Tag: Curry Todd

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Politics Politics Feature

Dual Decisions in District 95

Consensus would seem to be an uncertain prospect, as Shelby County commissioners face the task of naming an interim replacement for the District 95 seat in the state House.

Neither the Commission’s seven Democrats nor its six Republicans seem prepared to act as a bloc on the matter of a successor to Mark Lovell, the Eads Republican who was pressured into resigning from the legislature last month after serving 45 days in the position he wrested from former incumbent Curry Todd in the August 2016 Republican primary. 

The departure from the General Assembly of Lovell, the proprietor of the annual Delta Fair and other business enterprises, followed allegations of sexual misconduct involving a staffer at the General Assembly. Lovell has denied any wrongdoing and has said he merely acceded to the urging of unnamed members of the House Republican leadership who, he has said, expressed a wish to sidestep whatever potential taint might result from a new controversy, following one that ended in the expulsion last year of GOP House member Jeremy Durham of Franklin.

And, while the commission may be influenced to some degree by matters of personal character and the likelihood of avoiding scandal in making a choice about an interim successor, the brevity of the term to be served by a replacement dictates that other considerations will loom larger.

Mark Lovell

There is a certain sentiment on the commission that appointing anybody at all in District 95 might be beside the point, inasmuch as whoever might be named would likely serve for a very brief period, perhaps only a week or two before the adjournment of the legislature, which would probably occur in middle or late April.

As Democratic Commissioner Eddie Jones (who favors making an appointment) observes, “Whoever we send up there may end up serving less time than Mark Lovell did.”

The earliest date that a commission appointee could arrive in Nashville to serve would be April 3rd. The current schedule calls for applications for the interim position to be made available between March 21st and March 27th, with applicants to be interviewed by the commission on March 29th and an appointment to be made during the Commission’s regular public meeting of April 3rd.

Complicating that scenario further is the fact that, on the scheduled appointment date of April 3rd, a primary campaign to fill out Lovell’s full term in District 95 may be underway in both political parties. An official writ last week from Governor Bill Haslam declaring the seat open and calling for a special election established a primary date of Thursday, April 27th, with a general election to be held on Thursday, June 15th.

And the deadline for filing candidate petitions is Thursday, March 16th — a date early enough to reveal who, among the applicants for the interim commission appointment, wants to occupy the seat both temporarily and for the duration of a full term.

In the case of interim appointments, the commission favors applicants who express no intention of running in a special election for a given seat, so as not to give any active candidate in the election a head start on others. That factor may not be so important this time around, even though — as indicated — the appointment process and the special election campaign will be overlapping.

As Republican Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett pointed out, several key votes are generally left to be resolved in the final week or two of a legislative session. “We need to appoint somebody to represent the district,” Reaves said, especially since an issue of more than usual interest to commissioners — that of school vouchers — is likely to still be hanging fire at the tail end of the session. “And the District 95 seat has generally been a swing vote on vouchers in previous sessions,” he says.

A similar opinion was put forth by GOP Commissioner Mark Billingsley of Germantown, who notes that the commission recently recorded a unanimous vote opposing vouchers — the awarding of public funds to pay for education in private schools. “Vouchers would ultimately erode our public and municipal school systems,” Billingsley maintains.

Even the few commissioners who are dubious about making such a short-term legislative appointment, like Republican Steve Basar, whose district encompasses much of East Memphis, concedes that there is unanimity on the point of vouchers.  “I’ll go with the will of the body on that, but I’m really not in favor of filling the seat for just a couple of weeks,” he says.

The Democratic members of the commission concur on the importance of the voucher vote, and on the need for a District 95 representative to endorse the rest of the commission’s adopted legislative agenda, which includes support for medical marijuana.

The commission Democrats could be vexed by another matter — whether to assert the fact of their numerical majority to appoint a fellow Democrat or, conversely, to adhere to a tradition of filling vacancies according to the accepted party preference of the district in question.

No one disputes that House District 95, in southeast Shelby County, votes overwhelmingly Republican in any partisan election, but various Democratic activists in Shelby County, like Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club, are campaigning for the party to name its own to the position.

In support of that position, Cambron points out that the White County Commission, with a 7-6 GOP majority,  has just named a Republican, Paul Bailey, to succeed Democratic state Representative Charles Curtiss in a vacated House seat.

Two Democrats have expressed interest in the District 95 seat — Julie Byrd Ashworth and Adrienne Pakis-Gillon. Pakis-Gillon, a veteran activist who has run previously for a state Senate seat, has been contacting commission members in quest of their support for the interim post. An email sent out to fellow Democrats by Cambron suggests that all but three Democrats lean toward Pakis-Gillon, but Democratic commissioners on both sides of Cambron’s count express doubt that any such determination can be made.

Circumstances as of now would seem to favor the appointment of a moderate Republican for the brief end-of-session interim. Reaves put forth a name — that of his former Shelby County School Board colleague, David Pickler.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Seismic Shift in Voting Demographics

A seismic demographic shift in the United States has forced some to consider what actually “makes America great.” This debate has been fully displayed within the Republican Party, referred to — somewhat ironically given the recent rhetoric — as the Party of Lincoln.

Beginning in 2008, a vocal base of the Republican Party — whiter, older, and less formally educated — rebelled against the “otherness” of President Barack H. Obama. They challenged his veracity, religion, and citizenship. In that campaign, Senator John McCain had the decency to push back against the know-nothings in his own party.

