Tag: Governor Bill Haslam

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Gubernatorial Hopeful Boyd, an East Tennessean, Has Roots in These Parts

CREDIT: JB

JB

GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd with Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell in the Mayor’s office this week

Former state Commissioner of Economic Development Randy Boyd of Knoxville, an early-bird candidate for Governor in 2018, was making the rounds of West Tennessee this past week to show the flag — and in the process to divulge some local roots.

Some of them were even more local — and more personal — than he knew, as he discovered from a stop at the Vasco Smith Shelby County administrative building on Wednesday morning. Boyd had a dual purpose there, to sit down for an interview with the Flyer in the11th floor conference room of County Mayor Mark Luttrell and to overlap that with a courtesy call on the Mayor.

In the Flyer interview, Boyd, the founder of Radio Systems, Inc., which manufactures and distributes a line of electronic pet-related products (“Invisible Fence” being one well-known example) had disclosed the fact that he had been the first member of his family line to be born and raised in East Tennessee and that seven generations of his immediate forebears had resided in the West Tennessee counties of Madison, Obion, and Crockett.

“You’re from Fruitvale?”

In fact, said Boyd, he had made a point of paying homage to his family connections by including as a stop on his announcement tour last month the Crockett County hamlet of Fruitvale (population 64), where he spoke from the stoop of J.O. Boyd’s General Store, which had belonged to one of his relations.

“I believe I set a record for the smallest place to make an announcement from,” Boyd said.

Later, when Luttrell, having disposed of some pre-scheduled mayoral business elsewhere, entered the conference room and joined the conversation, he, too, was apprised of Boyd’s West Tennessee pedigree.

“You’re from Fruitvale?” exclaimed the delighted Luttrell, who went on to explain that he himself had spent some growing-up time in nearby Bells, (population 2,437), also in Crockett County. “Bells is a city, compared to Fruitvale!”


Some reminiscences were swapped back and forth, until it got to the point that both men were fondly recalling individuals from the area that they jointly knew. At one point Luttrell mentioned a lady named Myrtle Rose Emerson. “Aunt Myrtle!” Boyd responded.

All of that may have been a revelation of sorts, but Boyd and Luttrell could already claim a longstanding relationship in their official capacities. As Boyd had noted to the Flyer, he had worked with both Luttrell and the current Mayor’s predecessor, A C Wharton, in developing a program of community-college tuition aid called “Shelby Achieves,” which, along with “Knox Achieves,” in Boyd’s home environs, had been the precursors of the statewide Tennessee Promise program that Governor Bill Haslam has credited Boyd with developing.

For “High Quality Jobs” and “More Local Control”

As Economic Development Commissioner, Boyd had a hand in several of Haslam’s better-known major programs, including Drive to 55 and  Tennessee Reconnect, and he made it clear in the interview that, as Governor, his intent would be to keep on keeping on with such initiatives.

Indeed, in discussing the era of technological and economic progress that he would like to oversee as Governor, Boyd’s very manner of speaking, a rapid-fire but highly focused and by no means off-putting stream-of-consciousness style bespoke an obvious intensity of purpose transcending ambition.

Boyd said that, upon entering government at Haslam’s invitation “my goal was to create a mission for the state. He struck an almost Trump-like note when, in speaking of entrepreneurs, he praised “people who would be disrupters, coming in with new ideas.” His three “key goals” he enumerated as completing the Drive to 55 program (the number representing an ideal minimum of Tennesseans with college degrees or certificates), bringing in “high quality jobs,” and creating a “rural task force [to] take care of people left behind.”

“The state cannot reach its goals unless Memphis reaches its,” said Boyd, who extrapolated a bright future for this area from the fact that Memphis was “Number One in the country” last year in FAFSA filings (applications for federal student aid to attend college).

Boyd sounded one note that would surely be of comfort to Memphians who see state government, at least the legislative part of it, as having increasingly overriden the prerogatives of local government. “I prefer having more local control,” he said, conferring his disapproval of “occasions when people in Nashville think they know better.”

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Cover Feature News

Nashville Gets Serious

CREDIT: Photographs by Jackson Baker

The timetable of the Tennessee General Assembly once sprawled a bit, with a session ending sometime in May, generally. But now and then, one would get into June and even, within the memory of many legislators still serving, go on later than that.

There was the time in 2001 when Jimmy Naifeh, the longtime speaker of the state House of Representatives and a no-nonsense legislative boss if there ever was one, stepped down from his perch on the House dais, stood for a moment in the well, and took a few steps into the main central aisle of the chamber, as if he meant to do something hands-on.

Photographs by Jackson Baker

Rep. G.A. Hardaway and other Civil Justice subcommittee members that state law overrides a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The look on Naifeh’s face was somewhere between wrathful and pleading, as he intoned loudly, “It’s July, folks!”

Indeed it was. Those were the years, from the late 1990s into the early years of the current century, when state government, grappling with looming financial shortages of all kinds, and struggling in particular with the costs of the ever-expanding rolls of TennCare, was looking desperately for ways to raise money.

