Tag: Bryan Carson

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Democrats to Revive

Mary Mancini of Nashville, who in late January won reelection as Tennessee Democratic Party chair at a meeting of the state party’s executive committee, has, as one of her first priorities, launched an effort to recreate the defunct Shelby County Democratic Party.

Mancini has contacted 13 local Democrats and asked them to serve as an ad hoc committee for the purpose of reforming the Shelby County party. Members of this core group will next agree amongst themselves on a date for an organizational meeting, either late this month or sometime in March.

A series of subsequent public meetings will then be scheduled to allow input from prospective new Democratic Party members, and out of those subsequent meetings a new party machinery will be formed.

When the process is completed at some point down the line, presumably in the spring or early summer, the Shelby County Democratic Party, complete with new officers to be elected during the course of those several public meetings, will be a reality again for the first time since August, when Mancini, backed by the state party committee, formally decertified the local party.

That dramatic act of decertification occurred after a lengthy period of local party dissension (“many years of dysfunction” was Mancini’s phrase) and, in particular, during the course of a pitched battle between Shelby County party members over the issue of what to do about party funds allegedly unaccounted for during the tenure of former local chairman Bryan Carson.

At issue also were several fines incurred by the Shelby County party, both during and after the flap over Carson, for incomplete and late financial disclosures to the state Election Registry.

Some of the local Democrats named by Mancini to the ad hoc committee that will attempt to recreate the Shelby County party are David Cocke, Dave Cambron, George Monger, Van Turner, Jeannie Johnson, Jolie-Grace Wareham, Corey Strong, and Deborah Reed.

The local reorganization effort occurs at a time of numerous local demonstrations of resistance to the national administration headed by Republican Donald Trump and calls for a local party organization to function as an opposition force.

• Nowhere was that spirit of resistance more evident than during a weekend “town meeting” held at East High School by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who, coincidentally, has just been named to the House Ethics Committee as one of five Democratic members by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who made the announcement on Tuesday.

Over the course of a grueling three hours on Saturday, Cohen, assisted by Memphis lawyer Brian Faughnan from the Tennessee chapter of the ACLU and Chris Coleman from the Tennessee Justice Center, responded to questions from an audience of nearly 1,000 people.

The questions, on every political subject under the sun, mostly involved attendees’ negative responses to actions taken by the Trump administration and featured numerous concerns that Democrats, even out of power, might be able to mount an effective opposition.

Typical was one woman’s plea: “We are not fighting back! We need a grass roots growth like the Tea Party. We need a Democratic tea party now!”

Despite the size of the crowd (which necessitated a substantial police security force, just in case) and abundant expressions of anger, there was little internal dissent. Faughnan offered assurances that the ACLU was on the case in resisting both the Trump travel ban nationally and pending legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly to limit free expression. Similarly, Coleman provided details of available government services and detailed strategies for defending those services against Republican efforts to abolish or truncate them.

Cohen himself was indefatigable in dealing with specific audience concerns, dealing out wisecracks and dollops of advice and assuring the attendees, mostly Democrats or party sympathizers: “We are going to win in the future!”

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Politics Politics Feature

RIP for the Shelby County Democratic Party

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For what it’s worth — and that is a very open question — the Shelby County Democratic Party has ceased to exist, having been formally decertified last Friday by state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini of Nashville. 

Mancini’s letter of decertification, dispatched to the latest person to chair the SCDP, Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant Michael Pope, cited as the basis for her action “Article III Section 2(f) and Article VII Section 1(a)(3) of the Tennessee Democratic Party Bylaws,” which, she said, made it “the responsibility of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee to establish ‘the procedures and rules for organizing and functioning of County Democratic Executive Committees and maintaining close relationships with such committees’ and to develop and monitor a minimum set of requirements that must be observed by a state sanctioned certified County Democratic Party.”

That description left unaddressed two important components of the matter: 1) whether and to what extent the state committee took part in her decision; and 2) specific reasons for her action.

Those are arguably related issues, in that one of the known factors in forcing Mancini’s hand, and likely the precipitating one, has been the Shelby County party’s months-long impasse over what to do about the case of former local party chair Bryan Carson, who resigned last year after an audit turned up evidence of unexplained shortages in the party treasury.

Ever since, through the brief tenure of one successor to Carson as chair, Randa Spears, who also resigned, pleading a need to give full attention to her administrative job at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and into the election of Pope as her successor, the local party organization has been riven into two factions. 

One faction was willing to accept a compromise proposal, letting Carson effect partial repayment of the unaccounted-for funds at the level of $6,000, through monthly installment payments of $100. The other, contending that a second audit showed Carson’s liability to be at $25,000 or higher, sought prosecution of some sort and prevailed in a vote of the committee at its June meeting.