Now the same party has nominated for president a man who has exploited this relentless wave of ignorance, once claiming that he sent investigators to Hawaii to uncover the secrets of President Obama’s birth certificate. Such overt racism has infected the party at all levels. Who can forget the revealing 2010 rant of State Representative Curry Todd (R-Collierville) against the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause when he suggested that Latinos would multiply like “rats”? He was reelected two more times by the people of his district.

Though the GOP has been handed over to racists and xenophobes, there are signs that the American public has had enough of hateful speech and fearmongering. Representative Todd’s political implosion and Trump’s tumbling poll numbers may be omens of what’s to come.

Demographics are the harbingers of the inevitable failure of this movement. Latinos number 27.3 million eligible voters, and their participation in November will prove critical in many states. In New Mexico, 40.4 percent of the electorate is Latino; their voice, their history, and their concerns will greatly impact that state’s vote.

To ignore or offend the Latino community in swing states makes little sense. For the past several years, education, jobs/economy, and health care have been the top three issues rated for registered Latino voters. But, immigration will be at the heart of the Latino vote for the foreseeable future because it directly affects nearly every Latino family.

For many Latinos in the United States, Obama will leave behind a nebulous legacy and an opportunity for Republicans. While signing executive orders (DACA, for example) which established a temporary status for young, undocumented immigrants, his administration also pursued deportations at an unprecedented level, earning him the nickname of “Deporter-in-Chief” from some activists.

The Republican response nominated a man whose rhetoric toward the Latino community is unidimensional and built on vilification, and who has plans for deportation and national isolation via construction of a wall.

The vast majority of Americans are rejecting this posturing. They are not fooled by a disingenuous campaign that focuses on a few bad Latino apples and completely dismisses the hardworking, tax-paying, social security-contributing people who are part of the basic fabric of our communities.

America’s greatness does not come from harkening back to a mythical past, but from the sueño Americano — the American Dream — built on dynamism created by constant influxes of new immigrants who are hungry to earn their place, contribute to their communities, and raise their kids. The energy, vitality, and optimism that still influences and guides this nation are not to be found in every nation, but here, it still endures.

Shifting demographics create challenges, opportunities, and, for some, fear. We shouldn’t ignore that. There are serious problems with our immigration system, but hateful speech and reactionary policies can never lead to a better way. Only a reasonable, bipartisan, comprehensive immigration package set by Congress, that offers a pathway to citizenship for millions of hardworking people who have been contributing to our nation for decades, can address immigration misunderstandings.

America is not the unhinged mob that Trump hopes to lead. Trump’s downward spiral shows us that any person in America who aspires to public office has to live in a world defined by the demographic data upon which we’re anchored.

Trying to alter that data, through mass deportation, is not the America to which we aspire. We hope that Todd and Trump represent the last gasp of a movement that’s completely contrary to that which makes this nation unique and great.

Bryce W. Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board member at Latino Memphis; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1433

Goodbye, Mr. Todd

Fly on the Wall is in mourning. Last week, we said goodbye to WMC reporter Jason Miles, who’ll soon be chest-bumping cops and crawling under things in Houston. This week, we’re losing one of Tennessee’s most reliably clownish legislators, State Rep. Curry Todd. The man from District 95 (depending on who you ask) was one of those gifts who kept on giving right up to the very end when he was apprehended by police and locked up for removing his opponent’s yard signs.

Fly on the Wall would like to look back on some of Todd’s greatest hits — like that time when he went all Time Lord and created legislation to eliminate Daylight Saving’s Time. Or did he want to make it permanent? It wasn’t clear exactly, but one way or another, Curry Todd was determined to give Tennesseans an extra hour to get ready for work in the morning and an extra hour to unwind in the evening.

Kent Williams, an independent from Elizabethton asked if he could tweak the bill and make Tennessee more like Alaska: “Six months of daylight and six months of darkness?” Fly on the Wall suggested that Todd, who sponsored Tennessee’s controversial “guns in bars bill” and had previously been arrested for driving under the influence with a loaded pistol, might be laying the groundwork for a three-hour happy hour.  

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Editorial Opinion

De-Annexation Pollyannas

We know that politicians, even wise and knowledgeable ones, whose local constituencies lie primarily outside the current boundaries of the city of Memphis, may find it difficult to fully tell it like it is in the case of the de-annexation bill under consideration in the Tennessee General Assembly.

That fact might explain why Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, whose views on city/county affairs are normally quite balanced, professes not to be unduly concerned about a bill which, on the face of things, threatens to dismember Memphis, depriving it of geographic areas that are prime sources of sustaining revenue.

At this moment, Luttrell necessarily has to be looking to that part of his bailiwick — suburban east Shelby County — that will supply the lion’s share of the votes in the pending election for the 8th District congressional seat which Luttrell is seeking in this year’s election. Fair enough. Sentiment in that area seems, on the basis of attitudes taken by its representatives in the legislature, to be either favorable toward the bill or indifferent to its consequences. However, if the final version of the bill, in its sanction of easy dissolutions, turns out to apply to all incorporated municipalities statewide, including all of those in Shelby County, they may have another think coming.

In any case, we note by contrast to Luttrell’s hands-off approach the response of Sheriff Bill Oldham, who has viewed with concern and simple common sense the increased burdens, financial and otherwise, that will accrue to his department if it becomes wholly responsible for law enforcement in areas that might separate from Memphis.

Unfortunately, the attitude of the Shelby County’s aforementioned suburban legislators seems characterized either by an attitude of vengefulness toward Memphis, as in the case of state Representative Curry Todd, or an affected Pollyanna-ism in the case of state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, both of Collierville. We find disingenuous Norris’ protestation that the bill doesn’t de-annex anybody but merely gives annexed populations the right to vote on their status. That’s especially misleading, given Norris’ public rebuke of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland for laying out the consequences to Memphis of the bill, at least as originally written — notably the potential financial losses to an already cash-strapped city of from $27 million to $78 million.

