Tag: Frank Nicely

Categories
At Large Opinion

No Column This Week

Photo: Redbaron | Dreamstime.com

Someone told me that I had two faults. One was that I didn’t listen, and the other was … I dunno, some crap they were rattling on about.

But I can’t worry about that. I’m under a lot of pressure here. You read this column hoping to be informed or entertained or outraged, perhaps to be brought up to speed on issues of the day. And this is week after week after week, mind you. I don’t get a break.

It’s not like I’m a comedian or a band on tour, with a new audience every night. Those people have it easy. They know what their audience likes. Play the hits. Tell that funny story about your brother-in-law. Soak in the applause. Hit the hotel bar. Job done. Piece of cake.

Not me, no sir. I have the same readers every week, and I can’t just rerun a column from three weeks ago that got a lot of Facebook likes and web traffic, no matter how brilliant it was. No, you people demand fresh material.

I know, it’s not like I don’t have subject matter. There’s an unspeakably horrible genocide happening in Europe, but I have no real insights there, other than to hope someone pushes Vladimir Putin out of a window soon.

I guess I could always rant about Tucker Carlson’s creepy and mostly traitorous television show on Fox News, which Russian television is running verbatim almost every night. This week, Tucker is claiming that American men are being “feminized” by the woke left and has been running a homoerotic promo video of sweaty, muscly shirtless guys swinging axes and other heavy items. He also discussed the possible testosterone-building benefits of testicle tanning with an “expert.” I’m not making this up. And this manly man does all this while sitting in a director’s chair, wearing a bow tie, khakis, and Weejuns loafers sans socks. Is it wrong that I want to punch his smug, entitled face with my woke little fist?

And I’ve already written at length about the GOP clowns who run the Tennessee legislature, the people whose primary concerns are hassling trans kids, setting up private schools with taxpayer money, and overturning Roe v. Wade. They do the latter under the guise of “protecting children,” but let’s be real: If they really cared about children, they’d expand Medicare (a gift from the feds), raise the minimum wage, enforce the clean air and water regulations, and quit making it legal for any mouth-breathing yahoo who can stand upright to carry a gun anywhere with no training or restrictions.

But, okay, since I’m here, knee-deep in writing about the Nashbillies, I’d be remiss in not mentioning the speech given last week by state Senator Frank Niceley. The senate was debating a patently unconstitutional bill that would keep homeless people from sleeping on public property — basically criminalizing homelessness — and Niceley decided he needed to give the chamber “a little lesson on homelessness.” Here’s how the speech began:

“[In] 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with citizens and then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books.” Homelessness, Niceley added, is “not a dead end.”

Indeed it is not. One can rise from homelessness to take over a country, found the Nazi party, start a world war, and murder millions of men, women, and children in gas chambers.

No doubt motivated by their colleague’s inspirational oratory, the Senate passed the homelessness bill, which makes sleeping on public property a Class E felony, and sent it on to Governor Bill Lee, who will no doubt sign it in Jesus’ name, amen. Because Jesus also hated poor people.

So, I think you see what I’m dealing with here. Trying to make enough sense of any of this to crank out a reasonably coherent column is just impossible this week. Sorry. I promise to do better next time.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

On the Docket: Bills Before the General Assembly Could Alter the Local Status Quo

CREDIT: TN State Senator Brian Kelsey

A persistent issue in Tennessee government is that of whether state law should trump the preferences of local jurisdictions. Two tests of the proposition are now before the General Assembly. One concerns Senate Bill 29 by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). Passed last week by the Senate and pending in House committee, the bill would strike down local residence requirements for first responders.

Another measure, House Bill 1280, by state Representative Tom Leatherwood (R-Arlington), would outlaw partisan primaries for judicial or local political offices in counties containing populations greater than 500,000 (Shelby County and Davidson County). This bill is now before the Senate State Local Government Committee and the House Elections and Campaign Finance Committee. In a preliminary committee vote, the Shelby County Commission voted 7-2 last week on a resolution to oppose the Leatherwood bill.

Joining other bar associations statewide, the Memphis Bar Association issued a statement on Friday “strongly condemning” a Republican-backed Tennessee House resolution that would initiate a process to remove Nashville Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle from office. House Resolution 23 (HR 23), said the MBA, “is as undemocratic as it is dangerous and flatly forbidden by the separation of powers principles enshrined in the Tennessee Constitution.”