Nothing came of that vote, however. Meanwhile Mancini, expressing displeasure that the imbroglio was getting in the way of the party’s ability to focus on electing the party’s candidates this year, prevailed upon Pope to execute an agreement with Carson on behalf of the $6,000 compromise.

That led to a vote at the SCDP committee’s July meeting at which a tie vote failed to ratify the agreement, and to a vote at the committee’s August meeting, two weeks ago, renouncing Carson’s bona fides as a Democrat.

Carson continues to be a member of the state Democratic executive committee, however, a fact that his critics, and Mancini’s as well, find questionable under the circumstances.

In any case, Mancini could with some justice cite as additional reasons for her decertification what she termed (in something of an understatement) the SCDP’s “many years of dysfunction,” typified by nonstop personal feuds, many of them involving self-appointed party gadfly Del Gill, and the fact that, in both Carson’s tenure and Spears’, the SCDP failed to meet deadlines for financial disclosures to the state Election Registry, thereby incurring fines rivaling in size the amounts alleged to have gone missing under Carson.

In the meantime, Alvin Crook, president of the Shelby County Young Democrats, and London Lamar, president of the state YD organization, held a press conference on Monday, at which the YD officers promised, in Lamar’s words, to continue to “represent the views of the Democratic Party,” as the only remaining “chartered Democratic organization in this county.”

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Settle the Carson Matter!” …

Mr. Kustoff, if you can singlehandedly end Obamacare, stop illegal immigration, and destroy radical Islamists, there’s no reason to wait until Election Day. Please, sir, put on your cape, and fix all our problems immediately. Having done so, you will no doubt win by acclamation. 

Boris

Seeing the party’s inability to audit its own books, we are left to ponder a couple of possible reasons: 1. The party is incapable of performing an audit due to an utter lack of accountability for the funds, not just from the former chairman, but everyone involved (i.e., no one submitted receipts even for legitimate expenses), or 2. The party is unwilling to perform an audit due to general penny-ante corruption, not just of the former chairman, but throughout the organization.

And the actions of the state party chairman, rather than being a harsh reprimand, seem more like the actions of someone desperate to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Jeff

It’s foxes guarding the hen house. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m not optimistic that Bryan Carson will satisfy the entire $6,000 debt.

Regarding David Kustoff’s campaign ads: I’ve noticed that they don’t display any of the arrogance, condescension, and general snarkiness that he exhibits on shows like Informed Sources. Maybe he has turned over a new leaf.

Okay. That was pretty sarcastic.

Jenna

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Shelby County Democratic Party Fracas for Dummies

CREDIT: JB

If it’s July, the Shelby County Democratic Party must be live and well and getting ready for next month’s primary voting, right? 
JB

Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Michael Pope (left) with Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron at a party fundraiser on Thursday

Well, not necessarily. Not for the first time, there seem to be two local Democratic Party organizations in Shelby County, or at least two wholly disparate factions — one loyal to the current chairman, Sheriff’s Department Lt Michael Pope and to state party chair Marty Mancini; and another, possibly constituting a majority, up in arms against Pope and Mancini over the issue of a legal settlement involving former local party chairman Bryan Carson.

Carson, the son of longtime state party secretary Gale Jones Carson, was forced by the local party executive committee to resign his chairmanship in February 2015 after the Shelby County party had missed a state Election Registry filing-disclosure deadline and after an informal committee audit determined that party funds amounting to as much as $10,000 could not be accounted for, then or later. The party then proposed a settlement whereby Carson might repay the local party a lesser sum of $6,000 in installments of $100 a month. The offer was rejected in a letter by Carson’s attorney, Robert Spence, but may have been agreed to in some form later on, a matter key to the current disagreement.

[NOTE: It now appears that a letter made available to the Flyer in which Spence is seen to be explicitly rejecting a proposal may actually have been in response to a later proposal from a committee source demanding a much larger repayment amount from Bryan Carson of $26,336.00, with a $5,257.20 down payment and a monthly note of $585.24. This would be a reference to a matter referred to in the next paragraph.]

Meanwhile, the party missed another financial-disclosure deadline early this year, and, in April, Carson’s elected successor as party chair, Randa Spears, and the party vice chair, Deidre Malone, resigned their positions, pleading a need to focus more on their livelihoods. One known catalyst, however, was the still pending Carson affair, in which the two departing officers had supported the $6000 payoff. Meanwhile, an ad hoc party committee conducted a second audit, maintaining that, by means of a second, unauthorized bank account, Carson had managed to misappropriate another $15,000-plus. Adding that sum to the original raw number of $10,000 nudged the amount of unaccounted-for funds over the $25,000 mark, and a majority of the executive committee voted in early June to seek Carson’s prosecution for embezzlement.