Norris blithely upbraided Strickland for stressing the bill’s downside (one that the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, other Tennessee mayors, and major business leaders like AutoZone founder Pitt Hyde and ranking officials of First Tennessee Bank have testified is realistic). According to Norris, Strickland should be emphasizing Memphis’ advantages to residents rather than what he calls “the parade of horribles” itemized by the Memphis mayor.

Norris seems to believe that the proponents of de-annexation are seeking to physically remove their areas miles away from Memphis, distant from the job opportunities and attractions and developed infrastructure that the city offers. The fact is, all these amenities would still be available to the de-annexed populations; the latter would simply cease to help pay for them. They would become exploiters of Memphis rather than partners in maintaining the city. He should know better, and probably does.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

De-Annexation: The Moral of the Story

As this week’s Flyer cover story notes, the city of Memphis — in the judgment of numerous spokespersons for city interests — may have dodged another bullet in the General Assembly this week. This was a bill, the product of

longstanding collaboration between various opponents of urban expansion in Tennessee, that would have crippled the efforts of Memphis to right itself and resolve what was already a difficult financial predicament even before the advent of the bill.

The bill, still not formally dead, is a measure to facilitate de-annexation by residents of incorporated cities. It was proposed by two House members from the Chattanooga suburbs who two years ago had succeeded in establishing the principle of consent on the part of residents about to be annexed. The new bill has, in the lexicon of our time, gone a bridge too far beyond that. It would allow referenda on the part of residential areas annexed since 1998 to de-annex themselves, even if, in the words of Memphis Chamber of Commerce head Phil Trenary, the results would be “swiss cheese” urban maps, with gaping holes marking where formerly contiguous Memphis neighborhoods had existed side by side. 

In the case of Memphis, there would be gaping holes in the city’s financial resources as well. Even those legislators who favored the bill — including suburban Shelby County legislators who helped to get it passed in the House of Representatives last week — acknowledged that it would occasion a $28 million annual loss in property tax and local-option sales tax revenues for the city.

And the bill’s proponents made no pretense of applying an objective standard to all urban areas in Tennessee. It singles out Memphis and four other areas — Knoxville, Chattanooga, Kingsport, and tiny Cornersville — as liable for redress penalties on account of allegedly “egregious” annexations of adjacent territories. That these annexations were all performed in perfect compliance with the letter of Tennessee law was of no matter to the authors of the bill. Nor was the fact that the bill would up-end the long-standing provisions of Public Law 1101, a.k.a. the Urban Growth Act, a compromise arrangement agreed upon in 1998 among representatives of Tennessee’s urban, suburban, and rural constituencies.

The Urban Growth Act was the result of positive and coordinated effort. The current attempt to dismantle it, which the de-annexation bill would achieve, is the consequence of ex parte vengefulness, by way of contrast.

Luckily, as detailed in the cover story, various representatives of Memphis and Shelby County interests mounted a coordinated effort of their own to get the bill sent back to committee this week, and, as of this writing, the chances of positively amending the measure seem good. Only one thing is lacking, a joining in the effort by representatives of Shelby County government per se. And that, we have the right to hope, will be forthcoming. 

After all, it would be county government that would have to shoulder the financial burden of, say, 150 additional Sheriff’s deputies, and as many new vehicles, in order to police the newly de-annexed areas. We’re all in this together, and that’s the moral of the story.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Behind the Bill

CREDIT: JB

NASHVILLE — Maybe it’s because Ron Ramsey, the powerful state Senate Speaker, Lt. Governor, and presumed political careerist, chose Wednesday as his time to announce his decision to exit politics, or maybe it’s just another indication of how Memphis and its perils rate low on the Richter scale of Legislative Plaza these days. Or maybe it’s just a matter of the calendar. JB

Strickland at Shelby delegation lunch

In any case, outside of those folks who, in one sense or another, represent the sphere of Memphis and Shelby County in Nashville, the Great De-Annexation Crisis has generated very little fuss and bother at the General Assembly in Nashville.

This is despite the fact that Memphis is one of only six municipalities in Tennessee that stand to lose from the de-annexation bill that swept through the House of Representatives on Monday night and has convulsed local government — the Memphis part of it anyhow — with its implications.

It was only on behalf of Memphis that several of the Representatives elected by the city — Joe Towns, G.A. Hardaway, Raumesh Akbari and Larry Miller — and two friendly helpers — House Democratic leaders Mike Stewart of Nashville and Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — rose on Monday night to protest HB0779/SB0749, the bill brought by two Chattanooga-area Republicans that would allow residents of areas annexed by their municipalities since 1998 to de-annex.

Other cities charged by the bill’s sponsors with “egregious” and arbitrary annexations are Chattanooga, Knoxville, Kingsport and Cornersville. Cornersille? Yes, the tiny Marshall County municipality of 1100 souls was faulted on Monday night by bill sponsor Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah) for grabbing up nine local farms in an arbitrary annexation.

The only one of 16 or so amendments introduced by opponents of the bill that was accepted by Carter was one to delete Johnson City as an offender. What that east Tennessee city had done was to voluntarily consent to the de-annexation of a community called Suncrest and thereby earn a pardon.

It would seem that Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, for whom this is about the fourth or fifth crisis to hit him unawares during his short term, is agreeable to ceding two of the most recently annexed Memphis neighborhoods — South Cordova and Southwind. He said so to the press after a Wednesday lunch meeting of the Shelby County legislative delegation at Tennessee Tower that he and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had signed on to long before the current matter broke.

