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Change is Coming

Photo: Steveheap | Dreamstime.com

The election of August 4, 2022, in Shelby County will likely go down in history for more reasons than the length of its ballot, the longest in local history.

Some 31 years since a political revolution occurred in the county’s core city of Memphis, electing an African-American mayor and broadening the concept of both citizenship and officialdom, a similar process is about to occur in Shelby County at large.

The county will still be the site of six suburban municipalities that are predominantly white in population and Republican in disposition, but these enclaves — their populations inflated by a generation of evacuees from the earlier transformation of Memphis — will now be subject to a governing apparatus that is increasingly diversified and bent on reform.

Shelby County already had a Black chief executive, Mayor Lee Harris, who had launched a number of initiatives designed to extend opportunity and ameliorate the lot of the county’s traditional underclass.

As a result of the election, the mayor’s partners in power will include a legislative body, the Shelby County Commission, whose 13 members will have a Black and female majority and a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 9 to 4; a Juvenile Court judge who is the scion of African-American civil rights pioneers; and a Democratic district attorney general who, though white like the Republican DA he defeated, has declared an agenda that targets the residual racial inequities of the county’s criminal justice system.

Tennessee state government has become as inflexibly Republican and Trump-dominated as much of the rest of the old Confederacy and, via intensified assertion of its authority on home-rule local governments, has managed to suppress the influence of the state’s urban centers. Nashville had been a bastion of progressivism and New South sensibilities, but the capital city saw ruthless state gerrymandering in January that drastically reduced its legislative capacity and virtually scuttled its hundred-year tradition of electing Democrats to Congress.

As Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, almost surely destined to be the state’s last surviving Democratic member of the U.S. House, foresaw back in the spring, Nashville’s loss would mean a potential gain in leadership possibilities for the Memphis area, where a Black majority made such disenfranchisement of its political base impractical. Among other things, Shelby County now becomes, post-election, a kind of laboratory for governmental experimentation.

The Democrats elected and re-elected last week are free to propose remedies not only to legacies of neglect in Shelby County government but also to the increasing arrogation of power to a Republican-dominated state government.

Consider only the three top-of-the-ticket officials newly confirmed by voters — Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, District Attorney General Steve Mulroy, and Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon.

Candidates Mulroy, Harris, and Sugarmon, with former NAACP head Johnnie Turner, make last-minute pilgrimage to a statue of Ida B. Wells.

All are long-term Democrats with specific ideas for new agendas. (Technically, Sugarmon’s office is nonpartisan, and accordingly he ran without party label, as, for that matter, did his defeated opponent, current — now outgoing — Judge Dan Michael, who essentially was considered a Republican.)

Harris, who invoked “segregation” as the county’s most severe problem during his first race for mayor in 2018, has bent his efforts toward the abolition of racial and economic disparities affecting the county’s underserved population. He has pioneered in the issue of criminal justice reform, in the establishment of re-entry programs for first-time offenders, and in the creation of a new Juvenile Justice Center. He has shown a willingness to take on the establishment’s sacred cows, as when he vetoed funding for a posh new swimming facility at the University of Memphis, holding to his opposition long enough to extract a pledge from university officials to move toward a $15-an-hour pay for all employees, the same plateau he has instituted for county workers.

Harris’ Republican opponent in the recent election, Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan based his well-financed campaign on the idea that “we deserve better,” though he never was able to articulate any specifics behind that and other pleasantly-put platitudes.

The final vote was 78,552 for Harris to Morgan’s 56,789 and might have been larger, had Harris turned on the jets full-blast. The bottom line was, he didn’t need to.

A major background issue in the campaign, largely unvoiced, was the tension that had prevailed between county government and the state at the height of the Covid pandemic. Early difficulties in the county’s administering of vaccines were one problem; the state’s insistence on overriding home-rule medical authority, hardened and codified into law during a special legislative session, was another.

It is widely assumed that Harris’ future political ambitions run to a congressional bid down the line; it is less well-known that he has also thought of running for governor and, in fact, had considered that idea, among others, before opting for a second mayoral term.

That mayoral race was run, more or less, as a partnership with the campaign of Mulroy for district attorney general. Candidates Harris and Mulroy, who had served together on the law faculty of the University of Memphis, shared a busy campaign headquarters at the intersection of Poplar and Highland, and there was generous overlap between them at the supporter and strategic levels, as well.

The district attorney’s race became the marquee event to the county election campaign, and there were several reasons for that — one obvious one being that DA Amy Weirich was the last possessor of a county elective office for the Republican Party, which, for most of the time in the era of partisan county elections, had been predominant locally.

That trend ran counter to the fact that demographics — notably, in the growing African-American percentage of the county population — were increasingly favorable to Democrats. The GOP, which led the way toward partisan elections in 1992, had been able to do well on the strength of good candidates with crossover platforms. By 2018, the year of the “blue-wave” election, locally as well as nationally, the county’s Democrats had developed that knack, while Republicans, saddled with Trumpism, had drifted toward ideological extremism.

Mulroy — articulate, self-assured, and a demon for work — had been an active political force for years, leading crusades ranging from reforms in the mechanics of voting to efforts to maintain the Libertyland amusement park and its legendary Zippin Pippin roller coaster.

Mulroy promises new age of fairness as Democrats sweep.

He served from 2006 to 2014 on the Shelby County Commission and hazarded a race for county mayor, losing in the Democratic primary to Deidre Malone.

As he liked to say, he had served in “the Bill Clinton Justice Department” and had experience in both the prosecution and defense aspects of criminal law. Highly active and respected as an academic scholar, Mulroy had ambitions to serve as a federal judge but, as a white male liberal, didn’t check the requisite number of boxes for an appointment in either Democratic or Republican administrations.

In local Democratic ranks, his credentials were considered nigh to perfect for the DA’s race, however, and, after coming out ahead in a three-way primary race, he threw himself into the general election showdown with Weirich, brandishing an agenda for reform that jibed with that of Harris and reflected cutting-edge ideas in legal and law-enforcement circles.

Weirich, though not anybody’s idea of an ideologue, styled herself as “Our DA” and campaigned as a law-and-order traditionalist concerned essentially with victims and their rights. She had financial assets of close to a million dollars for the campaign, but other numbers worked against her. For one thing, political affiliations in Shelby County were top-heavy for Democrats, and the early voting especially was in sync with that.

One set of numbers had especially adverse implications for the incumbent — those indicating a continuing upward climb in the crime rate, especially for crimes of violence, during her 11-year tenure. Mulroy was not shy about mentioning that fact and carried with him on the stump a cardboard graphic with bars depicting the steady rise.

For her part, Weirich launched an ad campaign depicting Mulroy, without explicit evidence, as a Defund the Police activist. Mulroy responded with ads noting the incumbent had been officially reprimanded more than once for judicial misconduct and called her the “worst” district attorney in the state.

In a series of debates, the two candidates lambasted each other.

There were genuine differences on the issues, with Mulroy outlining a progressive agenda seeking, among other things, reforms of the cash-bail system, a post-conviction review procedure, and a reduction in the number of juveniles whose cases were remanded to Criminal Court. He also vowed to amend what he saw as a disparity in the DA’s office, in which 80 percent of the attorneys were white and 95 percent of the accused in their caseloads were Black. He opposed “truth-in-sentencing,” which eliminated parole for certain violent felonies, while Weirich celebrated its codification into state law.

Late in the contest, what might have become a test case occurred on the matter of juvenile transfers. A youth whom Weirich had put on a restorative justice regime backslid and committed a brutal carjacking murder of Autura Eason-Williams, a revered local Methodist cleric. Both candidates were on the spot; almost reflexively, Weirich sought a transfer of the youth to adult court, while Mulroy fished somewhat inconclusively for a proper rhetorical response.

The moment passed, and so did a brief sensation arising from Weirich’s decision to be interviewed on “truth-in-sentencing” by “shock jock” Thaddeus Matthews, who had an harassment case pending that technically would call on her to prosecute.

In the end, Mulroy would win with surprising ease, polling 76,280 votes to Weirich’s 59,364.

