Tag: gerrymandering

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Politics Politics Feature

Showdown!

JB Smiley (Photo: City of Memphis)

It is no accident that many savants in the legal/political universe regard the 1962 Baker v. Carr decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to be second to none among landmark judicial decisions.

This decision was brought on by a suit from Charles Baker, chairman of what was then the Shelby County Court, precursor of the present Shelby County Commission. On behalf of Shelby County, rapidly urbanizing at the time, as was the nation as a whole, Baker sought relief from un-democratic districting guidelines imposed by the state of Tennessee that unduly favored the state’s rural population.

The court held in essence that the Fourteenth Amendment required that the principle of one person-one vote be applied in the determination of legislative district lines.

While the decision had immediate and lasting repercussions on determining matters of voter eligibility, both in Tennessee and elsewhere in the nation, it has by no means eliminated gerrymandering based on partisan politics (e.g. witness the Republican legislative supermajority’s strip-mining away of Democratic Party rights in Nashville’s Fifth Congressional District), nor has it much diminished the edgy relationship between urban and rural interests in policy-making.

The latter issue has flared up again in the quarrel over whether Memphis voters should be allowed to vote their preference on several gun-control measures embedded in a referendum proposed by the city council but now endangered by the action of the county Election Commission in removing it from the November ballot.

In so acting, the Election Commission — dominated 3-2 by GOP members according to state mandate — has clearly responded to overt threats from the state’s Republican leadership to withhold from the city some $78 million in state revenues, if the referendum should go through as scheduled.

This was some of the “stiff resistance” promised by House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who articulated things this way: “Local governments who want to be progressive and evade state laws will lose shared sales tax funding.” The speaker likened the city’s referendum plans to “subversive attempts to adopt sanctuary cities [and] allow boys in girls’ sports.” 

Some Memphians were expressing concern that the state’s retribution could also be visited on various large local projects dependent on previously pledged state subsidies, like those involving the zoo, FedExForum, and Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium.

It is worth recalling the actual import of the endangered referendum, authorized earlier by the council’s unanimous vote. In the words of its chief sponsor Councilman Jeff Warren, “Memphis voters will be asked whether they approve amending the city’s charter to require a handgun permit, restrict the storage of guns in vehicles in many cases, ban assault weapons sales after January 1, 2025, and enact extreme risk protection orders, sometimes called Red Flag Laws.”

All the referendum would do is solicit voter opinion, it would seem. Sexton chooses to see it otherwise, as a direct challenge to state authority.

Whichever interpretation is correct, the ongoing confrontation between city and state over a host of policy matters, of which gun safety is only one, is rising to fever pitch, as evidenced the rhetoric employed last week by Council Chair JB Smiley and various supportive council members, who announced their intent to sue the Election Commission to reinstate the ballot measure.

“Memphis has been shot and is bleeding out,” said Councilwoman Jerri Green. “We won’t back down, and we damn sure won’t be bullied,” proclaimed Smiley.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young meanwhile seemed to be trying to position himself at the nonexistent calm center, saying he understood the council’s “frustration” but expressing the view that the referendum ultimately would be “futile.” 

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News News Blog News Feature

Progressives Ponder Impact of Gerrymandering Ruling On Tennessee Election Maps

State Capitol (Photo: Tennessee State Government)

The fate of two of Tennessee’s state election maps could get a ruling in the coming weeks, while a potential lawsuit could challenge Congressional drawings after a favorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Lawyers in a suit challenging the the legality of 2022 state House and Senate redistricting maps submitted their post-trial briefs to the Davidson County Chancery at the end of May, signifying the conclusion of the trial. 

The trial ended days before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled an Alabama Congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act on the grounds of illegal gerrymandering meant to lower the chances of the state electing a second Black U.S. Representative. 

But while the ruling likely opens the door for Democrats in states like Louisiana and South Carolina to challenge those maps on similar grounds, a similar case will be tougher in Tennessee —  even as the ruling has increased the likelihood of a lawsuit. 

The argument from Republicans is these maps are not racially charged, but political. As long as there’s no evidence that the people in the room who are making these decisions were talking about race, then you have very little to go on.

– Lisa Quigley, former chief of staff for retired U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper

Breaking decades of precedent, Republicans divided Nashville into three Congressional districts as part of the 2021 redistricting process. Previously, Metro Nashville-Davidson County made up most of the 5th Congressional District, with smaller counties such as Cheatham or part of Rutherford filling it out.