The impasse had gotten to the point that Republican Governor Don Sundquist, a dependable fiscal conservative during his years as a Reaganite Congressman, broke with his own personal history and his party’s traditional philosophical base and proposed something as daring as a state income tax. One result of that was a mass protest, whetted by radio talk-show hosts, that culminated, on the night of July 12, 2001, in an unruly mob invasion of the state Capitol and its grounds.

Dianne Baker of Millington was one of several spokespersons for Shelby County’s suburbs who gave the county’s legislative delegation an earful last week.

Windows got broken, the heavy locked doors of the state Senate chamber, where a compromise income-tax package was being negotiated, were pounded on, and whatever deal had been about to happen there was aborted.

There would not be a fiscal solution of any kind until the next year, a time when several parks were closed and various state services had begun to be shut down. Forgoing the national holiday, the two legislative chambers met on July 4th and agreed to a patchwork revenue package based on hiking the state sales tax to its current rate.

The same year, a Democratic governor, former health-care entrepreneur, and ex-Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, was elected. He would prove as atypical to his party’s image as Sundquist had been to his. Launching an austerity regime, Bredesen slashed the TennCare rolls and imposed across-the-board departmental budget cuts of 8 percent.

get some pressure from the press.

And thus did one era make way for another.

The next 15 years in state government would see a progressive slide away from governmental activism toward various kinds of retrenchment. The temper of the state’s voters shifted, and both Naifeh and the state Senate’s venerable Democratic Speaker John Wilder would eventually have to surrender control of their chambers to Republicans — though the new House Speaker, Beth Harwell, a Nashvillian, would be somewhat more mellow in her conservatism than Ron Ramsey of Kingsport, who displaced Wilder in the Senate.

The populism of the left yielded year by year to the populism of the right. The famous argument over guns versus butter would be decided in favor of guns. Literally so, as the NRA and the home-grown Tennessee Firearms Association began having their way with legislators, and it became harder and harder to find public places that were off limits to lethal weaponry. Bars, parks, parking lots, schools — all yielded in turn to legislation backed by the gun lobby.

Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville wait their turn.

Attitudes toward education shifted, as well. Where once the focus of public education had been on the teaching incentives of Governor Lamar Alexander or the fiscal largesse and curricular pump-priming of Governor Ned McWherter’s Basic Education Plan (BEP), now it was channeled through various formulas that were deconstructive of the traditional public-school concept and smacked of privatization at their core.

At the insistence of Ramsey, who saw the Tennessee Education Association as a political adversary, teachers’ bargaining rights were legislated out of existence. And even the more moderate Republican governor, oil-company scion Bill Haslam, gave the go-ahead to a veritable plethora of concepts — charter schools, takeover districts administered by the state, online “districts” run by profit-seekers from out of state, and standardized testing as an apparent end in itself — that unraveled the whole notion of what public schools had been.

Having basically slain the idea of an income tax, progressive or otherwise, the new Republican legislative majority (a super-majority in both chambers after 2014, assured of majority votes without need of — or concern for — Democratic votes) took steps to make sure it stayed dead, authorizing a state referendum on a constitutional ban of a state income tax authored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown).

Three legislative veterans from Shelby County, all former state representatives, were among those who turned up last week at a reunion for General Assembly members at the Ellington Agricultural Center in Nashville. From l to r: Ed Haley, now city manager of Millington; Chris Turner, now a General Sessions Criminal Court judge; and Dan Byrd, now vice chairman and COO of the Bank of Bartlett. Haley was a Republican; Turner and Byrd served as Democrats.

As was the case with Republicanism in the nation as a whole, the state’s new GOP establishment was a strange yokedom of fiscal and social conservatives, whereby the advocates of, say, tort reform limiting awards in personal-damage litigation made common cause with the opponents of abortion and gay rights. And vice versa.

There was a nether end of the reigning coalition, too. With the stripped-down Democratic caucus depending heavily on minority members, racial and otherwise, there was a certain kind of reactionary sentiment to be found on the other side — embodied, arguably, in the GOP insistence for photo-ID voting and, without doubt, in the “discovery” by two Republican legislators of a potential jihadist foot-bath in the Capitol that turned out to be a mop sink.

And who could forget the immortal legislative contributions of former Republican state Senator Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville), a one-man cornucopia of bizarre and mean-spirited legislation — a bill calling for death certificates for aborted fetuses, his “Don’t-say-Gay” bill forbidding mention of homosexuality in elementary school, another measure requiring school personnel to out gay students to their parents, a bill to deny welfare payments to parents of poorly performing students, his charge of racism when he, a white, was denied membership in the Legislative Black Caucus, etc.

here testifying against the “natural marriage” bill before the House Civil Justice Subcommittee, has stayed busy on the civil liberties front.

Those bills did not pass, but, as much as the gun zealotry of the last several legislative sessions, the goofy stuff from the now departed Campfield (he was defeated in the 2014 GOP primary by the infinitely more dignified Richard Briggs) became a metaphor of sorts for what was arguably an unserious period in Tennessee legislative history — one that rewarded selfish and peripheral concerns at the expense of fundamental structural needs.