Those two de-annexations would only cost the city $5 million, Strickland said, as against the $27 million or so he estimates that de-annexations of every community absorbed by Memphis since 1998 would cost.
JB

…and wth the press afterward

The year 1998 is apparently being used as a demarcation point in the de-annexation bill because that is the year of what was supposed to be a settlement of the crisis caused by the fateful Toy Town bill of 1997. That measure, smoothed through the legislature by the late Senate Speaker John Wilder on behalf of a Fayette County client community, would have allowed communities of the most modest size to incorporate and, before it was finally declared unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court (on a caption irregularity, actually), it had already spurred dozens of would-be incorporation efforts on the borders of Memphis.

The resultant 1998 compromise bill assigned municipalities limited areas as expansion reserves and made the process of urban expansion more difficult. But that has clearly failed to appease the adversaries of urbanism, and one wonders if Strickland’s proffered sacrifice will be honored as a stopping point in a revised Senate version or serve merely to whet the appetite of the de-annexationists.

A dialogue Monday between Strickland and Rep. Curry Todd (R-Collierville), one of the more vocal advocates of de-annexation, was not promising in that regard. Todd insisted that the city, in a conference call held at some unidentified earlier point, had agreed to larger concessions, and Strickland (who would later say he had participated in no such conference call) would respond that it wasn’t so.

Beyond the offer to sign off on Southwind and South Cordova, Strickland also floated the idea of somehow  offsetting fire and police expenses and of adding utility and OPEB costs to the general obligation bonds that the bill would obligate the residents of any de-annexing area to pay out on a pro-rata basis.
JB

Germantown Mayor Palazzolo

Granted, the current situation is to the Toy Towns matter as apples are to oranges, but then Mayor Willie Herenton, for better or for worse, was less flexible on concessions by Memphis, and make of that what you will. (One historical analogy that definitely does hold is that County Mayor Luttrell, much in the manner of County Mayor Jim Rout in the Toy Towns era, professes not to be terribly troubled by developments.)

In any case, there may be beaucoup bargaining yet to come before the other legislative foot drops in a Senate vote, probably next week. For what it’s worth, Memphis Democratic Senator Reginald Tate is already showing signs of weakening in his sponsorship of the de-annexation bill under pressure from the media in exposing his legislative history.

Tate, who lost out on a vote to be Senate Democratic leader before the current session by a single vote, has in fact voted so often with Republicans, even on matters arguably counter to Memphis’ interests, that wags in  Legislative Plaza refer to his District 33 as “the Ramsey-Tate district.” JB

Curry Todd on the attack

For what it’s worth, spectators for the Monday night vote on de-annexation included a generous supply of mayors of suburban municipalities. Asked about that on Monday, Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo said his primary interest in being in town was to resist ongoing efforts to repeal the Hall Income Tax, the proceeds of which are significant add-ons to to the coffers of every municipality in Shelby County, including Memphis.

But Palazzolo acknowledged that his landlocked city would be an interested party if adjacent areas like Windyke became de-annexed in the wake of the current bill.

The question of whether and when such areas, if detached from Memphis, would be eligible for absorption by another municipality, is an intriguing one — and, oddly, several leading proponents of the bill, including Todd and Representative Mark White (R-Germantown) professed not to know what the bill provided in that regard, though House sponsor Carter dismissed the prospect of such re-annexations Monday night on the ground that the bill made them prohibitively difficult.

To say the least, there would seem to be much in the measure requiring a re-examination by all sides.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The 75 Percent Rule

Remember that time when state representative and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) board member Curry Todd submitted a bill to aid farmers and school children by creating an extra hour of sunlight? How about that time when he was living rent free in a lobbyist’s home? Or when he killed the Influence Disclosure Act, a measure that would have required lawmakers to acknowledge the influence of outside groups on public policy?

Let’s face it, this West Tennessee representative isn’t the sharpest nor is he the most ethical knife in the drawer. Even if his most recent proposal doesn’t overturn any natural laws, like inertia or gravity, HB241 displays Todd’s usual lack of seriousness. If passed, Todd’s bill will kill good legislation that helps fund our public defender system and has served Tennesseans well for 23 years. The proposed legislation, in the long run, benefits nobody but Todd’s fellow ALEC member, the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that operates three of Tennessee’s 14 prisons.

I’m not suggesting that ALEC was involved in crafting this bill, but it wasn’t Todd. And no matter who’s responsible for drafting the language, who do you think wins when the state decides to abandon even the pretense of parity and stacks the deck in favor of the prosecution? Here’s a hint: not the citizens of Tennessee.

If passed, HB241 would undo T.C.A. 16-2-518, a regulatory measure that controls disparity in the funding of prosecutors and public defenders. Sometimes called the “75 percent rule,” T.C.A. 16-2-518 ensures that whatever money is budgeted for prosecutors must be matched at a 75 percent level for public defenders. In simple terms, if the county gives District Attorney Amy Weirich’s office $100, they must give the public defender’s office $75.

Thirty years ago, a mere decade before the creation of T.C.A. 16-2-518, fewer than 350,000 Americans were in prison. By the turn of the 21st century, that number ballooned to more than 2.3 million. That breaks down to about one of every 100 Americans being in jail. If you extend the figure to include people on probation or parole, the number drops to a shocking one in 31 Americans. More than 80 percent of the people accused of committing a crime qualify for court-appointed defense. Study after study has documented how excessive caseloads have compromised the constitutional right to counsel and clogged the judicial system. To quote former FBI Director William Sessions, America’s public defense systems “should be a source of great embarrassment for all of us.”