Still, Mulroy’s victory, like Harris’, came somewhat as expected, and for all the Sturm und Drang of the DA race, for all the late money Mulroy got from a national network of criminal justice reformers, allowing him to compete on equal terms for advertising time, his margin of victory might simply have been owing to the superfluity of blues over reds in the voting population. More uncertain for most of the campaign season was the fate of the third member of the de facto reformist triad, Tarik Sugarmon.

The 2022 campaign was the second race for Juvenile Court judge by Sugarmon, who had run unsuccessfully in 2014 against incumbent Dan Michael, a loyalist in the administrations of former longtime Judge Kenneth Turner and Turner’s successor, Curtis Person. By 2022, Sugarmon was a judge himself, having won election to Memphis Municipal Court in the meantime, but he still hankered for the job of Juvenile Court Judge.

The son of civil rights pioneer Russell Sugarmon and the brother of Erika Sugarmon, who won a race for the Shelby County Commission in the May Democratic primary, Sugarmon believed, like the other two members of his de facto triad, that Black youths had been badly served by the existing social and judicial systems. At a joint press conference held in June in which he was endorsed by Harris and Mulroy, Sugarmon actually reached into the past and unexpectedly espoused a scheme, first advanced by then County Commissioner Mulroy and others in 2007, to double the number of Juvenile Court judges in order to deal with an ever-mounting caseload.

The proposal, when made in 2007, would have replaced one in which the Juvenile Court judge of record was assisted by 12 appointed referees or magistrates who actually tried cases and dealt with offenders. It was a system dictated originally by the fact that Judge Turner did not have a law degree and could not fully function in the judicial sense. The second-judge concept was approved by the County Commission at the time but brushed aside later by a state appeals court. Sugarmon, who had researched the matter, believes it can be successfully revived by the new group of county commissioners. It remains to be seen if he — and they — will try again.

In any case, the trio of Harris, Mulroy, and Sugarmon, who triumphed in a four-candidate race, edging out Michael by 10,000 votes, can be expected to proceed with an era of reforms in their respective jurisdictions.

Cordova Commission winner Shante Avant waves to well-wisher.

And something of the sort can surely be expected of the newly elected County Commission. Early in the current century, this 13-member body was dominated by seven white male Republicans. Come September, the body will number nine Democrats and four Republicans; eight Blacks and five whites; seven women and six men; seven returnees and six neophytes (though the firebrand Henri Brooks, back for a second run, should perhaps not be so described).

No longer will the balance of power be held by what has been called a white patriarchy. For the record, the names of the new commissioners are as follows, those of incumbents in caps:

District 1, AMBER MILLS, R

District 2, DAVID BRADFORD, R

District 3, MICK WRIGHT, R

District 4, BRANDON MORRISON, R

District 5, Shante Avant, D

District 6, Charlie Caswell, D

District 7, Henri Brooks, D

District 8, MICKELL LOWERY, D

District 9, EDMUND FORD JR., D

District 10, Britney Thornton, D

District 11, Miska Clay Bibbs, D

District 12, Erika Sugarmon, D

District 13, MICHAEL WHALEY, D

This, folks, is change. And city government is on the flipper, too. There were two items on the ballot for city voters only. One was a race for City Court judge. The incumbent, former county equity officer Carolyn Watkins, was turned out by Kenya Hooks, the city’s chief prosecutor.

More important for what it augurs was the overwhelming defeat by Memphis voters of proposed Memphis Ordinance 5823 by a convincing margin of 52,582 to 26,759.

That referendum victory for a two-term limit means not just that neither Mayor Jim Strickland nor any City Council member who is now in a second term can run again in city government. It also mandates that the controls will pass to new faces and, mayhap, to new ideas. For some time the names of retiring county Commissioner Van Turner, Downtown Memphis Commissioner Paul Young, and state House Minority Leader Karen Camper have been circulated as possible mayoral aspirants. More names and more energies are almost sure to come.

Former GOP candidate turned poll-watcher Patti Possel

There were anomalies elsewhere in the election, notably in the ranks of the judiciary. But first, props are called for in the case of longtime Republican activist Charlotte Bergman, an African American who has toiled in party ranks for more than a generation and became in the process a perennial primary candidate for the 9th Congressional District seat held, more or less in perpetuity, by Democrat Steve Cohen. There was a tendency for outsiders to see her activities as feckless, but she has just, and in the Republican primary, decisively turned away a moneyed entrepreneur named Brown Dudley, who supposedly had the wherewithal to give Cohen a run for his money in November. Clearly, GOP voters consider Bergman a legitimate voice for grievances and aspirations.

More kudos. Carol Chumney, the onetime state legislator and City Council member who made two races for Memphis mayor and then, to most eyes, had slipped away. Actually, she started taking care of her law practice and went to work on an interesting memoir, published just months ago. Now, after a spell of useful activism on the voting reforms front, she has won the election as Circuit Court judge in Division II. A good year, indeed.

And a tip of the hat to Joe Townsend, who came out of nowhere to beat veteran Judge Karen D. Webster in Probate Court, Division II, by 66,186 to 47,660.

There were, to be sure, unforeseen turns in the judges’ ballot as well. Most drastically, Mark Ward, Criminal Court judge in Division IX and the author of the primer on criminal law which is basic reading for all Criminal Court judges, went down to newcomer Melissa Boyd.

Joe Ozment, who had every known endorsement from various groups, including the Bar Association itself, lost in a multi-candidate race to Jennifer Fitzgerald for the Criminal Court, Division II, post.

Gerald Skahan, junior member of a brother-sister judicial team, lost his seat on the bench in General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 9, to Sheila Bruce-Renfroe, who won a judgeship on her second try. Meanwhile, Skahan’s sister, Paula Skahan, was run unexpectedly close by Michael Floyd in Criminal Court, Division I.

And Christian Johnson, a bankruptcy lawyer with a penchant for wearing cowboy hats, upset Judge Loyce Lambert-Ryan in General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 15.

There were other surprises and close calls, enough to suggest that, to an unusual degree, change was the order of the day.

Judicial races aside, most of that change, to repeat, was at the expense of the Republican Party in overtly partisan matchups, and it is hard, given demographic realities, to see how that trend will be reversed.

Increasingly, the politics of Shelby County will be antithetical to those of Tennessee state government. JB Smiley of the Memphis City Council made a brave, and perhaps premature, run at the Democratic nomination for governor. He won in Shelby County but lost statewide to Dr. Jason Martin of Nashville, another area which, like Memphis, has grievances against the state.

Gubernatorial hopeful Jason Martin of Nashville

Perhaps, Martin can do better than expected against Republican Governor Bill Lee. Even if not, the bench of potential gubernatorial hopefuls, many of them from Memphis and many mentioned in this article, is almost certain to expand. And the change that got started in this year’s Shelby County election is just on its first legs.

Categories
Politics Beat Blog

Harris, Mulroy, Sugarmon Win the Big Ones

Steve Mulroy. Photo by Jackson Baker.

While Republicans in Nashville were still smarting from the defeat — early in the week — of their hopes to host the 2024 Republican National Convention in the state capital, Democrats in Shelby County were rejoicing over their second straight sweep of countywide positions in the August 4th election.

To start with the most closely followed of all the races, the one for Shelby County District Attorney General: early voting totals, coupled with mail-ins, showed Democrat Steve Mulroy well ahead of incumbent Republican DA Amy Weirich, 76,280 to 59,364. As Mulroy correctly told his delirious election-night crowd at his Poplar Avenue headquarters, barring a statistical improbability, he had become the first Democratic DA in Shelby County history.

Fellow Democrat Lee Harris, operating out of the same HQ, was comfortably ahead of Republican challenger Worth Morgan, 78,552 to 56,789, thereby winning a second four-year term as Shelby County Mayor for his own reformist mission.

Completing a trifecta of sorts, Memphis Municipal Judge Tarik B. Sugarmon had apparently won out in a four-candidate race over Republican incumbent Dan Michael for the position of Juvenile Court Judge, with 53,267 votes to Michael’s 40,720. William Ray Glasgo and Dee Shawn Peoples were also-rans.