(Campfield’s bills may have gone by the wayside, but the legislature did, after all, vote in all solemnity to enshrine the Barrett .50 caliber as the Official State Rifle; and it failed by a trice to designate the Bible as the Official State Book.)

Things may be changing.

Against all odds, Nashville seems to be getting serious. And, ironically, a signal of that potential transformation came last week through the aegis of a major participant in the events of July 12, 2001, that pivotal moment when a mob action deflected an effort toward a long-term reform.

One of those actively involved that night in working out the compromise that might have yielded a workable income-tax measure was a Republican state Senator from Chattanooga named David Fowler. After leaving the legislature in 2006, Fowler donated $20,000 to an organization called the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT). The former state senator and lawyer ultimately became the chief spokesperson for FACT, which advocates social conservatism and attention to fundamentalist Christian concerns in public policy.

Now president of FACT, Fowler lives in Nashville and is an accustomed presence on Capitol Hill. Last year he famously led a group of conservative pastors in a rally on behalf of a bill that would compel transgender students to use bathrooms designated for their birth genders. The issue was one of several these days, in Tennessee and many another states, which contrast the social traditions of a social or religious group with the economic realities of the state as a whole.

Mindful of this inherent conflict, Fowler hit it head on, acknowledging that passage of the bill might cause the state to lose important conventions and forfeit possible industrial relocations, but calling on the legislature to “put their principles and their conscience above matters of mere economics.”

But the matter, of course, was — and is — more complex than that. In the 21st century, the dichotomy cannot be reduced to one of money versus morality. Words like “principles” and “conscience” can also be adduced, and increasingly are so adduced, to support an evolving social belief in the human and legal rights of transgenders.

When push came to shove, that fact probably did as much or more to tip the balance in legislators’ minds against the “bathroom bill,” as did the admittedly intense lobbying against it by the state’s business interests. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Susan Lynn (R-Mt. Juliet) withdrew the measure.

But it returned in this session, sponsored by Representative Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) and Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt.Juliet), two legislators lacking in the theatrical flair of a Campfield but equally prone to playing Horatio-at-the-Gate for causes which an increasing number of their legislative colleagues see as retrograde and wrong-headed.

And this year the bill failed even to get a motion out of the Senate Education Committee, a fact which both shocked and gratified Henry Seaton of the ACLU, who observed that “it seems like we are making progress” in raising legislators’ consciousness on the transgender issue.

And then there was what was called the “Natural Marriage” bill, also sponsored by the duo of Pody and Beavers. And there was Fowler in the House Civil Justice Subcommittee last week, making the best argument he could for a measure, reserving marriage in Tennessee to cases involving a man and a woman, that manifestly is in conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s watershed 2015 opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges cases declaring same-sex marriages legal everywhere in the United States.

Fowler’s argument — that, while the Supreme Court’s opinion compelled Tennessee to recognize same-sex marriages in other states, it did not invalidate the state’s own ability to define marriage within its own borders — was ingenious in a sense, but it also had the taint of the disingenuous. Memphis Democrat G.A. Hardaway called him on it, pointing out further that Fowler was a party to two separate lawsuits challenging the Supreme Court’s authority to deal with state marriage laws — a potential conflict of interest.

Like the lawsuits he was engaged in, Fowler’s testimony was seemingly based on the highly questionable thesis that the U.S. Supreme Court had no authority to override a state law on marriage — notwithstanding the obvious fact that the court had done just that.

In the end, the committee by unanimous agreement did what a legislative unit normally does for bills with no chances of passage. It punted, “rolling” the bill, in legislative vernacular — until a late point in the next session.

A clear pattern seemed to be developing in this session of the General Assembly. With, at most, a month left to go in the 2017 session, all attention was being focused, not on the kinds of tendentious and eccentric measures that had dominated so much of the legislature’s recent history but on indisputably serious matters relating to the root realities of the state itself — or to the counties and municipalities that comprise it.

The session’s chief gun bill, an “open carry” bill eliminating a need for permits to carry a concealed weapon, was disposed of summarily last week, in the same session of the House Civil Justice Subcommittee that shunted aside “natural marriage.”

That measure, HB 40, co-sponsored by Representative Micah Van Huss (R-Jonesborough) and Beavers (who seems almost Zelig-like in her attachment to fringe bills), was dismissed in the committee by voice vote.

As the General Assembly hits the stretch in the 2017 session, it will be focusing its major efforts on the centerpiece of Haslam’s agenda, an infrastructure program announced in his State of the State message of late January.

This governor is given to catchy titles for his major legislation. There was Tennessee Promise, his name for a scholarship program, paid for mainly by money diverted from the lottery-built Hope Scholarship fund, paying student expenses at the state’s community colleges. There was Tennessee Reconnect, a scholarship program for adults needing to finish lapsed degree efforts.

Most memorably, there was Insure Tennessee, Haslam’s name for a plan that, through a waiver granted by Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services, would have allowed Tennessee to partake of an estimated billion dollars or more of annual federal funding to expand TennCare, Tennessee’s version of Medicaid.