Mass-incarceration is expensive and that condition will only be exacerbated by eliminating the 75 percent rule. Tennessee spends more than $1 million a day to house the state’s prisoners. A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU shows that, in addition to being expensive, the United States has now imprisoned so many people that we’ve entered into a period of diminishing returns. Can there be any doubt that a deliberate weakening of Tennessee’s public defender systems will result in more convictions and longer sentences?

Eliminating the 75 percent rule will also disproportionately impact the state’s larger, urban defender systems, such as the one in Shelby County, which is among the nation’s oldest. The local defender’s office has a reputation for developing services that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration, such as the award-winning Jericho program, a model prison-diversion program that targets inmates with severe and persistent mental illness. The mentally ill are likely to be incarcerated two to five times longer than the average inmate, and have an average recidivism rate of 80 percent. The Jericho program has cut the repeat offender rate for the mentally ill in half.

Tennessee could reduce its incarceration and recidivism rate even further if, instead of embracing only the most retrograde policies, it looked to effective and cost-saving reforms enacted by neighboring states like Kentucky and Georgia. But that doesn’t seem likely.

The legislature already sent a powerful — and pointless — message to poor people in Tennessee when it passed a law requiring citizens who need public assistance to undergo drug testing, a program that has now been proven to be a major waste of time and resources. Over the past six months, 16,000 Tennesseans have been drug-tested. The total number of those testing positive: 37.

And speaking of pointless, expensive legislation: Todd’s bill revoking the 75 percent rule may well result in increased taxes, as financial responsibilities are shifted to meet needs that will not go away. This measure will end up costing Tennesseans more money without the perceived benefit of making anybody more secure.

Remember that time when Todd championed a good piece of legislation that helps to move Tennessee forward? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Categories
Opinion The BruceV Blog

Election Results Give Reason for Optimism

It’s been a long time since I woke on the day after an election in Shelby County feeling as optimistic and grateful as I do today. Let me count the ways:

First, my state senator, the mentally and physically impaired embarrassment, Ophelia Ford, was soundly defeated in the Democratic primary by Lee Harris, a smart, young law school professor with, I suspect, a bright political future hereabouts. This was the result I wanted most from this election cycle. Win.

Across the state in Knoxville, GOP primary voters turned out in droves to demolish the re-election bid of lunatic state senator Stacey Campfield, aka “Mr. Don’t Say Gay.” Thanks, Knoxville. Love ya. For grins, check out Campfield’s reaction to his defeat on his blog.

Perhaps the result that surprised me most was the defeat, statewide, of Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey’s attempted purge of three Tennessee Supreme Court justices. The upshot: Ron spent a few hundred thousand dollars to let Tennesseans know the names of three Supreme Court justices. Epic fail. Couldn’t happen to a sleazier jackass. This vote, and Lamar Alexander’s victory over anti-immigration nut Joe Carr, gave me some real hope that the Tea Party tide may have finally turned in Tennessee. I hope so, anyway.

Joe Brown and Henri Brooks were resoundingly trounced in their races for attorney general and Juvenile Court clerk, respectively. I’ve had my issues with Brown’s opponent, Amy Weirich, but Brown, like Brooks, simply self-destructed, making Weirich the winner by default, and by a landslide.

To recount, Memphis purged itself of Ophelia Ford, and along with other Shelby County voters, soundly rejected two potential lightning rods/potential embarrassments for public office.

On the other hand, Germantown and Collierville re-elected self-promoting loon Brian Kelsay and public drunk Curry Todd to the state legislature — without opposition. Shades of Ophelia Ford. The next time you hear some suburbanite snarking on Memphis politicians, remind them to check their own backyard.

And I was glad to see Steve Cohen retain his 9th District Congressional seat. Some advice: If local Democrats want to win county-wide races, they would do well to figure out how to organize behind Cohen and his presidential support and national clout, instead of lobbing a futile and divisive primary challenge at him every two years. The muddle-headedness of the SCDP is self-defeating.

There also needs to be serious state legislation passed to crack down on the illicit fake “official ballot” business hereabouts. It’s scandalous. But, all in all, not bad results to wake up to, IMO.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The “Stunt-Baby” Grows Older

CREDIT: Lauren Rae Holtermann

“He’s on a learning curve, no doubt about it. He’s still going through a learning curve, but that’s natural. He’s a sharp young man. If there’s anything wrong, he’s overenthusiastic about things once in a while, and you just have to rein him in. That’s youthful exuberance, and that’s the kind of stuff you want in people.”

— Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, speaker of the Tennessee State Senate, March 20th

In the spring of 2005, newly elected state Representative Brian Kelsey, a 26-year-old Germantown Republican who had been in office a mere few weeks, decided to summon the Capitol Hill’s press corps to a press conference. This was a surprise to the denizens of Legislative Plaza, who had the same expectations of legislative newbies as did the veteran members of the Tennessee legislature themselves.

“Wait your turn.” “Bide your time.” “Respect the protocol.” Even some version of the old childhood standard, “Be seen and not heard.” All these were an understood part of the ritual for the newcomer in a body as dependent on established hierarchies as the General Assembly, particularly as it was constituted in spring 2005, when majority Democrats had the same solid grip on the levers of power that they had possessed since Reconstruction.

Lauren Rae Holtermann

Senator Brian Kelsey

All the aforesaid admonitions and one more crucial one — “Don’t make waves or rock the boat” — would have made perfect sense to the then recently retired Joe Kent, the genial ex-policeman who, for 26 years before Kelsey, had held the District 83 seat encasing portions of Southeast Memphis and Germantown. A moderate’s moderate, Kent had moved easily in a chamber long dominated by House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, the Covington Democrat whose word was law and whose wielding of the gavel brooked no appeal.