Meanwhile, Pope, who, ironically, was elected the new chairman in the same meeting as the vote to prosecute, was in contact with state party chair Mancini, who, along with Pope and a minority faction of the local party, favored getting past the Bryan matter so as to move on to electoral matters in this election year. Late last week, Mancini, regarding the Carson affair as “already settled,” wrote a letter to Shelby County executive committee members, claiming that state party bylaws gave her “supervisory and organizational” authority over local party matters and giving the local party a de facto ultimatum of July 1 to endorse the $6,000 repayment proposal or risk losing the local party charter. (Interestingly, some local party members, willing and anxious to start again from scratch, have actually called for a voluntary surrender of the charter!)

There are numerous other complications, charges, and counter-charges, but the bottom line is that Pope has signed a statement authorizing the settlement, and Mancini has accepted it. What seems to have been a local party majority petitioned Pope for an emergency called meeting by the July 1 deadline to dispute the settlement, alleging that it had not been authorized by the committee. Citing party bylaws requiring what he said was a 15-day notice for a special called meeting, Pope rejected the idea of having one.

The committee will hold its next regular meeting on Juty 7, at which, it seems clear, the whole confusing affair will be the subject of a knock-down, drag-out. For the moment, everything is uncertain, including the legal status of the alleged settlement with Carson, conflicting claims over Mancini’s authority, and the question of who it is that actually runs — or will run — the Shelby County Democratic Party, which, as Mancini noted in her ultimatum letter of June 24, has experienced “many years of dysfunction.”

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Party Head to Local Dems: Settle the Carson Matter!

Mary Mancini

There are, as it turns out, more guaranteed circumstances than the two most often noted: death and taxes. Right up there with those two, in terms of inevitability, is the fact of discord in state and local Democratic Party ranks.

The latest instance of such is contained in a letter dispatched to members of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee from state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini. The letter deals with the long-festering case of former local party chairman Bryan Carson, who was forced to resign by the county committee in February of 2015.

The Mancini letter, in essence, mandates the terms of a resolution of the matter by the Shelby County party and provides a short deadline for doing so.

The executive committee’s action in early 2015 came after the county party had been fined by the state Election Registry for its failure to comply with financial reporting deadlines and after Carson had been unable to account for the disposition several thousand dollars in party funds. At issue also was the fact that the chairman had apparently switched bank accounts for the party funds without express authorization by the executive committee and had made several withdrawals from ATM machines without providing receipts.

The amount of the financial discrepancy has never been determined with exact accuracy, but a preliminary audit performed by committee members at the time of Carson’s resignation estimated the unaccounted-for amount to be at least $6,000. Another ad hoc investigating group on the committee has since arrived at a higher estimate for the missing funds, in the vicinity of $25,000, but there has never been absolute agreement on the committee on the validity of either sum.

Through his attorney, Robert Spence, Carson admitted no wrongdoing but offered to settle the dispute by compensating the local party for the $6,000 sum at the rate of $100 a month. There is disagreement as to whether the full committee was ever apprised of the offer, which in any case ceased to be active.

Compounding the confusion was the fact that Carson’s elected successor as chairman, Randa Spears, as well as the local party’s first vice chair, Deidre Malone, had both abruptly resigned their positions in April, each giving the press of other obligations as the reason for their departure. The Spears-led party had meanwhile missed another financial reporting deadline for this year and had been assessed a fresh $10,000 fine by the Election Registry.

At its regularly scheduled monthly meeting on Thursday, June 2, the executive committee elected a new chairman, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope, and acted on a motion by defeated chairmanship candidate Del Gill to prosecute Carson for embezzling the larger estimated sum. That motion passed, fairly handily, but there has been no formal action on the matter by the committee since.

All of that formed the background for the Mancini letter, dated Friday, June 24, to the Shelby County executive committee, care of chairman Pope.

Mancini’s letter begins with a citation of party bylaws and state codes that, she says, assign her “both a supervisory and organizational role over each of the county executive committees that operate throughout the state.” The letter follows with a cursory and none too indulgent recounting of the Shelby County’s ongoing problems (“many years of dysfunction,” as she puts it).

Mancini then comes to the nut of the matter, prescribing a settlement in accord with the dormant offer made to the party by Carson through his attorney:

“With a looming election that is shaping up to be of monumental importance for our state and our country, and for the health of your organization and executive committee, it is my responsibility to inform you that you must agree to the arrangement that Mr. Carson pay the amount of $6000 at $ 100 per month for 5 years and be released from any additional claims and that Chairman Pope must sign all the necessary paperwork to honor that agreement or you will no longer be in compliance with your charter issued by the Tennessee Democratic Party.”

Ironically, perhaps, Mancini had in recent months been sounded out by disgruntled party members wondering if voluntary surrender of the local party’s charter might be a feasible option. She had always answered no to such inquiries.