Though his was a non-partisan race, Sugarmon, who had lost to Michael eight years earlier, campaigned at times with Mulroy and Harris. The three of them had made a ceremonial visit, late on election day, to the statue of Ida B. Wells on Beale Street, where they had issued a call for late voters to turn out. 

In other results, who would have thought that Charlotte Bergmann, largely written off as a perennial candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 9th District, would dust off a new face, entrepreneur Brown Dudley,  who had  lots of money and the apparent ability to make a real race in the fall against 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen (the odds-on favorite to win again)?

Bergmann prevailed over Dudley, 9,382 to 7,811, a win for long-term party fidelity. All bets are on Cohen, though, in November. The 9th District is wall-to-wall Democratic, the last such in Tennessee after ruthless GOP gerrymandering.

8th District Republican incumbent Congressman David Kustoff easily won out in a four-candidate race to seal his renomination and will take on Democrat Lynnette Williams in the fall.

GOP Governor Bill Lee will compete in the fall with Democratic nominee Jason Martin of Nashville, winner of a three-way Democratic primary with Memphians JB Smiley and Carnita Atwater. Smiley won in Shelby County.

Sheriff Floyd Bonner, the Democratic nominee and the Republican endorsee, finished with 96,289, blowing away two independent candidates.

Assessor Melvin Burgess, a Democrat, had fairly easy going over Republican challenger Steve Cross, 51,517.

Democrat Jamita Swearengen, 79,329,  defeated Republican Soheila Kail, 51,801, for Circuit Court Clerk.

Incumbent Trustee Regina Newman, also a Democrat, had similar ease over the GOP’s Steve Basar, 80,327 to 51,746.

Incumbent Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn won 81,223, over the GOP’s Paul Houston, 49,772.

Democrat Janeen Gordon was unopposed for Juvenile Court Clerk.

Democratic incumbent Wanda Halbert survived a scare from Republican Jeff Jacobs, with 65,520 votes to Jacobs’ 54,519. Harold Smith had 13,699 in third place.

As expected, Democrat Willie Brooks won Register of Deeds, 76,801 to Bryan Edmiston’s 50,191. George “Dempsey” Summers had 4,896.

Unofficial early indications were that all Shelby County legislative incumbents won their primary races. More details to come soon on vote totals and matchups for the fall.

As anticipated, there will be 9 Democratic members of the 13-member Shelby County Commission. Winners are Amber Mills, R, District 1; David C. Bradford Jr., R, District 2; Mick Wright, R, District 3; Brandon Morrison, R, District 4; Shante Avant, D, District 5; Charlie Caswell, D, District 6; Henri Brooks, D, District 7; Mickell Lowery, D, District 8; Edmund Ford Jr., D, District 9; Britney Thornton, D, District 10; Miska Clay Bibbs, D, District 11; Erika Sugarmon, D, District 12; Michalel Wehaley, d, District 13. 

The most competitive Commission race was between Whaley, with 7,036 votes,  and Republican Ed Apple, 6,702.

Judicial Results:

Circuit court Judge Division I, Felicia Corbin-Johnson

Circuit Court Judge, Division II, Carol J. Chumney

Circuit Court, Division III, Valerie L. Smith

Circuit Court Judge, Division IV, Gina Carol Higgins

Circuit Court Judge, Division V, Rhynette N. Hurd

Circuit Court Judge, division VI, Cedrick D. Wooten

Circuit Court Judge Division VII, Mary L. Wagner

Circuit Court Judge, Division VIII, Damita Dandridge

Circuit Court Judge, Division IX, Yolanda Kight Brown

Chancellor, Part I, Melanie Taylor Jeffe

Chancellor, Part II, Jim Kyle

Chancellor, Part III, Joe Jenkins

Probate Court Judge Division I, Kathleen N. Gomes

Probate Court Judge Division II, Joe Townsend

Criminal Court Judge Division I Paula Skahan

Criminal Court Judge Division II Jennifer Fitzgerald

Criminal Court Judge Division III, James Jones

Criminal Court Judge, Division IV, Carolyn Blackett

Criminal court Judge Division V, Carlyn Addison

Criminal Court Judge Division VI, David Pool

Criminal court Judge Division VII, Lee V. Coffee

Criminal Court Judge, Division VIII, Chris Craft

Criminal court Judge, Division IX, A. Melissa Boyd

Criminal Court Judge, Division X, Jennifer J. Mitchell

General Sessions Civil Court, Division 1, Lynn C obb

General Sessions Civil Court, Division 2, Phyllis B. Gardner

General Sessions Civil Court, Division 3, Danielle M. Sims

General ESessions Civil Court, Division 4, Deborah Henderson

General Sessions Civil court, Division 5, Betty Thomas Moore

General Sessions Civil Court, Division 6, Lonnie Thompson

General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 7, Bill Anderson

General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 8, Lee Wilson

General Sessions Criminal court, Division 9, Sheila Bruce-Renfroe

General Sessions, Criminal court, Division 10, Greg Gilbert

General Sessions Criminal court, Division 11, Karen L. Massey

General Sessions, Criminal Court, Division 12, Ronald Lucchesi

General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 13, Louis Montesi

Environmental  Court Division 14, Patrick M. Dandridge

General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 15, Christian Johnson

These judicial results, preliminary only, are subject to appeal and possible recount. Several races are very  close.

County School Board District 1: Michelle McKissack

County School board, District 6, Keith Williams

County School Board, District 8, Amber Huett-Garcia

County School  Board, district 9, Joyce Dorse-Coleman

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Times and Places

Awaiting Judgment: Retiring General Sessions Judge Tim Dwyer (far left) was, arguably and understandably, the most relaxed person at a Sunday event on behalf of Magistrate David Pool, now running for a General Sessions position. The other jurists pictured, like Pool, are on the General Sessions election ballot and will be facing the verdict of the voters on August 4th. From l to r: Dwyer, Judge Karen Massey, Pool, Judge Bill Anderson, Judge Loyce Lambert-Ryan, and Judge Gerald Skahan. (Photo: Jackson Baker)

SIGNIFICANT DATES: Thursday of last week was the last day to file for the August 4th state and federal primary, as well as for independents running in the county general election of that date. One exception is that the filing deadline for the District 33 state Senate primary has been shifted to Thursday, May 5th, as a consequence of the seat — formerly held by Katrina Robinson — having been vacated last month by legislative action. The current holder of the District 33 state Senate seat is former state Representative London Lamar, who was appointed as interim state senator last month by the Shelby County Commission.

Last day to submit an absentee ballot request for the May 3rd primary election is April 26th.

• EARLY VOTING INFORMATION: Early voting for the May 3rd county primary is scheduled to begin this Wednesday at the Downtown offices of the SHELBY COUNTY ELECTION COMMISSION, with available times of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday. Also open on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. will be the AGRICENTER INTERNATIONAL on Walnut Grove; the ARLINGTON SAFE ROOM at 11842 Otto Lane; BAKER COMMUNITY CENTER, 7942 Church, Millington; DAVE WELLS COMMUNITY CENTER, 915 Chelsea Ave.; and GLENVIEW COMMUNITY CENTER, 1141 S. Barksdale.

Beginning on Monday, April 18th, and extending through Thursday, April 28th, those six locations will be open, along with 20 other locations, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 23rd. The other 20 locations are: ABUNDANT GRACE FELLOWSHIP CHURCH, 1574 E. Shelby Dr.; ANOINTED TEMPLE OF PRAISE, 3939 Riverdale Rd.; BERCLAIR CHURCH OF CHRIST, 4536 Summer Ave.; BRIARWOOD CHURCH, 1900 N. Germantown Pkwy.; CHRISTIAN LIFE CHURCH, 9375 Davies Plantation Rd.; COLLIERVILLE CHURCH OF CHRIST, 575 Shelton Rd., Collierville; COMPASSION CHURCH, 3505 S. Houston Levee Rd.; GREATER LEWIS ST. MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH, 152 E. Parkway N.; GREATER MIDDLE BAPTIST CHURCH, 4982 Knight Arnold Rd.; HARMONY CHURCH, 6740 St. Elmo Rd., Bartlett; MISSISSIPPI BLVD. CHURCH FAMILY LIFE CENTER, 70 N. Bellevue Blvd.; MT. PISGAH BAPTIST CHURCH, 1234 Pisgah Rd.; MT. ZION BAPTIST CHURCH, 60 S. Parkway E.; NEW BETHEL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH, 7786 Poplar Pike, Germantown; RALEIGH UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, 3295 Powers Rd.; RIVERSIDE MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH, 3560 S. Third; SECOND BAPTIST CHURCH, 4680 Walnut Grove; SOLOMON TEMPLE M.B. CHURCH, 1460 Winchester Rd.; PURSUIT OF GOD CHURCH, 3759 N. Watkins; WHITE STATION CHURCH OF CHRIST, 1106 Colonial Rd.

