sanders, 15,985. 

The Democratic Party’s ex post facto process for selecting delegates differs from that of the Republicans, which required would-be delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to file for election on the Super Tuesday ballot on behalf of the specific presidential candidate they chose to represent. The chief vote-getters on each list became convention delegates in a ratio proportionate to how well their candidates did in head-to-head voting.

For the record, Donald Trump won 39 percent of the statewide Republican primary vote; Ted Cruz won 25 percent; Marco Rubio, 21 percent, Ben Carson, 8 percent; John Kasich, 5 percent. (Results rounded off.)

The preliminary delegate list released last week by the state Republican Party did not include the apportionment for Shelby County, but the county’s GOP primary results went as follows: Trump, 30 percent; Cruz, 29 percent; Rubio, 26 percent, Kasich, 8 percent, Carson, 6 percent, and “others,” 2 percent. (Again, results rounded off.)

If all of this appears to be a mite complicated, that’s because it is. Updates will be provided by the Flyer as they are received.

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Brian Kelsey Drops Bill Supporting Racist, Sexist, Homophobic School Leader

Douglas Wilson

State Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) has dropped a bill that would give school accreditation authority to the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which was founded by a far-right religious leader who has expressed support of slavery and advocated for the exile of gays.

Douglas Wilson, the founder of that association, is perhaps best-known for co-writing a pamphlet called Southern Slavery, As It Was, which stated that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”

When Kelsey’s bill was heard in the Senate on Monday, Senator Jeff Yarbro (D-Dyersburg) questioned why Kelsey would bring forth a bill supporting the organization of a man who defended slavery. Kelsey replied, “I’m not sure of the actual person.” Apparently, Kelsey hadn’t done his research on Wilson. A simple Google search turns up all kinds of choice quotes from the founder of the evangelical Christ Church in Idaho.

Here’s another quote from Wilson’s Southern Slavery pamphlet:

“Sodomites parade in the streets, claiming that if we do not appropriate more money to study why people with foul sexual habits get sick, we are somehow violating their civil rights. Feminists, in rebellion against God, invert the order of the home established by God. They do so in a way that seeks to rob women of their beauty in submission and their security in being loved. For two decades, we have seen millions of unborn children slaughtered in abortion clinics. How did we get here, and what is the way out? The question cannot be answered fully without careful study of the War Between the States and the controversies surrounding it. Slavery was one of those controversies.”

And another anti-gay Wilson quote:

“You might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim. There are circumstances where I’d be in favor of execution for adultery. … I’m not proposing legislation. All I’m doing is refusing to apologize for certain parts of the Bible.”

Technically, the bill isn’t dead yet, but Kelsey has said he’s moved it back to the Senate Calendar Committee and isn’t planning to pursue it this year. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jury Still Out on Tennessee Appellate Conundrum

CREDIT: JB


Tennesseans may have thought that they’d solved the question of judicial confirmation back in 2014, when a constitutional amendment to clarify how the state’s appellate judges were appointed passed easily. 

The amendment, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), abandoned what had been a judicial nominating commission on the front end and added the important proviso of legislative approval or rejection on the back end. The middle process, by which state appellate judges would be appointed by the governor, remained in place.

JB

Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris

Although the constitutional amendment seemingly established a process similar to that by which federal judges are appointed — in that case, presidential appointment, followed by Senate confirmation — and was partly sold to the state’s voters that way, the real point of the change was to give the legislature final say over appointments.

In Tennessee’s system, state trial judges are elected directly by the people, as mandated by the state constitution, and controversy had raged for years about whether appeals court judges should be named by the same process. Besides establishing the principle of legislative control, the 2014 constitutional amendment would seem to have resolved that issue.

Left unresolved was a newly created conundrum: What exactly does legislative confirmation mean in a bicameral legislature? Should the two chambers — the state Senate and the state House vote as a collective body (in special session, as it were) on approving a gubernatorial selection? Or should each chamber vote separately? And, if the latter, what happens if one chamber votes yes and the other chamber votes no on an appellate judge’s appointment?

Lo and behold, the two chambers don’t agree on the point. The Republican Party may have an unbreakable monopoly (i.e., super-majority) in the General Assembly, with majorities in both chambers that cannot mathematically be offset by the small Democratic remnants in each body, but human nature, which abhors a perfect concordance, occasionally asserts itself in wrangles between Senate and House, each of which is jealous of its own power.