A partisan reaction by the GOP super-majority to a program it identified with “Obamacare” killed Insure Tennessee, but the newly serious legislature might give some version of the program a re-examination, especially since the Trump administration in Washington failed in its preliminary efforts to kill the ACA.

In any case, the Haslam infrastructure proposal, an ambitious and long overdue program of roadway rehabilitation billed in the State-of-the-State as the Improve Act, is still very much alive, though the governor’s original proposal for financing the plan’s $10 billion worth of improvements with a 7-percent increase in the state gas tax, coupled with decreases in a variety of other taxes, including the sales tax on groceries, has been modified once or twice and is subject to more changes. It is up for consideration in finance committees of both chambers this week.

Think of it: A General Assembly that once actually wasted time on the legality of eating roadkill is now clearly training attention on the condition of Tennessee’s roads.

One important modification to the Improve Act occurred in a Senate committee, with an amendment sponsored by state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville). Norris, who is eyeing a 2018 gubernatorial race (and who has billboards in Shelby County and elsewhere proclaiming him to be “Fighting Elder Abuse in Tennessee”), made sure to include in the bill several financial-relief provisions for Tennessee’s military veterans and its elderly population.

Even as the legislature’s Republican leadership is settling down to serious business, its once-dominant Democratic contingent, now become a shrunken minority (5 senators out of 33; 25 Democrats out of 99), is into a comeback of sorts, pointing out in a recent end-of-week press conference that Norris’ amendment has a distinct resemblance to provisions long championed by themselves. The Democrats, led by Representative Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley in the House and Memphian Lee Harris in the Senate, are also campaigning hard for a revival of some variant of Insure Tennessee.

Matters still to be resolved include two key ones of major importance to Memphis and Shelby County — a proposal for a “pilot program” of publicly funded private-school vouchers, restricted to the Shelby County Schools system and a possible revisiting of the de-annexation issue that has roiled relations between Memphis and its suburbs. (See Politics: “They’re Back!”.)

In any case, things have unmistakably taken a serious turn up Nashville way. Anybody who doubts that should ask former state Representatives Jeremy Durham of Franklin and Mark Lovell of Eads, both forced out of their legislative positions during the last year for allegations of sexual hanky-panky.

Heck, folks, hanky-panky used to be the General Assembly’s very stock-in-trade!

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Trumped Expectations

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Consider: As the year began, the idea of Donald Trump‘s becoming the Republican nominee for president was still considered somewhat fanciful — not to mention what seemed the remote prospect of his actually winning the presidency. But that general impression would change — and fairly rapidly.

It may be largely forgotten now, but Trump actually lost the Iowa Republican caucuses, first trial vote of the year, to arch-conservative Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And when I made my quadrennial visit to New Hampshire to check out the candidates, both Democratic and Republican, I had my doubts about The Donald. In my first online report from New Hampshire, on February 8th, here’s part of what I said:

“But for all the polls that still have Trump way ahead of his GOP rivals — by something like 20 points, at last reckoning — I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up suffering another major embarrassment like that which befell him in his second-place finish to Ted Cruz in Iowa last week. 

“So far I’ve only seen him in action in Saturday night’s debate of the remaining Republican contenders in Bedford, and, in all honesty, it was difficult to see Trump as a major figure in that event, or, for that matter, retrospectively over the course of the debates and cattle-call forums to date.”

I began to be disabused of that foolish conclusion (“foolish” because I mistook Trump’s lack of attention to issues in a debate to be a disqualifier) when I traveled through a blizzard to see his magic with crowds — and his fundamental uniqueness — at an indoor mega-rally in the state capital of Manchester the very next night.

That was the night that Trump shattered all verbal precedent by referring to Cruz, at the time his major GOP opponent, as a “pussy.” Granted, he was just channeling what he’d heard a woman supporter call out from the crowd, but still …

My online take: “The battle lines are now clear on an issue, perhaps the defining one, of Trump’s campaign — that of political correctness. Oh, go ahead and heap some other adjectives on: Social correctness. Verbal correctness. Philosophical correctness. What you will. The man is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it. 

“In a campaign based on the most broad-brush attitude imaginable toward political issues, it is Trump’s fundamental iconoclasm that stands out. Be it ethnic groups, war heroes, disabled persons, gender equities, or linguistic norms, Trump is dismissive of all protocols.” 

Trump won New Hampshire, easily, and, from that point on, was basically on a roll. He had the obvious aura of a winner by the time he took his road show to Shelby County on February 28th, appearing before a crowd of thousands gathered at a Millington hangar.

From my report: “The crowd, which was plainly not the usual muster of political junkie-dom (though any number of local GOP regulars could be spotted here and there) was uproariously with him … chanting “Win! Win! Win!” [W]hen, as often happens at one of his rallies, a protester began to chant against him from inside the hangar, he calmly directed the crowd to ‘get him out’ but ‘don’t hurt him.’ And so the crowd did, with its counter-chant morphing from ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ to ‘Win! Win! Win!’ And finally to ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’

“Call it what else you will, but this is a movement.”