Categories
Politics

Attorneys Blast Election Coordinator’s “Assault on Judicial Independence”

An apparent  act of judicial interference from state Election Coordinator Mark Goins has drawn alarm and disdain from the two Memphis lawyers who last year successfully sought to expand mail-in voting in Tennessee. 

Their efforts resulted in a positive ruling from a Nashville chancellor on adding pandemic fear as a legal reason for voters to seek mail-in ballots.

It was revealed in the Tennessean this week that Goins had seemingly been on the drafting end of a would-be legislative effort to oust the judge who made that ruling, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle.

The ouster resolution, from state Rep. Tim Rudd (R-Murfreesboro), was backed by a majority of Republicans in the state House and had at least nominal sponsorship in the state Senate as well, but, after kicking up a groundswell of outrage from the state’s legal community, was rejected last week by the House Civil Justice Subcommittee.   

University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy responded that the bill, HR 23, “was an assault on judicial independence.” 

Said Mulroy: “It sought to remove a democratically elected judge for a single decision holding a statute unconstitutional as applied to once-in-a-century circumstances, even though the bulk of the relief she ordered ended up being ordered by the Tennessee Supreme Court.  That is bad enough. But to find  out that the executive branch was actively cooperating with legislators on this assault is even more concerning, if you care about the separation of powers.”

And lawyer Jake Brown, who, along with Mulroy, had pleaded the case for expanding mail-in accessibility on behalf of Up with the Vote 901, said, “Coordinator Goins is an attorney and knows better. Wherever the initial impulse for the ridiculous resolution originated, it was below the dignity of Goins’ office and law license to have played any active role in that name-calling nonsense. You don’t publicly question a sitting judge’s ethics because she ruled against you. The question is where this memo falls on the line between bad faith and whining.” 

Rep. Rudd has acknowledged that a Goins memo that provided the underlying reasoning and some of the language employed in his ouster resolution had been supplied by the Election Coordinator. Rudd said Goins had responded to his own request for information about legal implications of the mail-in issue.

Much of what Goins offered to Rudd was consistent with arguments made by him and the office of Secretary of State Tre Hargett last year in appeals of Lyle’s ruling, which was partially rolled back by the state Supreme Court. The Court did, however, sanction legitimate anxiety concerning COVID-19 as a factor to be taken into account for applicants with underlying health problems or the caretakers of such applicants.

Lyle’s initial ruling, in June, had  been that the coronavirus pandemic, in and of itself, was sufficient reason for voters to seek mail-in ballots, which otherwise were available only via certain limited and long-established conventional justifications. At one point, when state officials dragged their feet on complying with her order, the judge had said “shame on you” and threatened them with legal penalties.

Categories
News News Blog

DOJ and FBI to Investigate Capitol Hill Violence

U.S. Attorney General D. Michael Dunavant

In response to the violence at the U.S. Capital on Wednesday, Attorney General D. Michael Dunavant announced that his office, as well as the Memphis Field Division Office of the FBI, will investigate and charge any potential violations of federal law.

Protestors had arrived at the capitol from around the nation to contest the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory. As tensions rose, protestors successfully pushed past a police barricade and into the U.S. Capitol building, resulting in five deaths.

In a statement released by his office, Dunavant reaffirmed his commitment to bring those who broke the law to justice and to use the full extent of their powers.

“The Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that those responsible for this attack on our Government and the rule of law face the full consequences of their actions under the law. We are working closely with our partners at the FBI, who are actively investigating to gather evidence, identify perpetrators and charge federal crimes where warranted. Any person who traveled from West Tennessee to commit federal crimes in Washington, D.C., as well as anyone who conspired with them or aided or abetted such lawlessness will be aggressively prosecuted by this office.”

Dunavant’s office and the FBI noted that people could be charged with Civil Disorder, Damage to Federal Property, and Rebellion or Insurrection.

Individuals with information are being urged to contact the Memphis FBI Field Division Office at 901-747-4300. They can also submit tips online at fbi.gov/USCapitol.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

No Next Day Election Results For Gannett Newspapers

If there was ever a news item worthy of the “Dammit Gannett” tab, it’s this. Via The Nashville Scene:

“Editors at the [Gannett] chain’s papers around the country were informed two weeks ago that deadlines for the print edition could not be extended in order to cover elections. As a result, Wednesday’s editions of The Tennessean, Commercial Appeal and Knoxville News-Sentinel will not have final results for some of the most closely contested statewide races in years.”

Justin Fox Burks

“We do not believe print is a vehicle for breaking news,” Tennessean vice president   and editor Michael Anastasi was quoted as saying.

Anastasi’s not wrong, of course. Broadcast and online media do have advantages when it comes to live and breaking news. How that absolves daily print editions from obligations to print subscribers and expectations of  mere currency remains a mystery.

Folks who pay for paper say it with me now: Dammit!

UPDATE: NiemanLab weighs in:

“Conceptually, the push to separate print — “not a vehicle for breaking news,” that Gannett memo notes — from digital makes a certain sense, of course. And not adding any extra pages of newsprint for election results does save money. (“As you plan for print, please remember that we have tight controls on newsprint costs,” says the memo. “Any pages added need to be ‘made up’ by the end of the year preferably in November.”)

At the same time, it is those incredibly loyal print readers — the ones who have stood by newspaper companies through cut after cut in staff and in the product — who will now see that loyalty tested, again. Gannett, like a number of other newspaper companies, has more than a third of its print subscribers ages 70 or above in many markets. Most read in print; digital is a second and lesser option. (E-edition readers, who essentially get the print paper in digital form, will also be impacted by this decision.) Those subscribers, at Gannett and elsewhere, have seen their subscription rates hiked again and again, raised to the very limits of econometric modeling.”

Ken Doctor’s column notes that, in an effort to push more readers online Gannett is dropping its paywalls for 48 hours, enabling anyone with internet access to read Gannett’s election coverage. It’s a good read that takes a hard look at recent economic and subscriber history.

“What those numbers tell us is that that road to a mostly/fully digital future gets narrower month by month. Digital subscriptions — which sell at much lower prices than print ones, though with lower marginal costs — are gaining ground much too slowly. Given the combination of higher prices, a lesser product, and even increasingly erratic home delivery, print subscribers may provide less of a lifeline to the digital future than Gannett and other publishers now assume in their whiteboard calculations.”

Read it all here.

Categories
News News Blog

Disturbance on Ole Miss Campus After Obama Victory

Amid last night’s post-election social media storm, Facebook and Twitter buzzed with news that “riots” had broken out on the University of Mississippi campus over Barack Obama’s re-election. Reports spread of hundreds of students collecting on campus, yelling racial epithets, and burning Obama/Biden signs. There were also rumors of rocks being thrown and pepper spray being used to disperse the crowd.

Ole Miss student burns an Obama/Biden lawn sign

  • Ole Miss student burns an Obama/Biden lawn sign

A grainy video was taken, showing students milling about, cop cars patrolling, students singing the Ole Miss fight song school cheer, “Hotty Toddy,” and police telling a student, wrapped in an American flag and riding in the back of a pickup truck, to sit down. Another photo then emerged of a student, who identified himself on Twitter as Brandon Adams, setting an Obama lawn sign on fire.

The University of Mississippi has responded that the events were “fueled by social media, and the conversation should have stayed there.”