The deadline for “signing the necessary paperwork and forwarding it to Mr. Carson’s attorney is Friday, July 1, 2016,” Mancini concludes.

Some party members are questioning Mancini’s authority to mandate an or-else solution of this sort, while others are ready to acknowledge that she has the right. In any case, there is no pending meeting of the executive committee until the regularly scheduled one of Thursday, July 7 and thus no opportunity for a committee vote before Mancini’s deadline.

Chairman Pope, however, has indicated he is prepared to accept Mancini’s mandate, but his authority to do so without a committee authorization is questionable. To say the least, confusion persists.

• Dynamic duo: During his first several congressional terms after being elected in 2006, 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen cemented an alliance with venerable Detroit congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan), who then served as House Judiciary Committee chairman and regarded the Memphis liberal, a committee member, as something of a protégé and journeyed to Memphis on Cohen’s behalf.

When the Republicans captured control of the House after the election of 2010, the Conyers-Cohen tandem was not heard from with the same intensity, but it still existed. This week, after the landmark Supreme Court decision striking down the severe restrictions on abortion clinics imposed by a Texas state law, Conyers and Cohen reasserted themselves as a duo.

In a joint press release, Conyers, in his capacity as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and Cohen, as ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on the Costitutional and Civil Justice, and Cohen, hailed the Court’s decision as a reaffirmation of “the fundamental cnstitgutional right of women to make their own decisdions about their health, their bodies, their families, and their lives.”

Said the two congressmen: “The Court correctly saw the Texas law for what it was, which was an attempt to severely restrict abortion rights and not one to protect women’s health” and that the Texas law “placed such substantial obstacles to a woman’s choice to have an abortion that its provisions were an “undue burden” on women’s constitutional right to choose….”

The Conyers-Cohen press release, one of several recently released by Cohen’s office, highlighted one of the incumbent congressman’s built-in advantages in generating media. Cohen has three opponents in the 2016 Democratic primary — Shelby County Commissioner Justin Ford, Larry Crim, and M. LaTroy Williams. Republican Wayne Alberson and independent Paul Cook will be on the November ballot.

• More fallout: The Court’s decision on the invalidated Texas statute, incidentally, will almost surely have repercussions in Tennessee, where the General Assembly in recent years had enacted laws with provisions almost identical to those in the Texas law, which basically required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and imposed rigid standards on abortion clinics resembling those for hospitals performing outpatient surgery.

Laws passed by the Tennessee legislature in 2012 and 2014 had made similar specifications, which have been challenged in the U.S. District Court in Nashville.

• Promises, promises: The fact that a freshman seat In the U.S. House of Representatives — to be one of 435 — is the equivalent of landing an entry-level job in the federal government, the continuation of which is entirely contingent on the good will (or passing whims) of voters back home, is often lost sight of in the heat of campaigning. Candidates want to suggest that they can, all by themselves, shift national policy, and who can blame them?

Along this line, it will be hard for any of his competitors to beat two claims made by 8th District Republican congressional candidate David Kustoff in a TV commercial that just hit the airwaves over the weekend. The ad proclaims, of course, that Kustoff, the former U.S. Attorney for Western Tennessee, has impeccable credentials as a conservative and will, for example, oppose Obamacare, but it makes two additional claims that are unprecedented in their magnitude.

In the checklist of promises with which the commercial concludes, one learns that Kustoff will (drumroll) “end illegal immigration” and (thunder and lightning) “destroy radical Islamic terrorism.” Not to vote to do these things, mind you, but — well, just to do them.
Er…wow! •

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Del Gill Wins One (No, Not the Chairmanship)

CREDIT: JB

After what threatened to be an interminable early segment, in which a dozen or so procedural motions from self-appointed Democratic Party scold Del Gill were introduced, duly hashed out, and rejected, the Shelby County Democratic Party got down to business at its regular June meeting Thursday night at the recently refurbished IBEW meeting hall and elected a new chairman. Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope.

Pope, a former party vice chair who had been serving as acting chairman after the resignation two months ago of then chair Randa Spears, was handily elected to lead the party by a
JB

New SCDP chairman Michael Pope

 margin of 17 to 4 over executive committee member Gill, whose chairmanship bid went the way of all his previous motions and who would lose a subsequent vote for vice chair as well.

In his brief remarks to the party’s executive committee before its members took their vote, Pope had appealed for party unity and an end to internal strife, but the moment of relative concord achieved by his victory dissolved somewhat in the aftermath. That was when Gill offered a new motion calling for the committee to go on record as favoring the prosecution of former chairman Bryan Carson for the alleged embezzlement of upwards of $25,000 from party coffers.

Carson had been forced to resign his chairmanship in February 2015 after an ad hoc internal audit of the party’s books showed an unresolved deficit of several thousand dollars that the chairman was not able to explain. He was also under fire for failing to arrange timely financial reports to the state Registry of Election Finance.