And a movement it would remain, all the way through Trump’s primary victories, a turbulent GOP convention in Cleveland, and a rancorous fall campaign against overconfident Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Finally, there was the astonishing moment of truth, agonizing for so many, galvanizing for so many others, that was summed up by the now famous Flyer cover of the November 10th issue, showing a victorious Trump in profile over a capitalized caption: “WTF?”

And those bare letters (understandably controversial at the time, though they merely used a common cyber-motif to express a shocked befuddlement that we suspect was experienced by Trump himself) continue to express our — and the world’s — uncertainty as we await the forthcoming reign of The Donald.

OTHER  ELECTIONS: Most local interest was focused on the hotly contested Republican primary for the 8th Congressional District seat vacated by U.S. Representative Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump. A large field competed, including several local politicians. In the end, former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff would come from behind and edge out runner-up George Flinn, the wealthy businessman/physician who had previously served on the Shelby County Commission. Kustoff easily defeated Democrat Rickey Hobson in November.

STATE POLITICS: The prevailing fact of life in state government in 2016 was the same-old, same-old domination of all affairs by a Republican super-majority in the legislature. The upset victory in November of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus was one of the few circumstances to counter the trend.

An early excitement in Nashville was the deposing of sexual predator Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin), first, from his perch in the GOP leadership, then from his party’s caucus, and, finally, from the General Assembly itself through expulsion.

From Memphis’ point of view, the crowning moment of the legislature had to be the dramatic turnaround of  a stealth de-annexation bill that was on the very brink of detaching from Memphis every territory annexed by the city since 1998. A concerted last-ditch effort by a coalition of city interests turned the tide and diverted the measure to the limbo of summer study.

From my article on that outcome: “‘We really had no idea this was going to happen. But it was the best possible result, obviously. This is really a victory for the entire state,’ said Phil Trenary, the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce head who had been in Nashville last week and this week opposing the bill.”

The issue of de-annexation is not dead, however. It was the subject of serious examination by local governmental task forces, and it will almost certainly return to the legislative calendar in 2017.

CITY AND COUNTY POLITICS: The first day of the year saw the inauguration of a new mayor, former Councilman Strickland, and of six new council members. One sentence of Strickland’s well-received  inaugural address expressed a painful reality: “We are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.” Another acknowledged a problem that still remains: “We will focus on the goal of retaining and recruiting quality police officers and firefighters, knowing public safety is at the forefront of rebuilding our city.”

A new police director, Michael Rallings, was appointed from the department’s ranks, as the city confronted an alarming rise in homicides.
Late in the year, Strickland launched a “Memphis 3.0” initiative to devise a new long-range plan for the city via a series of neighborhood meetings.

The dominant motif of the Shelby County Commission’s year was a back-and-forth power struggle with Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, focused on such matters as control of fiscal policy and the commission’s desire to have its own attorney, distinct from the county attorney’s office. The matter was one of several still hanging fire at the end of the year, though Terry Roland, of Millington, commission chair for much of the year, led the way with Heidi Shafer in getting a referendum passed extending the commission’s advise-and-consent power to the firing as well as the hiring of a county attorney.

Roland made it clear that he intended to run for county mayor himself in 2018, with another likely entry being that of County Trustee David Lenoir. Meanwhile, Linda Phillips became the new county election administrator.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS: The city council approved a measure to liberalize the penalties for marijuana possession. The Shelby County Commission failed to follow suit, and state Attorney General Herb Slatery’s opinion that state policy prohibited such local ordinances doused expectations, but reports were that medical marijuana might have new life in next year’s General Assembly. 

At year’s end, a major argument had erupted between local environmentalists and TVA over the authority’s intent to drill wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer in order to cool a forthcoming new power plant. Watch this space. 

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Fix Tennessee’s Healthcare System

Tennesseans have a strong sense of pride when it comes to valuing things like hard work and personal responsibility. People who work hard to provide for their family and contribute to their community help make Tennessee great. So, while it’s unfortunate that too many of Tennessee’s working poor are struggling to access affordable healthcare coverage, it’s encouraging to know there is a robust discussion being led by House Speaker Beth Harwell’s 3-Star Healthy Project Task Force aimed at addressing this problem.

Adam Nickas

Right now, hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans, of which more than 67,000 are residents of Shelby County, are living without access to care, falling into what’s called the “Medicaid gap.” These individuals earn too much to qualify for TennCare, our state’s Medicaid program, but too little to afford healthcare coverage on the federal insurance exchanges. These are people trying to make an honest living — three-quarters of them have worked in the last year.

Memphians never hesitate to give a helping hand, instead of simply a handout, to hardworking folks, and improving access to health care for this population does exactly that. The task force, which was established in April, is focused on finding sensible and financially responsible solutions to Tennessee’s healthcare problem. In just a few weeks, the task force will present their recommendations to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, D.C. 

In 2015, Governor Bill Haslam proposed a health-care plan, known as Insure Tennessee, to the Tennessee General Assembly. This program was designed as a for-Tennessee, by-Tennessee plan that promoted personal responsibility, imposed no new taxes, and would result in significant economic gains for our state. While the legislature did not accept the original proposal, there has been progress with the announcement of the task force to prepare a solution that increases access to affordable coverage for Tennessee’s uninsured population.