The resolution, sponsored by state Representative Tim Rudd (R-Murfreesboro), has numerous GOP signers in the state House, and at least one Republican state Senator, Frank Nicely of Strawberry Plains, has indicated he will sponsor an equivalent resolution in his chamber.

TN State Senator Brian Kelsey

Ruling on a suit last year by Up the Vote 901, a Memphis group, and the state ACLU, Lyle ordered state absentee voting restrictions relaxed to allow universal mail-in voting in view of the ongoing pandemic. The state appealed, and her order was later modified somewhat by the state Supreme Court, but it resulted in the acknowledgment of COVID-19 as a factor weighing in favor of an absentee-voting application.

• It is hard to believe that I won’t get to see Drew Daniel again. Although he had become 40-something and thereby ineligible to be a member of the Young Republicans, he was given permanent status as “honorary elder” by that local group even as he rose in estimation among his party’s seniors, winning their Statesman Award in 2019 for the 9th Congressional District.

Though he was a legacy Republican from an established GOP family, he was an almost archetypal version of the youthful political activist — the eternal volunteer and doorbell-ringer — idealistic, dedicated, in for the outreach as well as the fellowship. He was somehow untarnished by the seamier, cynical side of politics and utterly uninvolved with anything slashing or over-ideological.

Drew died over the weekend, and this came as a total surprise to many who knew him. He apparently suffered from diabetes, a disease that, it would seem, figured in his demise. Granted, he was physically frail in appearance, though appearances could be deceiving. He was a runner and was used to running 10 miles a day. As recently as the big snow, he kept to that pace while the rest of us were shivering in our blankets. I always enjoyed seeing Drew on my political rounds. He was the sincerest and best kind of citizen, and as likable as anybody I’ve ever known. I don’t know how many friendships he had across party lines, but he deserved to have many.

• Former Memphian Hendrell Remus, who was recently elected chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, will have a homecoming of sorts on Wednesday, March 24th, when he becomes the guest speaker, via Zoom, for the Germantown Democratic Club, an unusually active group that is resuming its pattern of regular meetings, suspended during the pandemic, and hopes to be resuming in-person meetings in short order.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Irony Week

Every so often, like a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live, there is talk from this administration about an “Infrastructure Week” — several days (one presumes) where the focus would be on improving the nation’s bridges and power grid and highways and such. It never works out, mainly because nothing survives in the news cycle longer than 24 hours these days, least of all “news” about fixing bridges. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

On the few occasions the administration has trotted out this gambit, events have always intervened — a fresh scandal, an errant tweet, some children getting put in cages, the president insulting a foreign leader, a new mass shooting, a “riot,” an invading “caravan,” golf, you name it. The truth is, you can’t really name a week after anything any more, but I’m going to try anyway. Even if it’s just in hindsight. I’m declaring the past seven days as “Irony Week.”

Let’s begin with Major League Baseball, which, after much wrangling with players, management, and owners, finally came up with a plan for a much-shortened, 60-game season. All the players would be regularly tested. Games would be played in empty stadiums. Sure, teams would be flying all over the country and maybe walking through airports and staying in hotels, but hey, it’s going to be great. Baseball is back, baby! (Except Canada won’t let teams play in Toronto’s stadium, because Americans are kinda, well, not welcome to fly into anywhere these days.)

That plan lasted five days before a dozen members of the Florida (duh) Marlins came down with the virus. Several games were canceled, but MLB officials said the season would go on. Because, surely, this won’t happen again. Play ball!

Things were a little better over in the NBA, where teams deemed worthy of playoff contention were put into a “bubble” at Walt Disney World in Orlando to finish the season that was aborted in March. Players and officials are not allowed into the outside world: no travel, no airports, no chance of the disease wrecking the season. Except for when, oops, the league let L.A. Clippers guard Lou Williams leave the bubble to attend a funeral in Atlanta and Lou decided he needed some wings from the Magic City strip club before returning. Which is pretty much peak-NBA.

Williams got a 10-day quarantine, and surely nothing like that will ever happen again. Ever. But just to be safe, the NBA should go ahead and construct a strip club at Walt Disney World. Call it the Magic Kinkdom. Or is that taken?

National COVID expert Deborah Birx was in Nashville this week. You may know Dr. Birx as the “scarf lady” because of her seemingly boundless stash of neck-wraps, which she uses to cover her face when the president says something stupid about COVID. I kid. Anyway, the good doctor was in Tennessee to urge mayors to mandate the wearing of masks in their cities because (after weeks of push-back) the Trump administration has finally recognized what their own Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has been saying for weeks: Masks help flatten the curve and control the spread of COVID.