So it was a double jolt for the Capitol Hill reporters when they assembled in a hearing room that day in early 2005 and realized that the tousle-haired, button-downed rookie legislator before them, who could easily have been taken for an intern, was there to lambaste the venerable speaker for abuse of power, in general, and in particular, for a procedural ruling that, as Kelsey saw it, skewed the results of a voice vote so as to interpret a clear chorus of nays as so many ayes.

But the surprise of the press gang was nothing compared to the astonishment of Naifeh himself, who later that week boarded a Capitol elevator in the company of then state Representative Paul Stanley, also a Germantown Republican, but a more senior one who at the time held one of his party’s leadership posts.

“Who is this whippersnapper?” might be a polite and somewhat Bowdlerized version of the question Naifeh asked Stanley, who executed some version of a shoulder shrug to indicate that he himself had no answer.

“And he [Naifeh] didn’t speak to me after that for three years, which made it dfficult,” Kelsey says now, with the kind of self-effacing grin that is part sheepish and part proud of himself. And the freshman member would get disapproving vibes from both sides of the aisle. “You don’t send press releases blasting the speaker? I must say I wasn’t aware of the protocol. But am I glad I was standing up for the people? Yes.” In the next few years, Kelsey would keep on vexing the then ruling Democrats — and assorted members of his own Republican Party, as well. There was the occasion in 2007, when state government, so often used to being straitened, approached the end of its legislative year with a budget surplus, for a change. The Democratic leaders of both chambers hit upon the expedient of offering Assembly members a portion of the overrun to use in their districts for projects of their choice.

In the House, this came to $100,000 per district, and most members of both parties had little issue with accepting the funds, which were being called “community enhancement grants.”

Not Kelsey, who preferred to use the term “pet pork projects” for the ad hoc grants. “This is the worst spending proposal I have heard in my time in the legislature,” Kelsey, midway through his second term, said at the time. “The idea of having members march around their districts like Santa Claus handing out checks reeks of incumbency protection and of buying votes.”

Kelsey with the brass at the wine bill signing

Accordingly, he filled an envelope with bacon and made a show on the floor of the House by handing it back to an annoyed Speaker Naifeh as a token of his refusal to participate.

That outraged several members, among them Kelsey’s fellow Shelby County Republican, Curry Todd of Collierville, who had what he considered good uses for the money in his district. Todd angrily approached Kelsey, whom — in what may have seemed an understatement at the time — he accused of being a “grandstander.”

For a while, Kelsey was referred to by colleagues as “Baby Bacon,” which quickly yielded to a blogger’s coinage, “the Stunt-Baby of Germantown,” a moniker that held for some time and still turns up in published criticism of Kelsey.

Acknowledging his aberrant ways of that period, Kelsey notes today that he was in the minority party in the House back then — the Senate had already gone Republican and elected the first GOP speaker, Ron Ramsey; the House didn’t turn over for another two years. And he offers this explanation for his antics:

“When you’re in the minority and you’re faced with the other party’s egregiously bad conduct, all you can do is scream and yell; the only shot you’ve got is to create a spotlight.”

Those are the sentiments, too, of Lieutenant Governor and Speaker Ramsey, who made a point in 2013 of replacing maverick Tea Party Senator Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet as Senate Judiciary chairman with the more reliable Kelsey, who was elected to his body in 2009 (ironically, in a special election to replace Stanley, whose involvement with an intern had led to a scandal and a forced departure).

“I think those were more minority stunts in the House, and he has matured a lot since then,” Ramsey told the Flyer. “So now, when you’re one of 33 [senators], and you’re in a majority with responsibilities, those aren’t the kind of things you do. And I think he understands that.”

Senator Kelsey with U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen

Back then, however, the “spotlight” Kelsey spoke of would turn awkwardly on the young representative himself. In 2009, the Republicans fully expected to elect their own speaker to replace Naifeh. They had just eked out a one-vote majority in the House in the 2008 election cycle, and an East Tennessee Republican, Jason Mumpower, previously the House minority leader, considered himself sure to be the next speaker. He had already written his acceptance address.

The Democrats had other ideas, however, and they bargained with a friendly Republican, Kent Williams of Carter County, to accept the Speakership by adding his vote to theirs. In the uproar that followed this coup, no one professed more outrage than Kelsey, who lodged an ethics complaint against Williams for allegedly propositioning a female Republican member with the line “I will give a week’s pay just to see you naked.”

But Kelsey’s moral indignation took a setback when Williams made public a simultaneous email dispatched by Kelsey, who was a House Judiciary Committee member and hankered to be the committee chairman. The email, to one of Williams’ staffers, read, “Tell Kent I’m willing to talk about reconciliation if he’s willing to talk about chairman of the full committee.”

Kelsey’s explanation today: “I attempted to reach out to the new speaker, knowing full well it [the request for the committee chairmanship] would be rejected, and it was rejected. This was before the committee assignments were made. I thought I should make an effort to reach out to him.”

The leaked email incident was not the only embarrassment for the upwardly mobile young legislator.

On two occasions in 2009, his last year in the House, he was called out in news accounts for claiming undue credit for legislative acts — once in the case of a bill to expand charter schools in Tennessee, another time in the case of the Memphis City Council’s easing of residency requirements for police officers.

In the latter case, though, Kelsey had introduced a bill that would have caused Memphis to forfeit revenue from property confiscations unless its residency requirements were eased, and at least one councilmember, Shea Flinn, thought the representative’s action might indeed have influenced the council’s actions.