The change gave Republicans the necessary rural votes to flip the historically Democratic 5th District and played a significant role in helping the GOP secure a four-seat majority in the U.S. House. 

Progressive organizations in Tennessee have started discussing whether the Alabama decision would allow them to reverse the Nashville gerrymander. Tennessee’s Black population makes up about 17 percent of the state, while one of the state’s nine Congressional districts (or roughly 11 percent) is considered a majority-minority district.

These groups believe a Nashville kept intact creates a Democratic seat, but it wouldn’t necessarily create a majority-minority district leaving it in a gray area under federal voting laws.

Lisa Quigley,  former chief of staff for retired Nashville Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, said the long-term success of the recently redrawn congressional districts could come down to an argument of politics versus race.

“The argument from Republicans is these maps are not racially charged, but political,” Quigley said. “As long as there’s no evidence that the people in the room who are making these decisions were talking about race, then you have very little to go on.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has previously ruled gerrymandering for political purposes is allowed.

State House and Senate map challenges

The current state House and Senate map legal challenges don’t accuse Tennessee Republicans of racial bias, instead arguing lawmakers violated a set of federal and state map drawing requirements. 

Gary Wygant of Gibson County challenged the state House map on the grounds it violated state and federal redistricting laws by dividing up more counties than necessary, while Francie Hunt of Nashville challenged the state Senate map based on a provision in the state constitution requiring districts to be numbered in sequential order inside a county. 

As an example, Republicans drew Sen. Mark Pody’s, R-Lebanon, Senate District 17 seat into Davidson County, whose other three Senators — Democrats Heidi Campbell, Charlane Oliver and Jeff Yarbro represent districts 19, 20 and 21.  

Democrats have argued the state House map could have divided fewer counties, which would potentially boost Democratic chances of picking up more legislative seats. After redistricting, Republicans increased their majority in the state House from 71 to 75 seats. 

Lawyers defending the maps argued the map split no more than the maximum allowed under the law.

A new map in the Senate could impact Republicans Kerry Roberts, Shane Reeves, or Bill Powers, potentially making one of their districts more competitive. 

Last year, the Tennessee Supreme Court overruled a lower court decision temporarily blocking the map because it said the concerns were too minor to risk impacting the 2022 midterm elections. 

A court ruling could force Republicans to redraw the maps before next year’s elections, which they could do during the August 21 special session called by Gov. Bill Lee.

The Wygant-Hunt briefs: GARY WYGANT – Plaintiff’s Post Trial Brief
gary wygant – defendant’s post trial brief

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.

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At Large Opinion

The Quiet Part

The Ninth District: Note phallic incursion from 2010 redistricting. (Photo: courtesy Congressman Steve Cohen)

Maybe you saw this quote last week, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud while defending the defeat of the Voting Rights Act in the Senate: “African-American voters,” he warbled, “are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Never mind that McConnell apparently believes African Americans aren’t actual Americans, like, you know, white people. And never mind that the bills his party is passing in GOP-controlled states around the country are intended to change that pesky situation before the next election rolls around. McConnell is intentionally glossing over the fact that the Voting Rights Act would have outlawed the implementation of these undemocratic new laws, and that every Republican Senator voted against it — as did two hypocrites calling themselves Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

Since the 2020 election, dozens of restrictive voting laws have been enacted in 19 states, laws that supposedly remedy “voter fraud” (which didn’t happen) but that have the actual purpose of making voting more difficult for poor people and people of color — who just coincidentally tend to vote for Democrats.

You don’t have to look any further than Nashville for a perfect example of how far the GOP is willing to go to establish a permanent and overwhelming majority. Last week, the Tennessee Senate Judiciary and House State Government committees approved three redistricting plans for new state House, state Senate, and Congressional maps, which are drawn every decade after the federal census to reshape state and federal districts, if necessary, to ensure equity at the polls.

The new Republican-created Tennessee maps are a joke at all three levels, a mugging of democracy in plain sight. Newly configured districts in and around Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville are designed to break up neighborhoods and Democratic voting strongholds in urban areas, especially Black communities. The new maps pit Black and Democratic incumbents against each other in four instances at the state representative level and give Republicans a huge numerical advantage in eight out of nine of Tennessee’s Congressional districts. That’s an 11 percent representation in Congress for Democrats, who made up 41 percent of the vote in the most recent statewide election.