In subsequent months, during the chairmanship of Spears, Carson’s elected successor, the matter of unaccounted-for funds continued to be an unresolved point of contention on the party executive committee. There ensued negotiations of various kinds, both public and private, in an effort to achieve a solution acceptable both to Carson and to all factions of the committee.

At one point, a proposal to allow Carson to repay a reduced sum of $6,000 in modest monthly installments, coupled with a contention of no intentional misconduct, was submitted by Cardon through his attorney, Robert Spence. There is disagreement as to whether the full committee was apprised of the offer, which in any case ceased to be active.

Meanwhile, a new ad hoc committee appointed by then chairman Spears had performed a second audit, showing the funds unaccounted for to be in excess of 25,000 and suggesting a variety of potential responses from the committee.

That was the background of things when, in the wake of the chairmanship vote Thursday night, Gill offered his motion calling for Carson to be prosecuted. There was debate back and forth, with various other members calling for delays or for more restrained actions, but, when vote time came, 14 committee members stood up for the motion to prosecute, including several who rarely or never vote on Gill’s side of an issue. That was enough to make a clear majority.

The gravity of the decision was undercut briefly by a semi-comic moment when Gill appeared about to protest something or other regarding the outcome, as he has done numerous times over the years after losing a vote and had done so repeatedly on Thursday night. Amid various catcalls to Gill of “Shut up!” or “You won,” committee member Rick Maynard uttered the line of the night, “Take yes for an answer!”

It remains to be seen whether and how the committee will follow through on the implications of Thursday night’s vote to prosecute, but it had finally taken a decisive action of sorts and perhaps can shortly shift to what new chairman Pope proposed as the party’s main duty of the year — to elect Democrats in the various election races of 2016.

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Politics Politics Feature

Outliers and Insiders

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The history of American politics demonstrates that positions that seem unconventional, even outrageous, when first broached have a way of becoming the norm with the passage of time — and sometimes not much time at all.

Think “Defense of Marriage Act,” now blink your eyes and think “Marriage Equality Act.” Even simpler: Think “Bruce,” don’t waste time with blinking and now think “Caitlyn.”

Though there was a time when the political left was responsible for most innovations (think 1960s, sit-ins, or even Social Security), the initiative where change is concerned seems to have shifted over to the right. Or at least to some mutating middle.

On the urban scene — and not just in problem-plagued Memphis city government — the idea of de-annexation may be finding its time. A bill to that effect got a trial run in the General Assembly last year, and it’s sure to take another bow in 2016.

Now you find the phenomenon of three city council candidates running as a ticket on that idea — which seemingly originated with suburban conservatives, but coupling it with such street-populist and Mempho-centric ideas as saving the Mid-South Coliseum and restoring pension and benefit levels for city police and firefighters.

The three are Jim Tomasik, a veteran of Libertarian Party politics; Lynn Moss, who admits to being Republican; and Robin Spielberger, whose politics are more amorphous. The trio of council candidates (Moss, Super-District 9, Position 2; Tomasik, District 2; and Spielberger, Super-District 9, Position 1) held an open-air meet-and-greet/fund-raiser Saturday at Lost Pizza Company on Poplar (site of the old Ronnie Grisanti’s Restaurant).

Their slogan (on a sign alongside a downtown-skyline graphic) indicates the ambivalent appeal of their position. “Right for Memphis/Cordova,” it says, and the fact is, sentiment for de-annexation seems to have just such a divided appeal. Recently annexed suburbanites (Moss and Tomasik are Cordovans) want independence (though they might settle for autonomy); meanwhile, a growing number of Memphians, like Spielberger, are concerned about the high costs of providing services to the sprawling outer areas annexed in recent years.

Maybe these three are wasting their time (competing with well-financed traditional candidates is going to be a problem), and maybe they are pathfinders, and maybe they’ll even run competitive races. All that remains to be seen, and how it works out may tell us something about our future.

• The developing matchup in council District 5 involves more conventional candidates and enough conservatives and liberals to allow for intramural contests within the larger race itself.

Of the nine potential candidates who have so far drawn petitions, five have drawn the most attention, and, though the nonpartisan nature of city elections allows for a certain flow across party preference and ideological lines, those five divide into two groups, basically.

Dan Springer, a still-youthful veteran of government service and Republican politics, and Worth Morgan, an even more youthful insurance executive with family ties to elite Memphis business circles, are regarded as battling it out for the loyalty of conventional conservatives. (Morgan’s first-quarter financial disclosure showed upwards of $150,000 on hand; my friend Kyle Veazey of the Commercial Appeal may not like the term, but that’s a war chest.)