In any case, skepticism by others often attended the actions of Representative Brian Kelsey. (It still can: Wags in the press corps raised eyebrows at Kelsey’s unexpected presence on a stage for the recent wine-in-grocery-stores bill signing.)

Senator Kelsey with House Speaker Beth Harwell

As a result of what would see some sort of legislative alchemy, however, his elevation to the Senate in late 2009 has profoundly altered the gravitas and influence claimed by Senator Brian Kelsey.

   

AS OF SPRING 2014, Kelsey, now 36 and a fixture in the GOP’s legislative super-majority, can claim a plethora of legislative accomplishments that are either celebrated or deplored, depending on one’s politics, but that have to be acknowledged in any case.

*Two of the three constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot this November were authored by Kelsey and nudged through the General Assembly by his perseverance.

One would abolish for all time the possibility of a state income tax of the sort that preoccupied and convulsed state government in the early years of this century.

Another, called by Kelsey the “Founding Father-Plus” amendment, would require the appointment of state appellate judges to be made by the governor and ratified by both chambers of the General Assembly. The amendment would eliminate all variants of the current judicial nominating commission.

*Kelsey has been the moving force behind efforts to prevent the statewide expansion of Medicaid (TennCare is Tennessee’s version), which is one of the linchpins of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and which the state’s Hospital Association and Chamber of Commerce, among other institutions, have considered vital.

Kelsey sees Medicaid expansion as both a federal intrusion and ultimately as a financial burden the state cannot afford, although the federal government would pay the full expense of expansion for the first three years and would commit to paying 90 percent of costs thereafter. (Kelsey, like other conservative opponents of expansion, professes to doubt that commitment.)

*As the author of a bill for what he calls “opportunity scholarships,” Kelsey has been one of the prime forces behind a state voucher program for use in private schools. Though the senator insists that he favors vouchers only for low-income students in certifiably failing schools, critics fear that such a program would ultimately lead to the dissolution of borders between public and private, and between church and state, and would adulterate public education.

Kelsey’s insistence on a more ambitious voucher program than the one proposed by Governor Bill Haslam in the legislative session of 2013 ultimately forced the governor to withdraw the core bill he had offered. But, as Kelsey notes, a compromise measure that is due to be acted on before the end of the current session has already doubled the number of start-up vouchers from Haslam’s original 5,000 to 10,000.

*Kelsey is the sponsor or co-sponsor of numerous other measures that are part and parcel of Tennessee government’s new orientation toward conservative Republicanism.

Senator Kelsey taking on Medicaid expansion

They include: a resolution putting Tennessee government on record as seeking a constitutional convention to impose a balanced budget; bills to rein in or eliminate various traditional forms of taxation, ranging from the Hall income tax on dividends to the gift tax to the inheritance tax to the state beer tax; bills to transform public pensions into 401k “planned contribution” systems; bills to shift workers’ compensation cases from the courts into a state administrative structure and to cap awards in personal injury cases; and bills to prohibit minimum-wage and living-wage legislation at local governmental levels that might clash with such mandates as are imposed by state law.

Kelsey proclaims himself an unabashed supporter of the state’s authority over local government on a host of issues, including pending legislation to allow charter school applicants to leap-frog over local school boards and be authorized directly by the state board of education.

And on the morning after the former Memphis City Schools (MCS) board voted to surrender its charter in December 2010, thereby forcing merger with Shelby County Schools, Kelsey put a bill in the legislative hopper that would have transferred to state authority the schools of the MCS — all the old MCS schools — if, as would happen, Memphis voters approved the surrender.   

The Norris-Todd bill that would eventually enable breakaway municipal school districts in the suburbs superseded that bill.

“To the extent that local governments are infringing on the rights of citizens, it is absolutely the duty of the state to protect freedom,” Kelsey insists. “Cities and counties did not fend off the British. It was the states that banded together under the Constitution.” In Kelsey’s view, cities and counties are mere subdivisions of the state and “can be created and abolished and legislated over” as the state decides.            

KELSEY, A PROBATE LAWYER in civil life, is a scion of two of the most prominent families in Collierville history, the Kelseys and the Carringtons. The fact that his mother was a public-school teacher enabled him, as he remembers it, to attend Memphis University School on scholarship via a cooperative inter-school arrangement not unlike what he wants to arrange statewide via his voucher legislation.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina and went to law school at Georgetown University, a haven, as he sees it now, for legal liberalism. He was somewhat shocked to be schooled by professors who acknowledged their Marxist roots, but he says he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation that came with such exposure.

Starting while he was still in law school, he went to work for a succession of Tennessee Republican eminences — Senator Fred Thompson, Congressman Ed Bryant (he and Bryant exited the Capitol together on the day of the 9/11 attacks), and Senator Bill Frist.

Kelsey left Frist’s office to work for a year in the White House of President George W. Bush as an intern (“mainly doing grunt work”) and was soon back in the Memphis area running for Representative Kent’s vacated position in 2004. “I was probably too young, but that seat had been held for 26 years, and I didn’t want to wait another 26 years for a crack at it.”

Through law school, his early governmental stints, and while in office, Kelsey has left himself little time for a personal life. His motto, one he repeats often in conversation, is: “Always be the most prepared person in the room.” He acknowledges there have been costs to that.

“While I was ahead in many ways in my professional career, I was behind in many ways in my personal life.” For one thing, he remains a bachelor. “I’ve never been engaged, never been close to being married. I thought being in Nashville would double my chances for finding the right person, but somehow it has cut my chances in half.”