The lone outlier is Tennessee’s Ninth District, represented by Congressman Steve Cohen, but it’s not for lack of trying. After the 2010 census (in what was widely seen as a direct skewering of Cohen), the GOP took a literally phallic-shaped piece out of the Ninth that just so happened to include Cohen’s place of worship in East Memphis and a large surrounding Jewish neighborhood. To balance the population math, the GOP added a large chunk of Tipton County to the Ninth, meaning Cohen now represents a disparate melange of rural, inner-city, and suburban voters. This isn’t just unfair to Cohen (or whoever the Ninth District representative may be in the future); it’s unfair to all the residents of the district, who deserve to be represented by someone who reflects their concerns and values. The Republicans, it appears, would prefer it if Memphis residents found themselves being represented by a Republican turd farmer from Atoka.

But compared to Nashville, Memphis got off easy. The Fifth District — represented by Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, and which currently encompasses most of Nashville and Davidson County — will now encompass parts of five (count ’em!) counties. The city’s vote will be split and allocated to three rural-majority districts. Meaning Nashville’s urban residents will soon more than likely be represented by three Republican turd farmers.

This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work. Our elected representatives shouldn’t be allowed to create districts specifically designed to keep them — and their party — in office. Geographic political districts — at every level — should be created by bipartisan commissions, not party hacks. And yes, I know gerrymandering has been done by Democrats as well. The point is that it’s wrong, no matter who does it, and that we had in our hands a bill that would have eliminated all this cheating, that would have kept states from arbitrarily reducing the number of polling places in certain districts or shortening voting periods or, for god’s sake, banning the dispensing of water to voters in line.

In our system, unfettered democracy is supposed to be a feature, not a bug. But unfortunately, that’s not how the Republicans see it these days.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

GOP Congressional Lines Fragment Memphis and Nashville

Based on the redistricting information revealed by Republicans in the General Assembly the past day or two, numerous voters in Tennessee’s two largest cities may experience disappointment ranging from the irksome to the extreme.

Under the GOP plan, negative reaction is most likely to be felt in the 5th Congressional District, which has consisted to this point of Nashville/Davidson, Dickson County, and part of Cheatham County. The city of Nashville, which is the site of the State Capital, is roughly the same size as Memphis, population-wise, and is profoundly Democratic in its voting habits, would be fragmented in a map backed by the Republican supermajority and spun off into three districts, all of which have had substantial Republican voting patterns. Gone will be the city’s unity, both politically and geographically.

No demographic data from Census 2020 made this necessary, as state Rep. Bob Clement (D-Nashville) and a surrogate for U.S. Representative Jim Cooper (D-Nashville) made obvious, in presenting two redistricting plans that kept Nashville whole while conforming to the requirements of the census data. The essentials of those two plans were contained in a new Democratic proposal to be made public on Thursday.

Clearly, the motive of the Republican majority on the redistricting committee was to gain the upper hand, politically, for the GOP in one of the few areas where its impact has been relatively minimal.

Despite complaints from Freeman and two Shelby County Democrats (Reps. Antonio Parkinson and Karen Camper) that for most members of the House, where the proposal was unveiled, there had been no advance transparency, the GOP majority eschewed extended discussion and voted the new map on to further committees and, in what is likely to be short order, to consideration on on the House and Senate floor.

As Parkinson and Camper made clear, the GOP plan will create discontent in Shelby County as well. On the proposed congressional map, the new 9th District is enlarged in size, as anticipated, to compensate for its stagnated population figures relative to the state as a whole. But the district keeps to its present dimensions in the county itself (the green line in illustration) while expanding northward to take in the whole of Tipton County, a rural and GOP-dominated area that was formerly in the 8th District.

In routing the 9th in that direction, the Republican framers of the map disdained the opportunity to extend the district’s borders eastward to regain parts of eastern Shelby County, including a large Poplar Corridor segment in East Memphis, which were gouged out of the 9th in the previous post-2010 redistricting. To do ask would have reunified the city of Memphis in a single district.

Two scenarios for legislative redistricting have now been made public by the GOP supermajority — those affecting the state House of Representatives and the state’s congressional districts. Plans for the state Senate will be unveiled on Thursday.

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Politics Politics Feature

Gerrymandering Shelby

The proposed new House District 93, one of several salamander-shaped ones. (Photo: Tennessee State Government)

Within the week, a newly reconvened General Assembly will consider new district lines for the state House of Representatives, the state Senate, and the state’s congressional delegation.