According to University of Mississippi Chancellor Dan Jones, police officers were alerted of “Twitter chatter” among students inciting a protest of the presidential election results at the student union. When police arrived they found around 40 students gathered in front of the union. Within 20 minutes the gathering had grown to more than 400 students. The crowd of students chanting political slogans was dispersed by university police. Shortly thereafter, around 100 students gathered at a residence hall. University police broke up the gathering and made two arrests — “for disorderly conduct, including one for public intoxication and one for failure to comply with police orders.”

Chancellor Jones has expressed that some of the incidents reported on social media outlets were less than accurate:

“Unfortunately, early news reports quoted social media comments that were inaccurate. Too, some photographs published in social media portrayed events that police did not observe on campus. Nevertheless, the reports of uncivil language and shouted racial epithets appear to be accurate and are universally condemned by the university, student leaders and the vast majority of students who are more representative of our university creed.”

For now, the administration says it will conduct “a thorough review of this incident to determine the facts and any follow-up actions that may be necessary.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

In Florida, awhile back, Senator John McCain said, “I’m sorry to tell you, my friends, but there will be other wars.”

Who’s supposed to fight in these wars? Not our current military, which is stretched to the limit. Not me or my generation; we’re still busy fighting over the Vietnam War and the domestic cultural shifts that arose because of that bloody conflict. We’ve been doing that for 40 years now, partly because of the disrespect directed toward the soldiers who were sacrificed by the “Greatest Generation” for dubious causes and because of the fight over what determines “patriotism” when you find your country is engaged in an immoral conflict. American participation in Vietnam ended in 1973 but not before 58,000 men, average age 19, perished.

The terrible costs of Vietnam were never resolved at home. We decided it was better not to talk about such unpleasantness and went on a decade-long disco and cocaine bender instead.

I swore that when I grew older, I would never say, “When I was your age …” to a young person. But I will anyway. When I was your age, we were at war. A despised president put us there. Then an attractive candidate emerged who was adored by the young. He was a champion of the destitute and the downtrodden. Bobby Kennedy promised to end the war and bring our soldiers home in order to concentrate on the growing domestic unrest exploding in every major city. The similarities between 1968 and 2008 are striking, with two exceptions: 1) The draft was feeding my peers who weren’t able to take refuge in college into a meat grinder; 2) the voting age was 21. Despite being only 20, I had been drafted and was emotionally invested in Kennedy’s candidacy. You can imagine how crushed we were when he was murdered in Los Angeles.

Deeply dispirited, my generation chose to withdraw from politics, ensuring the election of Richard Nixon, five more years of war, and 20,000 more dead American soldiers.

There are a lot of “what ifs” in this life. Young people voting in large numbers then could have literally saved lives. My generation, which once believed we were going to transform the world, blew it — big-time. Nixon’s bag of “dirty tricks” soon turned people cynical about their government, and “wedge politics” were used for the first time — and they worked. We have been divided ever since. You can help change that now, if you remember two things: Assume nothing — this race is far from over — and do not discount the importance of your actions. Go to the polls as if your single vote were going to determine the outcome and bring a friend with you.

You’ve seen the best and the worst of my generation. We gave you Bill Clinton, a brilliant policy thinker and communicator who couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants. Then we gave you George W. Bush, a moral absolutist and former drunk who took this country to war because his Nixon-worshipping neocon staff convinced him that it was the Lord’s will. To paraphrase JFK, it’s time to pass the damn torch already. We have lived too long with prejudices that the young have never had to experience, and it clouds our thinking. Can you imagine that I never sat in a classroom with a non-white person until college? We desperately need to alter our nation’s course, but I wonder if the young are aware of the potential political clout that they possess. Being too young to vote in 1968 — when my ass was personally on the line — changed me. I am one of the laziest men walking (it took me 28 years to complete my bachelor’s degree), but I have never missed voting in a single election since. Now, it’s your future that’s at stake.

It’s this simple: If young people come out in numbers and vote, Obama will win. If they don’t, he won’t. And history is not on your side. Young people might have saved us from a second Bush term, but registering on campus is not the same as going to the voting booth. In every election since Nixon, young voters have disappointed those candidates who depended on them. Just ask Al Gore. If you don’t know where your polling place is, you can call or Google your local Election Commission. Don’t wear your campaign gear or some zealot will make you turn your T-shirt inside out. And bring an ID and prepare to do battle with those who would challenge your rights. You have the power to decide this election, and if we do it right this time, you also have the ability to recapture a lot of forgotten dreams. If I could, I would come and beg each of you individually — please vote.

Randy Haspel writes a blog, “Born Again Hippies,” where this column first appeared.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

It’s a “Change Election,” All Right

CREDIT: by Jackson Baker

It had been a feel-good Democratic rally in Whitehaven last Sunday — replete with rah-rahs and collective self-congratulations and nifty munchables and a laundry list of party politicians pleased to be there — when it came city councilman Myron Lowery‘s time to speak. And, depending on one’s taste for verisimilitude, Lowery either broke the mood or enhanced it with some bona fide straight talk.

First off, he noted something publicly that had been on the minds of almost all the Democratic cadres at the event: “Tennessee has been given up by Barack,” Lowery said bluntly. He thereby gave voice to what everybody knew — that the Obama-Biden campaign organization, despite having laid claim to Democratic national chairman Howard Dean’s concept of a “50-state strategy” and despite having raised a formidable amount of money, including a record $150 million in September alone, had decided to bypass Tennessee, doling out only a modest amount of expense money for Nika Jackson (the campaign’s representative in Memphis) and one other state employee.

No money for anything else, meaning that those Obama-Biden signs you see here and there were paid for by private fund-raising activities here and elsewhere in Tennessee. Just as Lowery said (and despite conjectures, based on a favorable poll or two, that the state could be competitive in the presidential race), Tennessee had indeed been given up by Obama’s campaign. Nor was the Republican McCain-Palin ticket pulling out the stops.

Turning to Bob Tuke, the Nashville lawyer and former state Democratic chairman who took up the Senate race when few others were willing to, Lowery complimented the candidate for taking his challenge to Republican Lamar Alexander seriously and excoriated those Democrats who were “hanging on to the coattails of our incumbent senator, Bob, and they really let you go.”

That was after Tuke had earlier said this: “When Barack Obama becomes president of the United States, he’s going to need to have 60 senators in the United States Senate in order to vote for his legislative agenda, so that it’s more than just a promise and more than just a dream, but a reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, I volunteer.”

A late-coming dignitary, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, would, some minutes later and with evident enthusiasm, make the same point that Tuke had — that the candidate, if elected, could be number 60, the filibuster-killer. But even Cohen, though no coattail-grabber, has been careful to observe the amenities with his colleagues in the Tennessee congressional delegation, and a courtesy visit of his to a fund-raiser for Alexander (following a joint visit to the Med by the two) had not exactly been treated as a secret by the senator’s people.

Another late arrival at the rally, Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, was asked at one point by event impresario Bret Thompson to list for the crowd’s sake the four magic names of Democratic candidates who needed full-fledged support. That might have been a stumper in any case, but the mayor’s prolonged hemming and hawing, which required Thompson himself to do fill-ins on the list, might have owed something to the fact that Wharton, along with Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and a number of other name Democrats, had formally endorsed Alexander.

Which is as good a way as any of pointing out one of the anomalies of the current political season. At a time when, if the pre-election polls are to be believed, the rest of the nation is trending — even racing — toward the Democrats, Tennessee not only holds fast to its status as a Republican state, it seems to be getting redder.

Some of this conundrum is due to purely personal factors. Tuke is the Democratic Party’s official alternative to Lamar Alexander because, as the former chairman and genial ex-Marine himself confesses, the party had trouble finding someone to take on an incumbent with so formidable a pedigree in the Volunteer State.

In the late ’70s, while still in his 30s, Alexander had become governor, succeeding a corrupt good-ole-boy Democrat (Ray Blanton, who did prison time for selling favors). In office, he sponsored educational reforms and went on to serve as president of the University of Tennessee and secretary of education under Ronald Reagan. In 1996, Alexander mounted a serious run for the presidency, losing the vital New Hampshire primary by inches after Bob Dole, ultimate winner of the Republican nomination, put non-stop ads on TV accusing the ex-Tennessee governor — unjustly — of having been a mad taxer in office.