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, Mary Wilder, Charles “Chooch” Pickard, and John Marek, will be competing for the support of those voters who see themselves as progressives (a designation that has largely replaced “liberal” as a self-signifier).

All three have overlapping interests and platforms, with Wilder noted for neighborhood advocacy, Pickard for preservationist activity, and Marek for campaign management. Wilder and Pickard have been in the field for some time, while Marek, a longtime advocate of police reform and loosening of restrictions on marijuana, is poised to begin a serious effort.

Expectations are that a runoff is inevitable, with no candidate able to get an absolute majority as of October 8th. It seems almost certain that either Springer or Morgan will make the runoff, to vie against whoever predominates among the progressive trio. But it is not impossible that the two perceived conservatives, given the depth of their anticipated resources, will end up opposing each other.

It is less likely that the runoff will be drawn exclusively from the Wilder-Pickard-Marek aggregation, but that is possible.

The Rev. Kenneth Whalum drew a petition for a District 5 race, along with petitions for Super-District 9, Position 2, and mayor, but it’s now being taken for granted that he will end up in the mayoral field.

Colonel Gene Billingsley, Jimmie Franklin, and Jennifer James Williams, all of whom have drawn petitions for District 5 (Franklin has actually filed), have to be regarded as outliers, on the basis of the name-identification factor alone.

• At its meeting of June 3rd in Nashville, the Tennessee Ethics Commission met to consider several new penalties for alleged campaign-finance offenders and to reconsider several already assessed. One of the latter was a $1,000 fine imposed on then Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Bryan Carson last September.

As the commission recapped the situation last week: “Mr. Carson was assessed $1,000 at the September 17, 2014, meeting for failure to file the Statement of Interests. Mr. Carson has subsequently filed and appeared before the commission to explain the tardiness of his filing. After the discussion, Mr. [Jim] Stranch made the motion to reconsider and to waive the penalty as it was Mr. Carson’s first time filing. Mr. [Greg] Hardeman seconded and the motion passed 5-0.”

Carson — who ran afoul of his executive committee and the state Election Registry for his accounting procedures a few months ago and subsequently resigned his chairmanship — offered this explanation: “A few months ago, I learned that each candidate running for public must file a Statement of Interest and submit it to the Tennessee Ethics Commission. I ran for the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee last August 2014 and did not know that I needed to complete a Statement of Interest which was due in September 2014. 

“All candidates were required to complete another statement in January 2015, of which I completed and filed on time. Running to serve on the TNDP was my first time running for public office, therefore, that weighed heavily on the final decision of the Tennessee Ethics Commission.”

• Fresh from serving as host for a “Memphis for Hillary” rally held on Saturday in a Southeast Memphis storefront owned by her family, state Representative Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) is in Canada this week, guest of the Embassy of Canada, which selected her and seven other legislators from the United States for a week-long “Rising State Leaders Program.”

The program began in 2006 with the goal of facilitating understanding between the two neighbor countries on business, trade, and cultural matters. The 2015 program, focusing on eastern Canada, will take legislators to Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. It began on Sunday and will continue through Saturday.

Following the death of longtime legislative eminence Lois DeBerry in 2013, Akbari won a special election to represent DeBerry’s District 91 House seat in the Tennessee General Assembly. She was easily reelected to full term last year.

A member of the House Criminal Justice Committee and Subcommittee, Akbari also serves on the House Education Instruction and Program Committee, where she closely monitors the effect on Memphis public schools of various state programs. She has sponsored several pieces of legislation designed to safeguard the structure of Memphis schools during a period of rapidly imposed innovations at the state level.

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Editorial Opinion

Get It Together

Four aspirants to succeed local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, who resigned under pressure recently (though his term was about to expire anyhow), made their cases Saturday in a forum at the IBEW Union Hall. They were

Reginald Milton, Jackie Jackson, Randa Spears, and Del Gill.

Party caucuses will be held on March 14th, a party convention to name a new executive committee and a new chairman on March 28th.

Meanwhile, the Shelby County Republicans caucused at Bartlett Municipal Center on Monday night of this week, selecting delegates for their own convention at the Bartlett location on March 29th. There are two declared candidates for chair to succeed the outgoing Justin Joy: Arnold Weiner and Mary Wagner.

All the names mentioned here, be they sinners or saints, are committed activists, with personal histories that indicate that they possess the energy to acquit themselves well in the positions they are seeking. “Zeal” might even be a better descriptor in some cases. There’s the rub. Particularly if partisanship per se commands the electoral environment, the nature of our political debates is often nothing less than poisonous.

Strong feelings have always been a feature of political life in Shelby County, but only since the mid-1990s, when first the Republicans and later the Democrats adopted partisan primaries as a means of selecting preferred candidates for local office, have local political contests become as divisive as they are today, at least at the level of countywide elections. Until the advent of local partisan primaries, it was the rule, not the exception, for various components of the body politic to form coalitions behind this or that candidate. Blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans, atheists, Christians, and Jews, plus whatever other categories come to mind — the more different sectors of the community were accounted for in a political campaign, the greater the likelihood for that campaign to succeed.