As of this writing, only the outlines of the proposed new House have been revealed, though the same general principles will doubtless hold for the Senate and congressional seats.

To go by the legislative Republicans’ previously released House map, the boundary lines of districts are not geopolitical; that is, they do not reflect obvious community clusters and contiguous territories as such.

They are political only in the electoral sense. They represent an effort to maximize the power of the GOP supermajority at the expense of the opposition, Democrats. They zig and zag across community lines, splitting ethnically cohesive population areas as deemed necessary to accomplish that purpose. In other words, they are gerrymandered.

The word “gerrymander” derives from the name of one Elbridge Gerry, who, according to Wikipedia’s account, “as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.”

Several of the GOP’s proposed new House districts in Shelby County run west to east and have an arguable resemblance to the shape of a salamander. (See illustration.)

The root fact of the next House delegation from Shelby County is that it will number 13 members, as against the current 14. In one sense, the change is accounted for by the proposed transfer of House District 90, currently represented by freshman Democrat Torrey Harris, to Middle Tennessee. Harris’ abode is now in District 91, represented by fellow Democrat London Lamar.

That the county was to lose one of its existing representatives was made inevitable by the continuing shift of population density from West to Middle Tennessee, as revealed by the 2020 census.

But, whereas the Shelby County population in the decade of the 2020s will be measurably more African-American than that of the previous decade — an estimated 54.3 percent as of now, compared to the earlier 51.2 percent — the ratio of Democratic districts to Republican ones seems certain to be less rather than greater.

This is despite the fact of the well-documented proclivity of Shelby County’s Black population to vote Democratic rather than Republican.

In other words, the GOP legislative supermajority, whose votes will determine the final district lines, will ensure that Shelby County’s majority party, the Democrats, will bear the sacrifice of the lost House seat, not the minority Republicans.

This is the opposite situation from that, say, of the newly reapportioned 13-member Shelby County Commission, where the existing Democratic majority of eight voted in favor of a new map likely to increase the number of Democrats to nine.

Like they say, politics is politics.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ordains that the number of “minority majority” (i.e., Black) districts cannot be reduced within a specific area. Accordingly, the number of such districts in Shelby County, nine, will be the same, though one of the nine will be the reapportioned District 96, represented now by a white candidate, Democrat Dwayne Thompson. Black Shelby County residents will have gained a slim population majority in the new district, though the popular Thompson has good chances for re-election as the county’s only white Democrat in the House.

Regardless of how that turns out, there will be one fewer House Democrat from Shelby County, and very possibly one fewer Black Democrat.

The Democrats will very likely turn to the courts for potential redress.

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Opinion Viewpoint

How to Fix Our Broken Electoral System

Every presidential election season spawns calls for reform of our rickety, antiquated system for electing presidents and representatives. In light of recent events, the urgency has never been greater. Here are some options to consider that would fix our problems.

Electoral College: Take the Electoral College. (Please.) Under our Constitution, state legislatures have exclusive power regarding the Electoral College. Any federal legislation to the contrary would be unconstitutional.

You could consider having states allocate Electoral College votes by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do. But all that’ll do is import the pathologies of gerrymandering into the presidential election.

Steve Mulroy

Or states could allocate Electoral College votes pro rata, based on each candidate’s share of the statewide vote, rather than on the current winner-take-all basis. But this is only a slight improvement. It would still make a vote in Wyoming mathematically worth three times as much as a vote in California (because each state gets two Electoral votes, regardless of its population). More fundamentally, it would still allow a candidate with more nationwide votes to lose to a candidate with fewer. (These same two criticisms also apply to the Maine/Nebraska approach.)

And, as I explain in my book, Rethinking U.S. Election Law, mathematically, it would still allow a small number of large states to dominate the campaign and get outsized attention in governance, as they do now. Because most states have a small number of Electoral College votes (average is 11, median is 7), even the most aggressive campaign effort could only change one Electoral vote in most states. So the incentive would still be to focus on a few big states with 20 or more Electoral votes and ignore the rest.

Better is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (nationalpopularvote.com), an agreement among state legislatures to award their state’s Electoral votes to the nationwide winner regardless of the vote count in their own state. This makes every vote in the U.S. mathematically equal to every other. Swing states won’t dominate, no one is ignored, and a candidate with fewer nationwide votes can’t beat out someone with more.

Within the last 10 years, 14 states representing 196 Electoral College votes have signed on to the Compact. They’re now 70 percent of the way toward the goal of 270 Electoral votes, at which point the Compact takes effect and the Electoral College is rendered harmless.