There are two critical items we hope the task force considers as they continue their work.

It’s important that any recommended solutions be comprehensive in scope. Limiting the scope of access to coverage to a segment of the Medicaid gap population leaves thousands of hardworking Tennesseans without access to affordable healthcare. A path to comprehensive coverage for this population is needed in order for the state to fully realize the economic gains from increased insurance coverage. A Tennessee study found that Insure Tennessee would create more than $1.1 billion in new health-care spending, $909 million in new income, and 15,000 full-time equivalent jobs for Tennessee residents.

One of the key drivers of these potential economic benefits is the fact that a comprehensive solution would help reverse deep cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates for Tennessee hospitals that were a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The numbers tell a striking story: Our hospitals are projected to lose $292 million this calendar year and $8.2 billion by 2024. With the closing of three hospitals in Tennessee since the beginning of 2016, we have all become acutely aware of the negative impact of those closures. Hospitals are economic engines within our communities, providing over 35,000 jobs in Shelby County and 630,000 jobs across the state. A plan that increases access to affordable healthcare can help to offset these cuts and protect our hospitals.

That’s why any recommendation from the task force must secure approval from federal officials. Without that approval, millions of dollars will continue flowing out of Tennessee and into states like California and New York. To be clear, the money being cut from our hospitals isn’t going to another Tennessee program. It is going to states that have implemented similar efforts to cover those in the Medicaid gap, and we need to bring these tax dollars back home.

The 67,000 Shelby County residents, some of whom are veterans who bravely served our country, carpenters who are building homes in our communities, and waiters and waitresses who serve us at local restaurants, deserve a solution.

Governor Bill Haslam’s 2015 proposal for Insure Tennessee provides a strong blueprint for a solution, as it would extend coverage to an estimated 280,000 of our hardworking friends and neighbors currently struggling in the Medicaid gap.

As the task force presents its recommendations in Washington later this month, we hope they bear in mind our recommendations so that their proposal aligns with Tennessee values and leads the way to a responsible, healthy future for our communities.

Adam Nickas is the executive director of Tennesseans for a Responsible Future, a nonprofit organization that supports efforts to improve the health and prosperity of Tennesseans through the promotion of sound health-care policies.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

TN AG Should Clarify Transgender Policy

Memphis was favored last week with a visit from state Attorney General Herb Slatery — who turns out, by the way, to have a brother living here and, in a luncheon address to members of the rotary Club of Memphis, said some appropriately nice things about his host city. In almost every way, in fact, General Slatery was a particularly agreeable visitor. We especially enjoyed his recollection of the “historic” occasion in 2014, when Governor Bill Haslam came to town and swore in, on a single day, “an African American, a Jewish man, and a woman” — to wit, Appellate judges Kenny Freeman and Arnold Goldin, and Supreme Court Justice Holly Kirby.  

We appreciate his pride in recounting that moment of diversity and share in it, vicariously. However, if we’d had our druthers, Slatery, who is Tennessee’s preeminent legal officer, would have been more forthcoming about some of the more current issues of inclusiveness. 

One of them was highlighted in the form of a question directed to Slatery about an imminent clash between the jurisdictions of state and nation. The issue was a directive — actually, a letter — from the Obama administration offering “guidance” on the matter of whether transgender students should be allowed by schools to use bathroom facilities of their declared (as against their birth) gender. The letter, issued jointly by the Justice Department and the Education Department, declared, in the words of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex.”

In all candor, the federal letter, shrouded in several layers of ambiguity, was not exactly a model of clarity and directness. Nor was it terribly forthright about the extent of its legal authority or whether a mandate per se was being proclaimed. There was language to the effect that failure to comply could invite financial sanctions under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Its essential import was clear enough: Transgender Americans should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice.

As it happens, the aforementioned General Assembly had, in its most recent session, rejected a bill that would explicitly have sanctioned the opposite premise, prohibiting transgenders from exercising such a choice. As it also happens, Slatery himself had contributed to the bill’s withdrawal, in April, by advising legislators that loss of Title IX funding could follow passage of such a measure.

Yet Slatery and, officially, Tennessee have now joined 10 other states in a lawsuit challenging the federal government over the bathroom directive. As the Attorney General said in Memphis last week, “The people of Tennessee should have a voice in [the] process, and we’re having a hard time finding where that voice was.”

For ourselves, we’re having an even harder time finding where the voice of state government is regarding a sensitive matter on which, arguably, it has been on both sides of the issue. Without much optimism, we await further word.

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News News Blog

ServiceMaster Moves Global Headquarters to Peabody Place

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam made things official today when he announced that ServiceMaster is moving its global headquarters from East Memphis to Peabody Place in downtown Memphis. The move means approximately 1,200 employees will occupy the renovated former mall by the end of 2017.

“I’m a former mayor, I believe in cities,” Gov. Haslam said. “Cities are the heartbeat of what happens. [Memphis] is a city that, I think has, not just an incredible past with creativity coming out of its pores. But an incredible future.” 