So it is that one of the first agenda items for the just reconvened General Assembly to resolve is the effective meaning of “legislative confirmation” as it applies to the 2014 constitutional amendment on selection of appellate judges.

And the issue is hardly moot. In September, state Supreme Court Justice Gary Wade retired, leaving Tennessee’s ultimate judicial tribunal one member short of its five-member quota. Governor Bill Haslam has appointed Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Roger Page to fill the vacancy, but Page cannot take his seat on the court until his appointment receives legislative confirmation — whatever that turns out to mean.

There is a fail-safe in the process. If the legislature remains in session 60 days without producing either a yes vote or a no vote on Page, the state constitution allows him to be confirmed by default. But nobody wants that to be the endgame. It would leave the conundrum unresolved, with other judicial appointments sure to come before the legislature in the relatively near future.

And such a conclusion would leave the legislature as such looking ineffectual in the process — a direct contradiction of the intent of the constitutional amendment.

And, as Ed Cromer of The Tennessee Journal has noted in a definitive article on the controversy, reliance on the 60-day default process would inevitably lead to possible accusations of “stalling” by one chamber against another or even to the enabling of questionable appointments by some future “bad actor” governor.

The onus is on the General Assembly to resolve the matter as soon as possible in the current legislative session.

An effort was made to break the impasse last spring, in a compromise proposal drafted by Senate-House conferees calling for judicial-confirmation votes to be achieved by votes of the two chambers sitting together, with a majority of the entire General Assembly — 67 votes — needing to be achieved.

That plan was rejected in the Senate, where it got only four of the body’s 33 votes and was condemned by the Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) as threatening “the end of the bicameral legislature.”

Both Norris and Kelsey are members of a 10-member committee (seven Republicans, three Democrats) assembled for the current session and charged with coming up with a new solution. The committee’s first draft, last week, called for separate confirmation votes by House and Senate, with a split decision resulting in a nominee’s rejection. Since both Haslam and the Tennessee Bar Association immediately expressed their opposition to this plan, other formulas and drafts are due to be considered by the committee this week, with deliberations starting on Tuesday.

Besides the urgent matter of filling out the state Supreme Court to its full complement, there are numerous other ramifications that would seemingly call for an immediate solution — including the fact that, while the constitutional amendment may have strengthened the legislature’s hand on the back end of judicial selection, it weakened it on the front end by allowing the expiration of what had been a built-in legislative screening process prior to the governor’s naming a candidate for an appellate position.

That’s what you might call an “unintended consequence,” one of many that may have been packed into last year’s much ballyhooed constitutional amendment process.

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News News Feature

Clean Slate

America loves a comeback story, except when it’s ex-offenders seeking redemption after they’ve served their time. For these men and women, a criminal record often stands between them and a job, an apartment, or a loan. Although they’re no longer behind bars, they’re not free.

But last week, a new nonprofit organization committed to criminal justice reform brought emancipation to a few people.

In one of its first official actions, Just City wrote six $450 checks to cover the expungement fee for six people who’d completed the process to have their records wiped clean.

The Clean Slate Fund covered the cost through a grant from the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center and the Memphis Bar Association.

“One of Just City’s core values is that you should not be defined by the worst thing you’ve done,” Kerry Hayes, one of the organization’s co-founders, said.

Of the six Clean Slate Fund recipients, three were first-time offenders convicted of theft of property under $500, said Josh Spickler, director of the Defender’s Resource Network for the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office.

After they served jail time and paid monthly probation fees and court costs that may have totaled more than $1,000, another hurdle awaited: an expungement fee that rivals the amount of property that they’d taken.

“These are shoplifting cases, and then they’re stuck, because $450 is rent,” Spickler said.

Helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society isn’t a conservative solution or a liberal solution, Hayes said. It’s just common sense.

“This is an investment we’re making in the lives of people who want to work, who do want to contribute to society, but for $450, they would probably be unable to do that,” Hayes said.

I wasn’t able to talk to any of the people who had their records cleared. It defeats the purpose of getting a fresh start if your name or identifying characteristics show up in the paper, Hayes said.

The motivations of some who want their records expunged were sometimes more psychological than practical, Spickler said. “I was just really surprised about how many people have wanted it for peace of mind,” he said. “They feel like they’re marked. And what we see and know about people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system is they are marked.”

In 2012, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) issued a report denouncing the “vast, half-hidden network” of collateral consequences that create a second-class status for the 65 million Americans who have a criminal record.