Gerrymandering: That “proportionate share” approach works better as a solution to gerrymandering. Nonpartisan redistricting commissions should become de rigueur. We’re the only advanced democracy that still lets politicians draw their own district lines. Voters don’t choose their representatives — it’s the other way around.

But because of “the Big Sort,” with Democrats overconcentrated in big cities, even the best such commissions can’t avoid “natural gerrymanders” that result whenever you superimpose single-member district lines and winner-take-all elections onto the unruly, demographically clustered populations of the U.S.

You still have a “skew,” which allows a party’s share of seats in the House to deviate significantly from its share of the overall vote. And you still have an overwhelming number of “safe” Republican and Democratic districts, where the only real competition is in the primaries. This incentivizes candidates to move to the extremes of left and right to avoid being “primaried,” with no real incentive to work across the aisle on constructive compromise.

Even better would be at-large or multi-member district elections using Proportional Representation, where 40 percent of the vote nets 40 percent of the seats. This would help Republicans in New York and Democrats in Mississippi get their fair share of representation; make all elections competitive with high turnout; and end gerrymandering once and for all.

The Fair Representation Act, currently pending in Congress, would give states the option to go this route, which has worked well in Australia for 60 years and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 80. (The multi-member districts would be drawn by nonpartisan commissions, but instead of a single winner-take-all election, three to five members would be elected at once, with each party getting its proportionate share of seats. And because the elections would use Ranked Choice Voting, where voters could choose their first, second, and third choices, third parties would have a decent shot at getting at least some representation.)

In conclusion, our electoral system needs real fixes. Now is the time to consider them.

Steve Mulroy teaches election law at the University of Memphis law school. He is a former Shelby County commissioner and Voting Section lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Squaring the Circle Game

CREDIT: Cammeraydave | Dreamstime.com

As I predicted would be the case last week, we still don’t have a concession from President Donald Trump, who by the Associated Press’ most recent accounting, lost the popular vote by more than 5 million and will lose the Electoral College vote 306 to 232. That Trump hasn’t conceded yet isn’t a great surprise, by now. He’s made his bones by breaking all the conventional traditions of the presidency — common sense and common decency being two of them.

But the fact that the president of the United States can petulantly declare that math is unfair and do his best to screw up a peaceful transition of power is a clear indication that the way we’re electing our president is broken.

Cammeraydave | Dreamstime.com

For starters, any “democratic” system in which a candidate who gets 5 million more votes than the opposing candidate could still lose an election, is absurd. Additionally, any representative system in which the state of Wyoming, which has about half the population of Shelby County, has as many U.S. senators as the state of California with nearly 40 million people, is royally screwed up.

Much of this stems from the decision made at the original Constitutional Convention in 1787 to give each state two senators regardless of population. It was probably a good idea at the time, with 13 relatively similarly sized states. But not so much in 2020, with 50 far-flung states, some with huge populations, some with more cattle than people. Indeed, as things stand today, a cow in South Dakota is much better represented in the U.S. Senate than a human being in New York or Florida. This makes the Senate deeply unrepresentative of the American people and puts Democrats and urban Americans at a major disadvantage, since Democrats tend to represent more highly populated states while Republicans more often represent rural states.

The Republican “majority” in the U.S. Senate currently represents about 47 percent of the American people, which means a mostly white, conservative, rural-based minority party is in control of the levers of power in our most powerful political body. And remember, Donald Trump came close to winning the presidency again with 47 percent of the vote! Sense a pattern here?

We have to fix this.

Every four years, the cry goes up to abolish the Electoral College, which most recently has made possible the minority elections of George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. But it seems to me the problem isn’t so much the Electoral College itself, but the rule that “winner takes all” of each state’s electors. An electoral college in which state votes were divvied proportionately to vote total percentages would make much more sense.

Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes, for example, would have roughly split in 2020 to seven Trump electors and four Biden electors, a much more representative outcome of the state’s views. Similarly, the 5.7 million Trump voters in California would have gotten about a third of that state’s 55 electors.

The same situation exists on a smaller scale in Tennessee state government. About four in 10 Tennesseans vote Democrat. The Tennessee state Senate has 27 Republicans and six Democrats. The Tennessee House of Representatives has 74 Republicans and 25 Democrats. That’s wrong. And it’s that way because the majority party gets to design the state’s district maps, and by slicing up urban district populations like a pizza and combining them with far-flung rural areas, those blue/city voters are diluted with rural voters, ensuring that the GOP can keep their lopsided, non-representative majority. It’s called gerrymandering and it’s endemic around the country.