These days, that situation is reversed. One of the questions asked of the Democratic chairmanship aspirants at Saturday’s forum was how each of them would deal with the flight of white former-Democrats into the Republican Party. One of the candidates rejected the question as irrelevant. He was in error, as would have been demonstrated by a look at Monday night’s GOP caucus crowd — almost entirely white, though there is presumably some variance in their political complexion. That configuration was an inverse mirror image to Saturday’s predominantly African-American Democrat crowd.

This is not a suggestion that either of the county’s parties avows or practices racism, as such. The increasing racial polarization of the local parties is largely a result of the primary process — which has magnified ethnic and social differences that have always existed and assigned them to opposite ends of the spectrum.

Contrast this troublesome phenomenon with the city elections — including the one to be held this fall — where the absence of party affiliation will, as it always has, encourage some serious coalition-building across party and ethnic lines.

In the long run, we’d like to see local partisan primaries done away with as detriments to the political process. In the short run, we would merely express a wish that whichever of the chairmanship candidates mentioned above actually ends up at the controls of our two major parties understand that we all are — or should be — a single community.

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Politics Politics Feature

Spring Training

It’s still a little less than two months — April 17th, to be exact — before candidates for city offices can even pull a qualifying petition from the Election Commission. And it’s nearly five months after that until the November 3rd election itself — seven month total.

For emphasis, let’s put that last figure in Arabic numerals: 7 months before Memphis voters can finish signaling their intentions on city offices — encompassing the lengthy span from now, when major league baseball teams are beginning spring training, to a date when the World Series is likely to still be happening.

And yet the roster is rapidly filling up for the most important race on this year’s election calendar — that for Memphis mayor. With the formal announcement of candidacy on Monday of this week by Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, the number of well-known names still expected to be on the mayoral ballot has shrunk to two — City Councilman Harold Collins, who appointed an exploratory committee last fall and former Memphis School Board member and New Olivet Baptist church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

[IMAGE-1]Whalum is forthright about his own plans, which to a great extent are based on an understanding with Williams, whose views on city matters overlap with his own. It boils down to this: “If Mike follows through and picks up a petition when the time comes and files, I won’t run,” says Whalum. “If he doesn’t, it’s 100-percent certain that I will.”

Already declared, besides Williams, are incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland, former County Commission Chairman James Harvey, current commission Chairman Justin Ford, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

And, while Ford, who has commission business to attend to, has not yet finished stockpiling his artillery, and Harvey has not yet begun to fight, the others are already doing battle. Strickland is speaking lots and firing away at Wharton on an almost daily basis via Facebook and Twitter; Williams and his supporters are active on the same social media; and the mayor is playing his bully pulpit for all it’s worth, materializing in numerous speech appearances and press conference formats that allow him to do double duty as city official and candidate for reelection.

And Golden, who has yet to demonstrate what his political base is, is turning up at public events, including those held by other candidates, and for well over a year has been conspicuous by driving around town in a car that is tricked-out with signs advertising his candidacy.

The mayoral-campaign activity so far is a form of spring training, and, like its baseball equivalent, it is a way of working the kinks out, finding a groove, and getting the jump on the competition. For that reason, Collins and Whalum won’t be able to procrastinate much longer on revealing their own intentions, and an announcement from one or both of them may well beat this issue to the printer.

There’s another reason why time is of the essence: money, which is a finite resource, especially here in hard-pressed Memphis, and won’t stretch far enough to cover every candidate’s needs. In a certain sense, it’s a matter of first come, first served, and the most accomplished self-servers so far are Wharton and Strickland. Both of them have been at it for a while — with receipts through January 15th showing a campaign balance for Wharton of $201,088 and for Strickland of $181,595.

The others have some catching up to do.

• As one of the first commenters to the Flyer‘s online coverage of the event said, “A very sad day, indeed, for the Shelby County Democratic Party in more ways than one.”

The event in question was the forced resignation on Saturday of Shelby County Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, well-liked in his own right and the son of the widely admired Gale Jones Carson, a former local party chair herself and the longtime secretary of the state Democratic Party.

In a nutshell, the younger Carson had, on the fateful Saturday, faced a no-holds-barred interrogation into his oversight of party finances by the party’s executive committee — 76 strong, at peak, with roughly 50 on hand for the occasion, which was closed to the press and public. Saturday’s meeting followed two prior closed-door meetings with Carson last week by the party’s smaller 11-member steering committee, the second of which had resulted in a unanimous vote of “no confidence.”