Haslam then introduced ServiceMaster CEO Rob Gillette who said he was, “Thrilled to be joining the downtown business community,” and excited about plans to create a new technology and innovation center in the new Peabody Place location. 

ServiceMaster moved its headquarters from Downer’s Grove, Ill. to East Memphis in 2007. Earlier this year the residential and commercial service provider relaunched its corporate brand and was named one of the world’s most admired companies by Fortune magazine.

ServiceMaster Moves its Global Headquarters to Peabody Place

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Tennessee Benediction

As of this writing, in time for a print deadline of Tuesday at mid-day, the two chambers of the General Assembly have not had an opportunity to vote up or down on overriding Governor Bill Haslam‘s veto last week of the bill (HB 615/SB 1108) that would make the Bible the official “state book” of Tennessee. By the time, sometime Wednesday morning, that the first editions of the Flyer hit the street, the bill’s fate will likely be known for certain.

The state House of Representatives, where the bill originally passed by a margin of 55 to 38, was expected to have an opportunity to override the governor’s veto either late Tuesday or relatively early on Wednesday. The Senate, which approved the bill by a vote of 19 to 8, would have an opportunity to follow suit immediately thereafter. In either case, a simple majority is all that is required to sustain an override.

Whatever the case, the disposition of the veto — and the Bible bill — will, in effect, be the culminating act of this legislative session before adjournment.

So, readers, as you peruse this column, the matter of the Bible bill is, one way or the other, a done deal — though its chances, ultimately, of avoiding litigation and judicial overrule have always been questionable. It is hard to see how the endorsement by a state government of a particular religion’s sacred text could stand a Constitutional test. But, just as they say on the ball field, where one side — on paper — is generally favored over another, that’s why they play the game.

In any case, here, allowed to speak for themselves, are two remarkable statements on the measure — one by the governor in his veto message to House Speaker Beth Harwell, another by state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris  (R-Collierville), during his chamber’s debate on the measure.

HASLAM: “I am vetoing House Bill 615, the legislation designating the Holy Bible as the official state book.

“As you know, last year the Attorney General opined that designating the Holy Bible as the official book of Tennessee would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution and Article l [sub-section 3] of the Tennessee Constitution, which provides that ‘no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship.’

“In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text. If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book. Our founders recognized that when the church and state were combined, it was the church that suffered in the long run.

“I strongly disagree with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square. All of us should and must bring our deepest beliefs to the places we are called, including government service. Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.

“For these reasons, I am vetoing House Bill 615.”

 

NORRIS: “I have made my discomfort with this bill known since it first appeared last year.

“I think my colleagues in the Senate, truth be told, are equally uncomfortable with the choice they are being forced to make. But I think they feel compelled not to follow their conscience but to choose primarily out of expedience.

“I have said that making the Holy Bible the official state book is sacrilegious. Passing this bill relegates it to a mere government symbol. As the smallmouth bass is the state fish, the raccoon the state mammal, the cave salamander the state reptile, the Barrett rifle the state rifle, the Holy Bible becomes the state book. I suppose it replaces what has traditionally been the state book — the Tennessee Blue Book. Perhaps we will soon see it printed with an orange cover to make clear the Bible is Tennessee’s official state book and no other state’s! 

“Equally troublesome to me are the lengths to which the sponsors have gone to convince the General Assembly that this is ‘alright.’ They know that in order to withstand the likely judicial scrutiny that is to come the legislation must appear to be ‘secular.’ But it is not secular.

“Secular is the opposite of sacred. Merriam-Webster defines secular as ‘not spiritual, of or relating to the physical world and not the spiritual world.’ How can we say the ‘Holy’ Bible isn’t related to the spiritual world? The sponsors and supporters of this legislation have stated: The Bible would fall into that ‘symbolic’ category if the Bible becomes the official book of Tennessee.

Making a book the official state book doesn’t require that people read it any more than making ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ the state song would require people to sing it.

It is about recognizing the Bible’s historical role in Tennessee, and that history is undeniable. This action doesn’t impose a religion on anyone.

People don’t have to read it, and they don’t have to believe it. The bill doesn’t even prescribe a particular version of the Bible. It is the most read and most sold book in history and its role in [Tennessee] history is undeniable.

“I have said of such statements that I hear Satan snickering at such talk. Convincing others that the Holy Bible is not sacred but, rather, secular, that it’s a symbol of history rather than religion, that it doesn’t have to be read or believed, is the stuff of Satan — not Holy Scripture. 

“Voting for the Bible to become the state book on the basis that it’s not religious but a symbol of history is like saying Jesus was a great teacher but not the Son of God.

“In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis posited a similar dilemma: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

“So, too, I must make my choice: Either Jesus was the Son of God, or he wasn’t. Either the Bible is the Word of God, or it’s not. 

“Adrian Rogers, one of Tennessee’s most revered pastors, once said, ‘It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie.’ The sponsor’s sophistry is not the truth. Refusing to participate in this sophistry will ultimately lead to success. Perhaps not on this earth, but hereafter. 