New district maps will be created next year and you can bet the GOP will set themselves up nicely for the next 10 years in the state House and Senate. It’s how Tennessee, a state with millions of urban voters, has come to be ruled by white, backwards country rubes.

How do we break the cycle? For starters, we need a national law mandating that congressional district maps be created by bipartisan committees. And we need a national law eliminating the “winner-take-all” system for Electoral College votes.

Nebraska and Maine already break up their state electors geographically. The other 48 states could do the same, but it would take an act of Congress to make that happen, which includes the Senate. Which means we’ve circled back around again to the fact that a minority rules — a minority that doesn’t want to dismantle the very thing that keeps them in power.

Oy.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Hold Your Nose and Vote for Mr. Excitement

Remember that time a blockbuster investigative report showed that the president of the United States had engaged in multi-million-dollar tax frauds throughout his business career? Probably not. It happened last week, while we were all watching the Senate’s Kavanaugh Kabuki Theater production unfold.

For some reason, The New York Times decided it would be the perfect time to publish an exhaustive, 40-page investigative report detailing the Trump family’s finances. The story revealed that Donald Trump (and his siblings) became millionaires as children, thanks to patriarch Fred Trump’s tax-evasion maneuvers. By age 3, the president was earning $200,000 a year. He was a millionaire by age 8. In all, Fred Trump transferred more than $1 billion to his children — and, according to the Times, the family paid around five percent in taxes on that money, thanks to shell companies and other financial machinations.

Phil Bredesen

The Times story completely debunked Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he is a self-made millionaire who took a measly $1 million loan from his father and turned it into a vast real estate empire. (Trump lied. Shocker, I know.) It also laid out a rock-solid case that committing tax fraud was a routine part of the Trump family’s business plan.

At any other time in American history, this story would have created a tidal wave of outrage. It would have consumed the media and our public discourse and put the president in political jeopardy. In 2018, the story barely caused a ripple.

Instead, the media focused on the GOP’s victory in getting Kavanaugh installed on the Supreme Court. Not content to merely celebrate their triumph, Republicans and their media minions took the occasion to lament that, as a result of all those nasty, aggressive women coming forward to recount horror stories of harrassment and sexual assault, it is actually men who are in danger in our society.

“The women are fine,” the president said, as he shot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

We shall see how fine they are in about 30 days, when the November 6th mid-terms occur. Hopefully, voters will let the president and the GOP know how they feel about the absurd “investigation” into allegations about Kavanaugh’s past behavior.

A fact that often gets overlooked is that Republicans aren’t really the “majority” in this country, even though they have managed to take control of all three branches of government. A majority of the country, for example — by a 45 percent to 32 percent margin — believed Christine Blasey Ford over Kavanaugh. The 48 Democratic senators who opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination represent 56 percent of the population, a clear majority. The 50 GOP senators who supported Kavanaugh represent 44 percent.

That’s why the only real change has to come at the ballot box. The system is skewed, both by the ridiculous gerrymandering of House districts nationwide, and by the fact that states like Wyoming — which has a population that’s about half that of Shelby County — have the same number of senators as California, with 40 million residents. The Senate does not accurately represent the electorate. Which is why every Senate race is so important.

Speaking of … in Tennessee, Democratic Senatorial candidate Phil Bredesen enraged many of his supporters last week by stating that he supported Kavanaugh’s nomination. It was a dumb move. The initial polling after Bredesen’s statement showed his opponent, Marsha Blackburn, surging into the lead, as many Democrats renounced their support for their nominee. A common refrain: “I’m not voting for the lesser of two evils.” But that’s exactly what you should do in this case.

There’s a saying that “Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.” I don’t know any Democrats who are in love with Bredesen, a centrist who’s probably to the right of John Kasich. But this is the choice we have: Phil Bredesen versus Marsha Blackburn — a Trump boot-licker and a pawn of Big Pharma, the NRA, and other corporate lobbies. She’s anti-choice and would support Alex Jones for SCOTUS if Trump nominated him.