All three meetings had been called out of a sense of crisis that developed from Carson’s repeated failure either to address party members’ concerns about the state of party finances or to deal satisfactorily with ominous promptings for an accounting from the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. The bureau had already levied three $500 fines on the local party for late or incomplete submissions of financial disclosure statements and threatened another of $10,000, along with a showdown meeting in Nashville in March.

There were two immediate issues: The first was a disclosure statement that had been overdue since October 28th. Carson would hurriedly prepare one and submit it, such as it was, to the bureau on Wednesday, February 18th, the same day as his second meeting with the party steering committee and their vote of no confidence.

The other issue was even more troubling. It concerned an ad hoc audit, prepared at the request of the steering committee by Diane Cambron, wife of David Cambron, the local party’s first vice chair, and Dick Klenz, longtime president of the Germantown Democratic Club — both with unimpeachable reputations for fair-mindedness.

The audit showed that, since last September, Carson had made 63 withdrawals from the party’s bank account, in an amount totaling $8,437.89, and could produce no receipts for what he contended had been cash payments on behalf of the party. Even allowing for figures submitted in what Carson called a “self audit” (again, unaccompanied by receipts and made difficult to trace by virtue of the chairman’s having arbitrarily switched the party banking account), there seemed to be an amount of $6,091.16, which the Cambron-Klenz audit referred to as “unsubstantiated.”

Carson maintained in all three meetings with party committees that he had done nothing wrong and that the apparent discrepancies were the result of an overload of activity during the 2014 campaign year, coupled with the fact that he had been compelled, he said, to try to function as his own party treasurer.

That last was another fact that confounded committee members, who had thought that party member Jonathan Lewis was functioning as party treasurer. It turned out during the week’s discussions that Lewis had shied away from the service and had not registered with the state after being given a glimpse by Carson into the actual state of party finances.

In any case, the predominant mood of the party executive committee on Saturday was to reject Carson’s explanations, as well as his expressed wish to maintain at least a titular hold on the office of chairman (while handing over actual control to first Vice Chair David Cambron) through the party’s scheduled March caucus-convention rounds that are scheduled to produce a new executive committee and chairman on March 28th.

Vice Chair Cambron has been named acting chair, and he announced that one of his first acts would be to open a new party banking account this week, so as to provide a revised and reliable financing accounting from the ground up.

Beyond that, there has been no word from anyone speaking for the party to take further action or pursue legal remedies and no apparent appetite for doing so.

Various online commenters on the matter have made a point of noting that the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office has issued a warrant of “theft over $500” against Axl David, former treasurer of the Young Republicans in that Middle Tennessee county, for what Sheriff Robert Arnold called “several discrepancies in the management of Club funds.” But no one has demonstrated any analogy between that situation and the one in Shelby County.

Bryan Carson, meanwhile, apparently still intends to seek the open District 7 City Council seat in this year’s city election. In January, he finished one vote behind Berlin Boyd in a council vote to name an interim District 7 councilman to succeed Lee Harris, who had resigned to assume his new duties as a state Senator.

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Chairman Carson Could Have Fate Settled at Saturday’s Meeting of Democratic Executive Committee

CREDIT: JB

JB

Bryan Carson

Weather permitting, the predicament of local Democratic chairman Bryan Carson may be resolved Saturday afternoon at a special called meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Party executive committee.

Within the last 24 hours, however, the executive committee meeting was declared closed to the media and the general public — apparently at the behest of an 11-member steering committee.

It was this steering committee that unanimously voted a “No Confidence” finding on Carson at a closed meeting held Wednesday night in the offices of a Teamsters Union local.
That meeting was held to discuss complications relating to Carson’s alleged failure to meet deadlines for financial disclosures that had been overdue to a state oversight agency.

On the same day of the meeting, Carson reported that he had submitted to the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance in Nashville a financial disclosure statement that had been due on October 28.

At Saturday’s meeting, to be held at 2:30 at the IBEW headquarters building on Madison, the full 73-member executive committee will be presented the particulars of Wednesday night’s meeting and possibly also the results of a financial audit conducted over the last month by a task force of the steering committee.

The executive committee will presumably have the option of accepting or rejecting the steering committee’s No Confidence vote and could take further disciplinary action, up to and including the termination of Carson’s chairmanship, which is due to expire in any case on March 28.

On that date, the SCDP will participate in its regular biennial convention, at which a new executive committee will be elected and a chairman named for the next two years. Carson has said he will not seek reelection but told the Flyer Wednesday night he intended to serve out his term.

Upon learning that Saturday’s meeting would be a closed one, executive committee member Steve Steffens expressed outrage at what he called “an appalling lack of transparency,” and said, “We’re a public body and should act like one.” Steffens objected further that the executive committee was apparently being asked to make a snap judgment on potentially complex materials that had not been shared with the committee previously.