Standing next to her on the podium was our own Governor Bill Lee, who at that very moment could have backed up Birx’ suggestion to the mayors of his state. But he didn’t because he’s a right-wing ideologue who thinks people should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to wear masks in public. You might say he’s pro-choice when it comes to masks. And you might say he’s an idiot.

Speaking of … You may have missed Tennessee state Senator Frank Nicely’s attempt at Twitter humor this week. He went after the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposed to Trump’s re-election. “The only thing you have in common with Lincoln,” Nicely wrote, “is the make of the car in the parking lot …” Semi-solid dad-joke burn. 

I wondered if Nicely had a history with the Lincoln Project, so I googled “Nicely, Lincoln” and the first articles to come up were about Nicely claiming that Abraham Lincoln liked cock-fighting. Turns out that Nicely is a big fan of forcing roosters to claw each other to death with razor-like spurs and cited Lincoln as a co-cock-fighting cognoscenti. All I can say is that if you google yourself and the first reference is to “cock-fighting,” you’ve got problems. Also, for the record, Nicely lied. Lincoln wasn’t into cock-fighting.

Other short takes from Irony Week: Arkansas state senator, homophobe, and COVID hoaxer Jason Rapert came down with a serious case of the virus this week. Hopefully, he’ll have some nice LGBTQ nurses and doctors in the hospital with him to help him recover from the hoax.

Billionaire creep Elon Musk, whose wealth has gone up $46 billion in the past four months, often with help from state and federal incentives, tweeted that “another government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the American people.”

And the CDC, which had sensible guidelines in place for when schools should reopen, was forced by the administration to issue a boilerplate statement urging the nation’s schools to reopen, no matter what. Another once-respected federal agency gutted and turned into a political tool. Remember that National Weather Service map with Trump’s sharpie-drawn hurricane path? Yeah, like that.

Finally, Irony Week would not be complete without pointing out the strange phenomenon of a president who felt it necessary to spend time in three television interviews bragging about how he “aced” a dementia test.

Man. Woman. Person. Camera. TV. Irony.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Nicely Doubts Alexander, Corker Could be Nominated by GOP Legislative Caucus

CREDIT: JB

Senators Alexander (l), Corker

  • Senators Alexander (l), Corker

NASHVILLE — Though he disclaims that his now dormant proposal for the state legislature to nominate U.S. Senate candidates is aimed at Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, state Senator Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains) is doubtful that either incumbent, both of whom he considers moderates, would pass muster with Republicans in the state legislature if they had to seek renomination from the GOP caucus.

“They both have 62 percent records voting with Obama, they voted for bail-outs, they voted for tax increases. I’m not sure they would, “ he said.

Joking about the non-existence of a book with the title “Great Moderates in American History, “ Nicely said, “If there was such a book, Lamar and Corker would be in it.”

(Asked about Nicely’s proposal during a visit to Memphis on Wednesday, Corker said he thought he knew the people of Tennessee as well as anybody, and, noting that, by his reckoning, some 650,000 people had voted in the state’s last U.S. Senate primary, said, “I don’t think Tennesseans would take very well to their right to vote being taken away.” And, Corker said, there would at present be all of 29 Democrats in the legislature to make their party’s nomination for U.S. Senate. “Just think about it.”)

In protesting that his aim was to restore power to the state and not to take the vote away from its people, Nicely contrasted the import of his proposal with the actions of three recent Tennessee governors, whom he took issue with: “We’re not doing like McWherter, who took away electing directors of schools, Sundquist took away our right to elect public service commissioners, Haslam appears to be taking away our right to elect Supreme Court judges and appellate judges. They’re actually taking away your right to vote.”

Nicely has been widely quoted as decrying a number of wicked things that he thinks happened in 1913 — the 17th Amendment, subjecting U.S. Senates to direct popular vote, of course. “Then we got the central bank that Jefferson had warned against [the Fed], more dangerous to liberty than a standing army, and Jakcson actually abolished the second U.S. bank in 1830….The bankers tried to kill him. But, anyway,we got the central bank back in 1913 and the dollar’s lost 90 percent of its purchasing power. A case of the bankers debasing our currency.”

He qualifies his Constitutional quibbles somewhat, though. “A lot of amendments I agree with — women’s suffreage, for example. The one I really agree with is the repeal of prohibition.” He laughs. “That’s one of my favorites.”