So, if you’re a progressive, tell me again how not voting in this election because you’re miffed at Bredesen is a smart decision. Progressives don’t have the luxury of sitting this one out because the Democratic candidate is less than perfect. There’s no Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or any other feel-good “make a statement” candidate in the race. The decision is binary, and it’s simple: You can hold your nose and vote for Bredesen, or you can cut it off to spite your face — for six years.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Winds of Change Roil Shelby County’s Post-election Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race will likely open up career opportunities for fellow Republicans — including some in the Memphis area.

One possible beneficiary is lawyer John Ryder, a longtime eminence in GOP affairs. Ryder has served as local Republican chairman, as a member of the Republican National Committee from Tennessee, and, currently, as general counsel to the RNC. After the census of 2010, Ryder headed up the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts nationwide, and the map he helped create has strongly reinforced the GOP’s hold on districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A partner at the Harris Shelton law firm of Memphis, Ryder was named Republican Lawyer of the Year in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. That follows a year in which he served as a Trump delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland and was a key member of that conventions’ rules committee.

Considering that Ryder, as general counsel, has essentially been the right-hand man of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, and that Priebus has just been designated by Trump to be the new president’s chief of staff, the question arises: Is Ryder a prospect to succeed Priebus as head of the RNC?

“That would be a decision reached by the president-elect,” Ryder said Monday in a telephone conversation that took place as he drove to Nashville, where he teaches a course at Vanderbilt. “We’re going to see what happens. A lot of different paths are going to open up in the next few weeks, and I’m looking to where I can best be of service to the republic.”

Ryder emphasized that “nothing’s been discussed so far.” As for the possibility of his being offered other positions in the official GOP network that stands to be expanded in the new administration, Ryder said, “I’m not particularly looking for anything. I’m not particularly expecting anything.”

Elsewhere locally, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who served as Trump’s West Tennessee chairman, said he expected to have a say in whatever patronage positions might be available in his bailiwick.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Democrats may be looking to change direction in the wake of yet another election in which they failed to advance. Except for one upset win, that of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus in state House District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), Democratic candidates lost all the legislative races in which they challenged Republicans. The net result was a loss of one seat in the House, which means that there will be 25 Democrats and 74 Republicans in the House come January; the state Senate remains at its current level: five Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Republican legislative super-majority holds tight.

And that’s not a satisfactory set of affairs for Bill Freeman, the wealthy Nashville businessman who is the chief Democratic donor in Tennessee and, as he made clear in a visit to Memphis earlier this month, has ambitions of running for governor in 2018.

Likening the party’s electoral showing to a dismal season in the NFL, Freeman told the Nashville Tennessean that, “we’ve got to look at every option, including a new chair.”

The current chair, Mary Mancini of Nashville, has no intention of giving up the job, however, and has said she will run for another two-year term. 

One of Freemen’s closest associates is former state party chairman Chip Forrester, who has served several chairmanship terms in different decades, who served Freeman as campaign manager in his unsuccessful race for Nashville mayor last year, and will probably head up a Freeman gubernatorial campaign in 2018 if there is one.

But there is no indication so far that Forrester is looking at another run at the party chairmanship, and Freeman is talking up Holly McCall, who early in the year declared for House District 65, then held by bad-boy Republican incumbent Jeremy Durham, an accused sexual predator. She eventually lost her bid for the seat to Sam Whitson, the Republican who ousted Durham in the GOP primary.

In a letter to members of the state Democratic executive committee emailed on Monday, Freeman put the kernel of his argument this way: 

“First and foremost, for all the effort that we focused on in Tennessee, we gained absolutely no ground in the state senate and had a net loss of one seat in the state house. Instead of moving the needle forward, we went backward. This is unacceptable. … We should have done better and done it more robustly. I believe we need new leadership to do so.”

Of Mancini, Freeman said, “She is a fine person and clearly committed to serving our party, but we have failed to grow as we all had hoped for during these past two years. … The poor results we have seen this past Tuesday show clearly that we need a change.”

Pointedly, Freeman made reference to “a critical statewide race for the United States Senate in 2018,” and said, “We must rebuild our party to have the infrastructure in place so that our Democrat nominees for governor and U.S. senator have the party machinery in place to succeed.”

Tennessee Democrats — and Mancini — did, however, have one legislative victory in the recent election that nobody saw coming except the participants in the winning campaign. As indicated, this was the upset win of Thompson, a genial human resources administrator and longtime Democratic activist, over state Representative McManus, a GOP legislative mainstay, in District 96.