But Kelsey soldiers on, attempting to stay the most prepared person in any room he’s in and seeing himself as a defender of the Constitution above all. He likes to cite his differences with the Tea Party wing of his party, embodied in his notable rebuttals, as Senate Judiciary chairman, of his predecessor in that position, Mae Beavers, who persists in introducing measures calling for nullification of federal law.

It had to be something of a personal setback, then, for Kelsey to see a bill of his own, which would have banned picketing in certain labor disputes, declared unconstitutional as an infringement on free speech just two weeks ago by state Attorney General Robert Cooper. (Kelsey’s personal website declares, among his desiderata, “I look forward to continuing to reform the judiciary … starting with how we pick the attorney general.”)

Another aborted effort was Kelsey’s sponsorship of SB2566, which was widely characterized as the “Turn Away the Gays” bill and which Kelsey withdrew after, as he puts it, “listening to my constituents.”

Though he says the bill was aimed only “to help pastors and rabbis and others to not be sued for not wanting to participate in a same-sex ceremony,” the bill was likened by critics to “model” legislation prepared by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that would sanction the denial to gays of a wide array of commercial services.

Kelsey acknowledges that “discussions” at ALEC events have often been the inspiration for bills he has introduced, but contends that he gets most of his legislative ideas from the aforesaid “listening” to constituents

He regards himself primarily as a fiscal conservative and not a social conservative in the mold of Senate colleague Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville). Hence, perhaps, a certain sensitivity that he evinces on the issue of the discarded SB2566.

But, lest anyone should get the idea that the erstwhile “stunt-baby” has transmogrified entirely into a stiff upper lip, Kelsey allows himself an occasional throwback moment. There was, for example, the occasion last fall when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius came to Memphis on behalf of Obamacare, the online site for which was then experiencing start-up difficulties. She was accosted by Kelsey, who presented her with a copy of “Websites for Dummies.”

Kelsey says his intent was to generate support for his anti-Medicaid expansion bill. “It was a light-hearted moment, but it had a very serious point.”

Be assured: Whatever else he is, Brian Kelsey is, in every conceivable meaning of the term, very serious.

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Line is Busy

Here’s a shout-out to Collierville Republican state Senator Mark Norris. As a man of intellect, not to mention the senate majority leader of the rambunctious Tennessee General Assembly, I bet he must cringe every time the phone rings. Imagine, having to appear to be understanding and civil to the looney-toon legislators of both parties who seek his advice on how to proceed with ethically and morally questionable legislative proposals they appear to have pulled out of thin air. Some of the proposed measures brought forward by his colleagues beg the question, “Have the inmates completely taken over running the asylum?”

I don’t know what his conversations specifically entail. But, for the purposes of this column, I’ll put my imagination to work.

“Senator Norris, I have Senator Stacey Campfield on the line, he’d like to speak with you?

“I thought I told you to block his number?”

“Well, sir, he insists it’s of some importance.”

“Okay, put him through.”

“Mark, Stacey here. I need some help on the language of a bill I’m working on to castrate all black men who have more than two children. I heard it works in cutting down on the Chinese population. And we could put more teeth in it by making them take a drug test before copulation occurs. I think I’ve got a sponsor lined up in the House from Johnson City. I know you’re busy, Mark, if you could just streamline the wording for me …”

“Senator, I hate to interrupt, but, it’s Senator Ophelia Ford on line two. At least, I think it’s her. It sounded kind of distant.”

“Okay, I got it.”

“Ophelia, to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“Who is this?”

“Ophelia, it’s, Mark Norris, what can I do for you?”

“Oh, yes, Mark, I’ve introduced a bill to legalize medical marijuana usage in the state. I think it’s timely because, with all the mean nurses I’ve dealt with in the past, I’ve decided self-medication is the way to go. Besides, I read, or someone read it for me, that Congressman Steve Cohen likes marijuana too, and he’s a white man from Colorado. Did you know they have bike lanes just like us?”

“Oops! Sorry, Ophelia, we’ll talk more later. I’ve got another call.”

“Senator, Brian Kelsey, on line three.”

“Hello, Brian, I was expecting your call. Well, you’ve made quite the mess of it, young man, mixing religion and business with homosexuality. I wish you had come to me first about the wording of your proposal. It’s atrocious legislation and no sane-thinking legislator is going to back it. Brian, what in the world were you thinking? (click) Brian? … Brian?”

“Senator Norris, I’ve got state Representative Curry Todd on hold.”

“Okay, put him through.”

“Mark, what time is it?”

“Well, Curry, by my watch, it’s 3:15 in the afternoon.”

“You see, that’s the point of some new legislation I’m wrestling with. This whole daylight savings time issue is so confusing. Now, here’s what I was thinking: We could scrap the whole idea of daylight savings time or we could make it permanent. Or we could try to make the day longer, because this idea of having to go through the tedious process of fixing our clocks twice a year is just ludicrous. We got different time zones in this state. If we rolled back the clocks for an hour, it would give extra daylight for our farmers to be productive, and in the winter our children wouldn’t be going to school in the dark. And for people who go to bars there’d be extra time for happy hour, because, as I well know, it’s always five o’clock somewhere, ain’t it, Mark? If you’ll just put the right words in place, I’ll find some senate sponsor who’d like to have his name on a bill. I tried to call Campfield and Kelsey, but their lines were busy. Do you know how I could get ahold of Ophelia Ford?”

“Senator Norris, I hate to interrupt, but I’ve got a phone call from some supposed elected official from Memphis who’d like to talk to you about legalizing guns in parks?”

“Just tell them, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”