Elected to the Senate in 2002, Alexander had succeeded by 2008 in both creating an image of a moderate who could work across the aisle and becoming the GOP caucus chairman — i.e., his party’s point man. No mean trick, that, and a tribute to his versatility.

by Jackson Baker

Bob Tuke

One example of the man’s prowess: He took on Democratic majority leader Harry Reid over the issue of appointing the Rev. William Graves, a Memphian and C.M.E. bishop, and (assisted by Cohen) won that showdown, thereby scoring with both African Americans and his Republican peers in Congress.

Hence the polls showing Alexander over Tuke by a two-to-one margin and hence a staggering fund-raising edge over Tuke, a man of parts but still a relative unknown.

But that’s just one case. It remains a mystery why the Obama-Biden campaign should be forsaking Tennessee. The campaign, after all, has targeted such hitherto red states as Virginia and North Carolina and, with recent help from former president Bill Clinton himself, is gaining toward a possible upset even in next-door Arkansas. It’s especially puzzling given the campaign’s momentum, record bankroll, and the fact of a highly motivated African-American voter base in Tennessee’s urban centers.

And the national party’s reticence toward Tennessee isn’t helpful for either the state Democratic Party’s tenuous hopes of regaining control of the state Senate (three key races are at stake statewide, and the party must win all of them) or the local Democrats’ hopes of getting their act together.

For all the exuberance of that Sunday rally on Elvis Presley, the Shelby County Democratic Party is a divided house — riven periodically by factional strife, most recently over an “official” sample ballot that includes among its mugshots of party nominees and other recommended candidates a box which, without any authorization whatever, calls for the defeat of each and every one of 10 referenda on the November 4th ballot. At press time, there has not yet been a full explanation for this mysterious event. (See memphisflyer.com for more coverage.)

The Shelby County Republicans have their own case of Ballotgate — a free-booting Germantown group having, according to Chairman Bill Giannini, misappropriated the party’s name and logo to issue a sample ballot pushing its own unauthorized slate of alderman candidates.

So much for old-fashioned party discipline.

And, symbolically, at least, the ballot confronting all Memphis and Shelby County voters begins with a choice of no fewer than eight presidential tickets, electors for pairs of presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Topping the list are Democrats Obama and Joe Biden and Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin. With time running out, and with the Electoral College system requiring them to fry their fish elsewhere, no member of either ticket has bothered to campaign locally.

Of the six choices which follow the two major-party tickets, three have attracted some note, in Tennessee or elsewhere.

by Jackson Baker

Lamar Alexander

The Libertarian Party slate of Bob Barr (a former Republican congressman from Georgia) and Wayne Root has made modest inroads on the national consciousness for its damn-their-eyes attitude toward both Democrats (too much government) and Republicans (too much social control). Neither Barr nor Root has made a local campaign visit, however, so far as is known.

Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, yet another former member of Congress from Georgia, has been here, however — though without her running mate, Rosa Clemente.

Another visitor to Memphis was the venerable Ralph Nader, running again on the fumes of his reputation made long ago as a consumer advocate par excellence. Nader’s veep partner, Matt Gonzalez, hasn’t come this way, however.

Other pairings are Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castle, Charles Jay and Thomas L. Knapp, and Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander — all listed on the Tennessee ballot as “independent candidates,” whatever their doctrinal claims.

Outlook: Though Tennessee seems locked up for McCain-Palin, according to the polls, Obama-Biden should win the nation. Skeptics are well within their rights to make arch references to Presidents Dewey and Kerry. For what it’s worth, early voting in Memphis and Tennessee, as elsewhere, has been brisk.

The U.S. Senate race is listed next. Besides Democrat Tuke and Republican Alexander are candidates Edward L. Buck, Christopher G. Fenner, David Gatchell, Ed Lawhorn, Daniel Towers Lewis, and Chris Lugo. Lugo, a Nashvillian, represents the Green Party and made a run-through, in tandem with McKinney, back in August.

Outlook: If Tuke is a praying man, he might qualify for a miracle. Otherwise, Alexander would seem to be a shoo-in. Aside from a certain potential in Shelby County and in Davidson County (Nashville), Tuke, whose name recognition remains minute, has limited prospects.

OTHER CONTESTED RACES

Congress, 7th District: Democrat Randy Morris is a name on the ballot, little more. If Republican incumbent Marsha Blackburn is ever to be challenged, it won’t be this year.

Congress, 8th District: Democrat John Tanner, a blue-dog perennial from Union City, is all by himself on the ballot. Literally, no contest.

Congress, 9th District: Steve Cohen, the first-term Democratic incumbent who now hovers on the edge of national stardom, scored a 4-to-1 win over primary opponent Nikki Tinker, who made a serious, if misdirected, run at him.

by Jackson Baker

Kemp Conrad

None of the three opponents running as independents against him in the general can expect to do better. Not Dewey Clark, Mary Taylor-Shelby Wright, or Newton Jake Ford — though the latter has planted some prominent yard signs of late. Some of these bill him as “N.J. Ford,” which may stir echoes of his late grandfather, the founding patriarch of the well-known funeral home which bears his name. There is no evidence, however, that candidate Ford is drawing support from his extended family, still a political clan to be reckoned with.

State House of Representatives, District 86: For some reason, Republican George T. Edwards feels obliged to challenge Democratic incumbent Barbara Cooper every two years in this reliably Democratic inner-city district. It won’t work this year, either.

State House of Representatives, District 88: Another inner-city district — this one, like Cooper’s, mainly north-side — and another slam-dunk for the Democratic incumbent, Larry Miller. Independent David Vinciarelli‘s only hope was his legal challenge to Miller’s somewhat uncertain residential status, which failed. (Vinciarelli, who had the Republican endorsement in a previous race, was erroneously referred to as the Republican nominee in an earlier draft of this article. A spokesman insists that he shares some of the precepts of both parties.)

State House of Representatives, District 91: This centrally located district is the bailiwick of House Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry. Republican Tim Cook Jr. has negligible hopes.

State House of Representatives, District 93: Tim Cook Sr. has somewhat better prospects for the GOP against longtime Democratic incumbent Mike Kernell, whose son David Kernell, a student at UT-Knoxville, is currently under indictment for hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. Kernell has turned away many a challenger of yore, though, and should do so again.

City Council District 9, Position 1: There’s a real race on here in this special election to replace former councilman Scott McCormick, now president of the Plough Foundation. The main contestants are businessman Kemp Conrad and IBEW business manager Paul Shaffer. Conrad, who started with a wide lead, has official support from the GOP, and Shaffer from the Democrats, but the issue in a somewhat narrowing race will likely be decided by nonpartisan voters. Arnett Montague, an unknown, and former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham, a perennial, are not expected to figure.

Memphis School Board, At Large Position 1: Incumbent Freda Williams should be well-positioned to hold off challengers Menelik Chiremba Fombi and Cynthia A. Gentry.

COUNTY REFERENDA

Ordinance No. 364: This ordinance basically recreates, with more or less the same defined duties, the five positions — sheriff, trustee, assessor, register, and county clerk — which the state Supreme Court ruled did not qualify as constitutional offices on grounds of a technicality. Prospects for passage are good.

Ordinance No. 365: More controversial is this one, which establishes limits of two consecutive four-year terms for the five newly recreated offices. Though favored to prevail, the term-limits ordinance — and only it, along presumably with a companion referendum, City Charter Referendum No. 1, which prescribes similar limits for city officials — has been formally opposed by the Shelby County Democratic Party. Resistance to the term-limits provision among inner-city Democrats is so virulent that, in a controversy that still rages, some unauthorized person or persons succeeded in grafting a box onto the party’s published sample ballot stating opposition to all referendum items, city and county.

Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, a proponent of City Charter Referendum No. 5 (see below), had offered to defray the cost of affixing labels to the party’s sample ballot obscuring the offending box. But apparently copies of the original, unauthorized ballot were being passed out as recently as Sunday, at the Democratic rally mentioned earlier in this article.

CITY REFERENDA

Ordinance No. 5232: This ordinance allows for recall elections of City Council members on the basis of petitions bearing a number of qualified signatures equivalent to 10 percent of those voting in the preceding municipal election. The recall election would take place during the next succeeding general election and, if successful, would create a vacancy that would be filled by vote of the remaining council members.

Ordinance No. 5265: This would require all non-civil-service city employees, including members of city boards and commissions (the board of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art excepted) to live within the city limits of Memphis under pain of discharge. New employees would have six months to arrange compliance.

CITY CHARTER COMMISSION REFERENDA

2008 Referendum No. 1 (Term Limits): Establishes two consecutive four-year terms as the limits for the mayor, council members, and the city court clerk.

2008 Referendum No. 2 (Staggered Terms): Mandates staggered terms for the above offices and proposes a formula to begin the process with the elections of 2011. It also would cause future municipal elections to be held in even-numbered, rather than odd-number, years.

2008 Referendum No. 3 (regarding the potential sale of MLGW): Mandates that any such sale of the city utility or any of its facilities would require prior approval of city voters in a referendum.

2008 Referendum No. 4 (Suspension from Official Duties): Reads “Any elected or appointed official charged with or indicted for official malfeasance or misconduct shall be suspended with pay pending final resolution of the charge.”

2008 Referendum No. 5 (Instant Runoff Voting): Provides a mechanism whereby voters can list candidates in a multi-candidate race in order of preference, so that in cases short when one candidate doesn’t gain a majority, the rankings are weighted so as to produce a winner, obviating the need for a subsequent runoff election.

2008 Referendum No. 6 (Filling Vacancy in the Office of the Mayor): Provides that the City Council chairman, bearing the title of Mayor Pro Tem, shall fill any mayoral vacancy for as much as 180 days, after which another mayor will be elected, either by special election or in the next general election if it occurs within the 180-day period.

Categories
Cover Feature News

As the World Turns …

So we have gotten to the point that an actress playing a ditzy vice-presidential candidate can take turns before the camera with her look-alike — a vice-presidential candidate acting on TV — and it’s hard to tell the difference. Such was the case last weekend on Saturday Night Live when Tina Fey and Republican nominee Sarah Palin traded time on stage, Fey doing a send-up of Palin, and Palin sending up … well, Palin.

One of the skits had actor Alec Baldwin, a frequent host on the show, “mistaking” the real Alaska governor for the talented mime Fey doing an impression of Palin, whom Baldwin described as “that horrible woman,” the enemy of “all that we stand for.” Two weeks earlier on the same show, Fey had done a skit in which she, as Palin, babbled incoherently when asked about the nation’s ongoing financial crisis. Viewers who had earlier seen the actual candidate, asked the same question by CBS’s Katie Couric, babble the same disconnected talking points, realized that the two takes — the real and the fictional — overlapped to the point of being virtually identical.

Was it any wonder that “Palin” — or rather, Palin — winked at us in her nationally televised debate with Democratic counterpart Joe Biden (or someone we could only presume was the bona fide Joe Biden; the hair plugs looked like Biden’s, anyhow).

In other words, what is this? Prime time or the End Time? Is our political system devolving into soap opera? Or revolution?

The confusion isn’t just on the national scene. Consider this: A Memphis state representative, Democrat Mike Kernell, is running for reelection at a time when his son, 20-year-old UT student David Kernell, is under a federal felony indictment for hacking into the e-mail account of Sarah Palin (the real one). Some of the Alaska governor’s e-mails, gleaned from that account, were posted online, and, rather than smacking of high drama and political intrigue, they read like soap opera, one friend dishing to another.

Representative Kernell’s GOP opponent, a Memphis police officer named Tim Cook, responded to the Kernell family’s predicament with a statement that made one of the most rapid, self-canceling segues from concern to condemnation on record:

“When I heard the rumor that Mike Kernell’s son was the one responsible for hacking into the Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail, I was stunned. As a father, I sympathize with Mike Kernell and can understand what he is going through as a father. And I will pray for him and his family during this ordeal.

“However, this clearly shows what family values Democrat Mike Kernell has taught his children. It reflects the values of his 34 years as a state representative in and for the Democratic Party. These are not the type of values the citizens want in their representatives.”

Whereupon Cook went on to suggest a possible media conspiracy to ignore an alleged relationship between David Kernell and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.

Then there’s a nearby state Senate race going on in neighboring Tipton and Fayette counties featuring a candidate, Democrat Randy Camp, who’s trying to simultaneously fend off both his Republican challenger, Dolores Gresham, and his ex-wive and former in-laws, who are carrying on a letter-writing campaign against him based on his alleged former derelictions as a husband. (Something of the same kind already had befallen Ray Butler, a Republican candidate for Shelby County trustee, whose ex-wife publicly campaigned for Democrat Paul Mattila, the winner in August’s countywide general election.)

Down in Mississippi, a U.S. Senate race is going on between Republican Roger Wicker, an interim fill-in for the now retired Trent Lott, and Democrat Ronnie Musgrove, the state’s former governor. As Memphis-area TV viewers have noted, these white-haired bespectacled look-alikes have thrown a plethora of attacks at each other, ranging from Wicker’s accusation that Musgrove virtually bankrupted the state as governor to Musgrove’s charge that Wicker has done little more in office than vote repeatedly to raise his own pay.

The mud-slinging match has gotten so bad that, in the course of a recent televised debate between the two, a Tupelo journalist asked the candidates, former roommates when they both served in the Mississippi state Senate, how they could sleep at night.

Yet beneath all the tomfoolery and Jerry Springer-isms of the current election season, something very much in earnest is going on: a struggle for power that could determine the fate of municipalities, states, and nations.

That battle in Mississippi, for example, could be crucial in determining whether Democrats — who are certain, it is generally acknowledged, to enlarge their majority in the Senate — can reach the magic number of 60, which would empower them to vote closure on debate and render party initiatives filibuster-proof in the next session of Congress.

A vitally interested spectator is Democratic nominee Obama himself, whose plans for health-care legislation and his vaunted revisions of the tax code in favor of “95 percent of Americans” could well depend on the outcome. Ironically enough, Musgrove has been loath, just as Wicker has charged, to make an explicit endorsement of Obama or even to mention him by name. (His preferred formulation: “I will support all the nominees of my party.”) Even so, Musgrove’s case is Obama’s own, for the reasons stated — though it is also true that the two competing roomies not only look alike, they seem to think alike on a variety of issues, both considering themselves conversatives — especially on social issues like abortion and gun rights.

And that duke-out between Camp and Gresham in state Senate District 26? Forget the interventions of the in-laws. That’s essentially a sideshow. What’s really at stake is whether the Republicans will continue to control the state Senate in Tennessee, a state which seems to be running in a slightly different direction from the nation. (As one example of the phenomenon, incumbent U.S. senator Lamar Alexander is universally regarded as a shoo-in over the dogged if underfinanced Nashville lawyer and ex-Marine Bob Tuke, who carries the Democratic party standard against him.)

The District 26 seat is the one that was held for 44 years by John Wilder of Somerville, the retiring Titan who was dethroned by Republican Ron Ramsey of Blountville for the position of lieutenant governor back in January 2007. (The Democrats have since taken revenge of sorts on maverick Democrat Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville, who unexpectedly voted against the party grain to give Ramsey the edge over Wilder, after the state Democratic executive committee voted to nullify her narrow 19-vote primary victory this year over lawyer Tim Barnes — on the grounds that the outcome was “incurably uncertain” — the party committees in the three counties comprising District 26 promptly voted to make Barnes the nominee. Kurita, who did indeed have considerable Republican support, in lieu of an official GOP candidate, is running a long-odds write-in campaign.)

Should three crucial Senate contests, including District 26, go the Democrats’ way, the next state Senate speaker and lieutenant governor will almost certainly be current Senate Democratic leader Jim Kyle of Memphis. If even a single one of those races goes for the GOP, Ramsey’s Republicans will remain in charge.