Under the circumstances of the 2016 election cycle, which not only strengthened the GOP super-majority in Tennessee but put Donald Trump into the presidency and gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House, it is astonishing that Thompson should have won election to the state House from a suburban Shelby County district. It is doubly astonishing that he unseated an incumbent Republican to do so.

Not only was Thompson the only Democrat in Tennessee to unseat a Republican, he believes himself to be the only Democrat in the South to have done so.

Thompson’s victory over McManus, who had been serving as chairman of the state House banking and insurance committee, was by the total of 351 votes out of almost 28,000 cast, and that ultra-thin margin can be attributed to old-fashioned work ethic on the winner’s side and what has to be reckoned as complacency and over-confidence on the loser’s.         

McManus’ campaign war-chest totaled  $155,754.59 as of the third-quarter financial-disclosure deadline, dwarfing Thompson’s $5,088.20. Thompson later received an infusion of financial aid from the Tennessee Democratic Party: $1,500 in a direct outlay on top of a $13,100 in-kind contribution in the form of a “polling survey.”

In October, Thompson’s total expenditures of $13,817 were almost equal to McManus’, and the Democratic challenger targeted his campaign money well, spending some of it on some modest internet advertising that pointed out, among other things, the fact that he had a military record.

McManus’ confidence may also have stemmed from the fact that he had easily dispatched Thompson in their first match-up, in 2014, with 62 percent of the vote to Thompson’s 38 percent.

Thompson was determined to prove that District 96 was a swing district, composed of a working-class/middle-class mix that was susceptible to a Democratic appeal. He boasts that he and his campaign team knocked on a total of 12,000 doors in the course of the campaign, focusing on issues ranging from Cordova’s traffic problems to skepticism about charter schools and the need for reviving Governor Bill Haslam‘s dormant Insure Tennessee program for Medicaid expansion, which, he emphasized to voters, had been blocked in McManus’ committee in the special legislative session of 2015.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Bozos on the Bus

There’s a classic Jerry Seinfeld routine where he riffs on Bozo the Clown. “What’s with Bozo the Clown?” he asks. “I mean, is ‘the clown’ really necessary? It’s not like there’s going to be a Bozo the Optometrist. If your name is Bozo, your career path is pretty well set. You’re a clown.”

Or a Republican presidential candidate?

I jest. Sort of. But there’s a reason folks are joking about the GOP candidates’ “clown car.” There are a lot of Bozos on that bus.

So how do the Republicans fix their image problem? Pretty simple, actually. All it’s going to take is one GOP presidential candidate with the courage to take off the clown suit and say, “Enough.” One Republican who will state the obvious, hopefully on a debate stage filled with all the other candidates.

“My fellow Republicans,” he will begin, “I’m going to say something that will be painful for you to hear: Our Grand Old Party is in trouble. We are too old, too white, too rich, too angry, and too out of touch. We’re chasing giant portions of the electorate off our lawn. We’ve lost African Americans, Hispanics, gays, and open-minded moderates and independents. We’re chasing off young people, people who believe in science, people who want accessible health care, and people who live in cities. And why? Because we have allowed ourselves to become trapped into pandering to know-nothings, gun fetishists, racists, religious fundamentalists, and the wealthy.

“As a major political party, we’re killing ourselves, gerrymandering ourselves into national irrelevancy. We have almost literally become Clint Eastwood talking to a chair. My friends, let’s face it, if our party doesn’t change soon, we’re going the way of the Whigs.

“We need to recognize that the country is becoming increasingly multicultural, more tolerant of sexual and gender differences, less traditional. We have a majority on the Supreme Court, and even they won’t support our agenda. The Democrats don’t have all the answers. Hillary Clinton’s not even that likable, but she’s going to win in a landslide if our candidate backs himself into a corner by pandering to our nutjob ‘base’ in the primaries.

“So, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to acknowledge that global climate change is happening, and I’m going to listen to our scientists at NASA, the Pentagon, and NOAA and take their counsel. I’m going to embrace the fact that gay Americans are now free to marry, just like the rest of us. That means you, too, Lindsay. Oh, did I say that out loud? Sorry. Where was I?

“Oh, yeah. I’m going to accept that some form of universal health care, as flawed as the ACA is, is inevitable, and I’m going to strive to make it work as efficiently as possible. And I want every American to be able to earn a living wage, because the real strength of this country lies in our having a robust middle class. I will fight to make that happen.

“In closing, I’d like to reiterate: It’s 2015. I’m a Republican. My name isn’t Bozo. And I’d appreciate your vote.”

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com