Besides the controversy over his proposal to tweak the 17th Amendment, Nicely generated some recent controversy in claiming that Abraham Lincoln was a defender of cockfighting. And he took part in a bizarre debate in the Senate Thursday over the issue of which pledge of allegiance should come first.

State Senator Stacey Canpfield (R-Knoxville) challenged the current order has the federal pledge first and the state pledge after, contending that “the American flag takes precedence over all other flags” and that the Senate should “highlight:” the pledge to the American flag by saving it for last.

Senator Doug Henry (D-Nashville) considered Campfield “technically” right but objected that it “pained” him to see the Tennessee flag “dipped” to the American flag, something Henry thought should never be.

Speaker Ramsey asked Nicely his opinion, and Nicely cited Robert E. Lee as having considered himself a Virginian first and an American second., concluding, “If Robert E. Lee was a Virginian first and an American second, I’m a Tennessean first and an American second.”

###

Frank Nicely in Nashville

  • JB
  • Frank Nicely in Nashville

A NOTE ON FRANK NICELY, who has figured more than once this week by more than one observer and for more than one reason as emblematic of the Looney Tunes aspect of the current Tennessee legislature.

Frank Nicely is one of those people who is seen one way by the outside world and another way by the people who know him up close. Yes, he’s got some outré opinions and some of them are close to the stuff that comes out of the ALEC handbook. But he is not reciting anything by rote. He’s a genuine populist, though of the right-wing —variety.

But he is personally a very tolerant man. I first encountered him back in 2002 when he was going around as the everyday helper of gubernatorial candidate Jim Henry, a bona fide moderate Republican. Henry (now serving as Bill Haslam’s new-broom director of Children’s Services, charged with redeeming that scandal-plagued agency) was urged into the Republican primary race that year as an antidote to hard-right candidate Van Hilleary by Don Sundquist, the outgoing Republican governor.

Sundquist had virtually been excommunicated by his party for the dual sins of upholding TennCare and vigorously pushing for some sort of progressive tax reform, up to and including a state income tax. Henry had similar views. Beyond much doubt, Frank Nicely didn’t, and he let Henry know it. “I’d work on him all day long, and I’d think I had him going right, and he’d waffle on me every time,” Nicely told me in a post-adjournment conversation this week, chuckling and shaking his head. It seemed clear that what he had been trying so hard to get into the governor’s office was Henry’s character, not his platform.

Hilleary won the primary, of course, to be shaded out in the general election by Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat who turned out to be more conservative in some ways than Jim Henry might have been. (Bredesen wasted no time cutting TennCare down to size, for one thing, and, having spent most of the previous couple of years second-guessing Sundquist on taxes, promptly took the income tax off the table and imposed Draconian across-the-board cuts in every state agency.)

Two years later, Nicely, who had served In the state House of Representatives from 1988 to 1992, ran again for the House and served there from 2005 to January of this year, when, having won a state Senate race last year, he took the oath and tripped over to the other chamber.

In 2006, Nicely went to work for Bob Corker, a U.S. Senate candidate seen by the GOP’s right wing as another moderate [see main story, above]. Hilleary and Ed Bryant, both of whom pitched to the Right, were the Republican alternatives that year. Nicely told me this week he had a certain affinity for Corker’s Democratic opponent, Harold Ford Jr., whom he regarded as being more or less acceptable had Ford been elected.

In the legislature, meanwhile, Nicely has followed his natural bent and materialized as a state’s right Constitutionalist. That’s how he would put it, anyhow. In practice, he votes a lot with the arch-conservatives. Returning to the House the same year that Brian Kelsey began to serve there, he and the Germantown legislator generally saw eye to eye on issues, but It is no secret that Nicely disapproved of what he saw as Kelsey’s showboating.

I don’t know a single Capitol Hill reporter or legislator, of whatever stripe, who doesn’t like Nicely or respect him for his sincerity. He’s not afraid to buck the tide. Back last year, during the first run-through of guns-in-parking-lots legislation favored by the N RA, Nicely was an opponent, contending, ““If a property owner tells someone you can’t bring a yo-yo on his property, much less a gun, you can’t bring it on that property.”

All that said, he is good fodder for the wags and fair game. After Newtown, he was one of those proposing armed guards in classrooms. He was apparently a birther in good standing. There is this 17th Amendment thing, and the cockfighting, and….Well, there’s a bunch of stuff. Again, he’s fair game. But he’s also fair-minded, and he won’t take it personally.

I think.

— JB

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