The GOP, in fact, has theoretical chances of capturing the state House, as well, needing only a turnaround of four seats statewide to do so. Hence, the mild flurry of excitement in Republican ranks over the Kernell affair. Cook, however, seems to be getting less support from the party than a string of previous opponents did against Kernell — a deceptively laid-back progressive who has been undefeated for nigh on three decades.

Turning full cycle back to Sarah Palin: There is no doubt that the previously unknown governor from the far north is a personality, as cover-worthy on the nation’s supermarket tabloids as any misbehaving show-biz nymphet. There is also no doubt that she has, as all the analysts seem to agree, animated the Republican Party’s base. Where doubt exists is whether the candidate now identified with the apochryphal line “I can see Russia from my house” can see the newly grave and mounting national dilemmas clearly enough to serve should the Republicans’ main man, Arizona senator John McCain, be elected and subsequently prove unable, through death or disability, to continue as president.

That’s just one of the realities that lie behind the giddy public face of a campaign year that has all too often masqueraded as an entertainment.

(Next week in Politics: a run-through of selected races on the November ballot and their likely outcome)

Shelby Dems Go Ballistic:
The Case of the Contraband Ballot

Anybody who has attended a meeting of the Shelby County Commission since Sidney Chism got elected to it back in 2006 has no doubt where the former Teamster leader and onetime Democratic Party chairman stands on the issue of term limits for elected officials. Chism, whose normal mien is robust and affable, becomes hoarse and virtually apoplectic when the issue is even discussed, seeing it as a means whereby the future Republican minority in Shelby County (for such, virtually all observers concede, is the demographic prospect) intends forevermore to straitjacket and tame the Democratic majority.

Roger Wicker and Ronnie Musgrove

“This is the first time a majority has ever voluntarily handed over power to a minority” was Chism’s refrain countless times during the debates earlier this year that led to referenda featuring two different versions of term limits for Shelby County elected officials. The first variant of the idea — prescribing three four-year terms as the max for the county mayor, county commissioners, and five newly defined countywide offices — went on the August election ballot and represented something of a triumph for Chism, who had thundered vigorously whenever the subject of term limits came up.

He had something of a point. The commission, which devoted innumerable hours, considerable heat, and every now and then a modicum of light to the issue of charter revision last year and this, had never been enjoined to do or say anything about term limits. All the commission had been faced with, as a result of a January 2007 finding by the state Supreme Court, was a need to re-create in its charter the five offices — sheriff, trustee, assessor, register, and county clerk — which had been invalidated on a technicality by the court.

At length, during the course of many contentious meetings, augmented by a series of public forums, a plethora of other issues crept into discussions — term limits, a popular concept in the white Republican government-distrusting suburbs, prominent among them. Chism did his best to keep the issue off the ballot, and he and various commission allies — mainly Democratic and mainly black — did the next best thing in getting the three-term proposition on, especially since it would have raised the existing limits on future mayors and commissioners by a whole four-year term.

But that proposition lost in August, by a hair. And Chism and his allies had shot their wad. Try as they might, fulminate as they would, they could not prevent a commission majority, cowed by the August defeat of the relatively liberal three-term provision, from putting together a new series of referenda, including one imposing a stricter two-term limit on the five redefined county offices. The Shelby County mayor and the 13 members of the commission already were limited to two terms as the result of a 1994 referendum which, after the narrow failure of the August proposition, would remain in effect.

The term “ballistic” is probably too mild a descriptor for the state of mind this fact has induced in the Chism wing of the county commission and, equally importantly, of the Shelby County Democratic Party, whose steering committee is dominated by Chism partisans.

Fade to this past week, when the first of an estimated 60,000 copies of official party voter guides rolled off the presses at A-1 Print Services on Brooks Road and got seen by party cadres. The letter-sized, full-color sample ballot bore mugshots of the party’s nominees and endorsed candidates: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bob Tuke for U.S. Senate, Steve Cohen for Congress, etc., etc., through various legislative candidates and a candidate for the Memphis school board.

So far, nothing out of the ordinary. It’s the kind of thing both major political parties and various other organizations that endorse candidates do just before election time. Only one problem: Mixed in with the candidates’ portraits is a small but prominent box bearing the message: “Vote on Referendums/ SAY NO TO REFERENDUMS.

What did we say about the word “ballistic”? Reassign it to numerous aggrieved Democrats, both executive committee members and rank and file, who were never consulted about the all-encompassing wording and were now prepared to out-Chism Chism in their outrage. Not to mention the County Commission majority, who had worked all those months to put together a referendum package. Nor the seven members of the Memphis Charter Commission, who had labored even longer to put together a package of referenda revising the city charter.

“SAY NO TO REFERENDUMS”: That took in a lot of territory — two commission-approved options (one merely reestablishing the five redefined county offices, another establishing a two-term limit for them); two City Council ordinances (one laying down the conditions for recalling officials, another establishing revised residency requirements for certain classes of city employees); and six recommended revisions to the city charter proper.

Ironically, it is only these last six ballot options — all relating to the city charter — that each go by the name of “referendum.” The county term-limits provision so loathed by Chism and his cadres on the Democratic steering committee is termed an “ordinance.” Talk about drowning the baby with the bathwater! Here were nine other offspring going down the drain along with the targeted one.

Although much of the preliminary activity that resulted in the publication of the party ballot is still shrouded in mystery, the facts would seem to be these: At the September meeting of the full Democratic executive committee, a resounding majority of the members present voted to reject the ballot initiative for county term limits. At the October meeting of the party steering committee, which is the executive committee’s smaller governing core, county commissioner Steve Mulroy, the leading local proponent of city-charter referendum Number Five, pitched the initiative, which would approve an instant runoff formula for municipal elections. The issue was not approved, on the grounds, said party vice-chair Cherry Davis, that the steering committee had not had ample opportunity to study the initiative. Period. Those are apparently the only formal actions ever taken by an established organ of the Shelby County Democratic Party.

Who then approved the ballot with its mischievous box on “referendums”? Apparently not party chairman Keith Norman, who was handily reelected early this year despite widespread criticism of his absentee, hands-off style. It was Norman, in fact, who, along with Mulroy, called a press conference Monday to vent criticism of the suspect ballot. Typically, groused Norman’s critics, the chairman was a no-show at the press conference, which was presided over in his absence by city councilman and city charter commission chairman Myron Lowery, Mulroy, Councilman Shea Flinn, local NAACP chair Johnnie Turner, steering committee member Lynn Strickland, and former party chairman David Cocke.

Chism was the prime suspect as the prime mover of the unauthorized mystery ballot. It was party members close to him who delivered it to the printer. But the commissioner declined to take credit Monday, saying, “I had nothing to do with it. Didn’t even know about it. But I agree with it!”

What the protesting group at the press conference asked was that those copies of the sample ballot — the great remainder — that had not been passed out should have labels pasted over the offending box before being distributed. In a meeting of the steering committee that took place later Monday, various alternative actions were reportedly discussed, including an offer from Mulroy to foot the bill for the labels.

Some who were there described the steering committee meeting, in part, as a “bash Mulroy” session. That sentiment, such as it was, emanated from the Chism cadres, who apparently sought an apology from the commissioner for his part in voicing public dissent concerning the suspect ballot. Certainly Chism himself had earlier expressed himself adversely: “Who appointed Steve Mulroy to speak for Democrats?” he had said.

A resolution of sorts to this proverbial Mell of a Hess was finally reached at Monday night’s steering committee meeting. The committee voted to have one more press conference, presided over by Mulroy and Norman, which would clarify the fact that only one act of opposition — to the term-limits resoluion — had ever been resolved on by the Shelby County Democratic Party. And the committee did in fact accept Mulroy’s offer to pay for new labels, to be pasted over the offending boxes, pointing out that reality.

Nobody was certain what the effect of the brouhaha would be on voters contemplating the affected ballot provisions. The affair could result in their damnation. But it could equally well end in a backlash favoring the 10 referenda, city and county. Given that early voting is now well under way, either reaction is entirely possible.