In Tennessee, a felony conviction means you can’t vote. You can’t work as a home inspector or reflexologist. You can’t be a security guard at the mall. You can’t even sell fireworks.

In 2012, the state legislature amended the expungement law, but it’s still so narrowly tailored that few ex-offenders qualify. Of the 10 recommendations issued by NACDL, number nine is exactly what Just City and the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office has done.

“Defense lawyers,” the NACDL wrote, “should consider avoiding, mitigating, and relieving collateral consequences to be an integral part of their representation of a client.”

The city of Memphis adopted a “ban the box” ordinance in 2010, but Shelby County and most private employers still ask job applicants about their criminal record.

“Some of these people are 20 years out of this mistake, and we still force them to answer this question this way,” Spickler said.

In late July, Just City held its inaugural event to introduce the organization to Memphis — and to ask the question: What is a just city?

“We titled it that so we would not give you an answer,” Hayes told the audience at Hattiloo Theatre. “What we want is for you to start asking the question with us … because when you start to ask the question, everything around you will change.

“If we believe that expectations create reality, which we do, it starts with having a different set of expectations for ourselves and our city. If justice is going to mean anything to any one of us, it’s got to mean absolutely everything to every one of us.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1377

Money Shot

Your Pesky Fly doesn’t take sides in electoral politics. Nevertheless, I’m compelled to put in a plug for District 64 Representative Sheila Butt, who has a racy new campaign logo. Yes, that is supposed to be a silhouette of the Maury County courthouse set against the background of the Tennessee state flag. It also looks a like the climactic scene in a porn film.

Viva los Toros!

Pamplona’s encierrÓ, or “running of the bulls,” always claims a few casualties. This year, two Americans were injured and one British man was gored in the groin. But State Senator Brian Kelsey, the pride of East Memphis, dodged all the hooves and horns without incident. Here’s a post-run photo of Kelsey with his friend and fellow bull-runner Pedro.

Tony Tweets

In a series of tweets, SuperGrizz Tony Allen exposed the hidden dangers of getting a couples’ massage at the day spa. Grammatical errors are his own.

• “I’ll never get in a jacuzzi at a day spa again. Dude just jumped in Butt Naked i had to get out of Dodge.”

• “I’m calling the police”

• “I thought u was supposed to at least have on swimming trunks.”

• “See I wouldn’t of ran in to this problem if, I didn’t have go get a couplesmassage ”

Lesson learned.

Categories
News News Feature

Panhandled

There is no social concern that a new law can’t solve. So in the absence of public policies to help the poor, Tennessee lawmakers created a new class of criminal: the aggressive panhandler.

A law went into effect July 1st that prohibits behavior already covered by other state laws, such as following someone who doesn’t want to be followed (stalking) or touching someone who doesn’t want to be touched (assault).

If you think this law is about anything other than protecting business interests in trendy areas, listen to what the sponsors said as the bill moved through the legislature.

“We have an interest in promoting tourism,” said the Senate sponsor, Republican Brian Kelsey of Germantown. “If individuals fear harm to their person because of aggressive panhandling, then they will no longer come here for tourist events and we will lose those state tax dollars associated with those events.”

House sponsor Raumesh Akbari was more direct. “What we’re really trying to get to … there are certain areas in Memphis that are on the upswing,” said the Memphis Democrat, mentioning downtown specifically. “I actually had a constituent who was punched by a panhandler,” Akbari said.

Anecdotes should not be the basis for public policy. But when it comes to ways to punish the poor and prioritize profits over people, if one law is good, then more are better.

In the Senate judicial committee, Memphis Democrat Sara Kyle was the lone voice of concern. “This seems awfully subjective,” Kyle said, wondering how the law would be enforced. “Isn’t this ‘he said, she said’?”

Kelsey had no such qualms. “At the end of the day, that’s going to be an issue for the prosecutor to prove,” he said.

The first violation is a Class C misdemeanor. A second violation is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail.

To her credit, Akbari toned down Kelsey’s bill with two amendments.

“If I’m standing still and you walk past me and I kindly ask you to give me a dollar, that’s not aggressive,” she said in a House criminal justice subcommittee. “If someone happens to be intoxicated and says, ‘Please, sir, do you have a dollar to spare,’ that’s not aggressive, just because they happen to be intoxicated while doing it,” she said.

In the end, the bill passed with only one no vote.

Peter Gathje, who helps run the homeless ministry Manna House, had harsh words for the law’s supporters. “Most people’s discomfort around panhandlers is that panhandlers are visible and sometimes verbal reminders that our society is messed up,” he wrote on Facebook.

“If I’m downtown enjoying myself, going out for dinner and drinks, I don’t want to feel like I am that well-dressed and well-fed rich guy in the Bible who went to hell because poor Lazarus didn’t even get the scraps from my table,” he wrote.

Gathje quotes Matthew 5:42, in which Jesus says: “‘Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.’ But then downtown merchants, political leaders, and even a few clergy say, ‘If you give to panhandlers you’re just enabling drug abuse or alcoholism or laziness.'”

Said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose last mission was to unite people across racial lines in pursuit of economic justice: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Pay attention to King’s choice of words. Panhandlers are produced. They are the creation of a nation in which most of the jobs being created pay less than a living wage. They testify of cities where mental health counseling is scarce, substance abuse treatment is nonexistent, and a night at the city’s largest shelter costs more than $5.

They speak to the nose-chopping, face-spiting cruelty of the Republican legislators who, despite the pleas of thousands of constituents, refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid, costing lives and billions in forfeited revenue.

“In the absence of housing or even shelter, we pass laws stigmatizing those who stand and ask for money,” Gathje wrote.

Take comfort in this: If there is divine reckoning at the end of our days, legislators who turned their backs on the poor will themselves have to beg — for forgiveness and for mercy.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Fireworks Ahead

This issue of the Flyer precedes a 4th of July weekend, and the revolutionary impulses that attended the birth of this nation 239 years ago will be symbolically re-enacted in thousands of fireworks shows across the country and here in Memphis.

This time of year has often witnessed turbulent, world-changing events — the American declaration of independence and the start of the French Revolution, both in July, being only two of many. And the period leading up to this year’s observance of Independence Day has certainly provided an astonishing sequence of political fireworks.

Whatever deluded impulse provoked a young racist assassin to gun down nine innocent African Americans in a church two weeks ago in Charleston, South Carolina, his unspeakable action generated nationwide grief and outrage and an apparent determination to do away with the remaining barriers to some form of racial reconciliation in this country. That would seem to include the physical vestiges of nostalgia for the Confederacy, at least in places of official sanction. And for those among us, many good of heart, who find this thought unbearable, let us merely point to the extraordinary transitions that have occurred in recent years at the University of Mississippi, which has managed to divest itself of such outmoded symbolism with no great loss to local pride or alumni loyalty.

Simultaneous with this development has been a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the recognition of same-sex marriage throughout the 50 states. It is fair to say that no prior ruling of the court, not even its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating desegregation of schools, has had the transformative effect that is implicit in Obergefell v. Hodges, with its stripping away of long-standing stigma.

And, though it was destined to be overshadowed in pyrotechnic intensity, the Supreme Court’s ruling one day earlier in the case of King v. Burwell may have long-range consequences just as lasting as any of the aforementioned by quashing a technical and pedantic challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare Cheats Death Again” was the headline of an emailed lament to his constituents this week from state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, who has been in the vanguard of the legislative effort to forestall the ACA in this state, including Insure Tennessee, the Medicaid-expansion proposal by Governor Bill Haslam to channel billions of dollars into the state for the relief of Tennessee’s financially beleaguered hospitals.

Kelsey’s text, wherein he vowed to fight on legislatively, conceded it would do no good “to continue to file lawsuits” against the ACA. Kelsey and other opponents of the ACA such as Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, may delay the inevitable, but Obamacare would seem to be here to stay.

And that’s yet another of the several revolutions that are under way as of July 4, 2015.

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Fly on the Wall 1370

Best Outrage Ever
A strange thing happened last week. Tennessee’s artsy-fartsy set and its tax-hating tea party set wound up, more or less, on the same side of an issue. You see, Tennessee has spent $46,000 for a new state logo. Now, when it comes to brand development, that’s really not much money to spend on a good logo. Then again, there’s nothing good about this.

The outrage was instant, and many fine things came about in the ensuing fracas. The Tennessee logo has its own parody Twitter account @TnLogo, of course.

But the very best thing to result from the logo outrage has to be Senator Brian Kelsey’s mirror selfie, which he took in support of a movement to preserve the state’s current logo. #Kelfie.