“Mark 12:17 says ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. And they marveled at him.’

“I choose to marvel at Him and His Word.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jury Still Out on Tennessee Appellate Conundrum

CREDIT: JB


Tennesseans may have thought that they’d solved the question of judicial confirmation back in 2014, when a constitutional amendment to clarify how the state’s appellate judges were appointed passed easily. 

The amendment, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), abandoned what had been a judicial nominating commission on the front end and added the important proviso of legislative approval or rejection on the back end. The middle process, by which state appellate judges would be appointed by the governor, remained in place.

JB

Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris

Although the constitutional amendment seemingly established a process similar to that by which federal judges are appointed — in that case, presidential appointment, followed by Senate confirmation — and was partly sold to the state’s voters that way, the real point of the change was to give the legislature final say over appointments.

In Tennessee’s system, state trial judges are elected directly by the people, as mandated by the state constitution, and controversy had raged for years about whether appeals court judges should be named by the same process. Besides establishing the principle of legislative control, the 2014 constitutional amendment would seem to have resolved that issue.

Left unresolved was a newly created conundrum: What exactly does legislative confirmation mean in a bicameral legislature? Should the two chambers — the state Senate and the state House vote as a collective body (in special session, as it were) on approving a gubernatorial selection? Or should each chamber vote separately? And, if the latter, what happens if one chamber votes yes and the other chamber votes no on an appellate judge’s appointment?

Lo and behold, the two chambers don’t agree on the point. The Republican Party may have an unbreakable monopoly (i.e., super-majority) in the General Assembly, with majorities in both chambers that cannot mathematically be offset by the small Democratic remnants in each body, but human nature, which abhors a perfect concordance, occasionally asserts itself in wrangles between Senate and House, each of which is jealous of its own power.

So it is that one of the first agenda items for the just reconvened General Assembly to resolve is the effective meaning of “legislative confirmation” as it applies to the 2014 constitutional amendment on selection of appellate judges.

And the issue is hardly moot. In September, state Supreme Court Justice Gary Wade retired, leaving Tennessee’s ultimate judicial tribunal one member short of its five-member quota. Governor Bill Haslam has appointed Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Roger Page to fill the vacancy, but Page cannot take his seat on the court until his appointment receives legislative confirmation — whatever that turns out to mean.

There is a fail-safe in the process. If the legislature remains in session 60 days without producing either a yes vote or a no vote on Page, the state constitution allows him to be confirmed by default. But nobody wants that to be the endgame. It would leave the conundrum unresolved, with other judicial appointments sure to come before the legislature in the relatively near future.

And such a conclusion would leave the legislature as such looking ineffectual in the process — a direct contradiction of the intent of the constitutional amendment.

And, as Ed Cromer of The Tennessee Journal has noted in a definitive article on the controversy, reliance on the 60-day default process would inevitably lead to possible accusations of “stalling” by one chamber against another or even to the enabling of questionable appointments by some future “bad actor” governor.

The onus is on the General Assembly to resolve the matter as soon as possible in the current legislative session.

An effort was made to break the impasse last spring, in a compromise proposal drafted by Senate-House conferees calling for judicial-confirmation votes to be achieved by votes of the two chambers sitting together, with a majority of the entire General Assembly — 67 votes — needing to be achieved.

That plan was rejected in the Senate, where it got only four of the body’s 33 votes and was condemned by the Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) as threatening “the end of the bicameral legislature.”

Both Norris and Kelsey are members of a 10-member committee (seven Republicans, three Democrats) assembled for the current session and charged with coming up with a new solution. The committee’s first draft, last week, called for separate confirmation votes by House and Senate, with a split decision resulting in a nominee’s rejection. Since both Haslam and the Tennessee Bar Association immediately expressed their opposition to this plan, other formulas and drafts are due to be considered by the committee this week, with deliberations starting on Tuesday.

Besides the urgent matter of filling out the state Supreme Court to its full complement, there are numerous other ramifications that would seemingly call for an immediate solution — including the fact that, while the constitutional amendment may have strengthened the legislature’s hand on the back end of judicial selection, it weakened it on the front end by allowing the expiration of what had been a built-in legislative screening process prior to the governor’s naming a candidate for an appellate position.

That’s what you might call an “unintended consequence,” one of many that may have been packed into last year’s much ballyhooed constitutional amendment process.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Stand Up for Tennessee Infrastructure

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

Brandon Dill

It wasn’t that long ago that Governor Bill Haslam and his transportation commissioner, John Schroer, were in Memphis as part of a statewide tour to pitch what had to have been the softest soft-sell of all time. Here, as

elsewhere in Tennessee, the two state officials met with local business, civic, and political leaders in an effort to dramatize a dire picture of infrastructure needs and the near-catastrophe that would confront the state if these needs could not be met in the near future.

That was in July. Haslam and Schroer made it clear then that the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) was looking at a $6 billion backlog of necessary highway and bridge construction — $150 million of which was needed here in Shelby County — and that there simply was no available revenue to build even a few dollars’ worth of it.

Not long before this tour, there had been some preliminary talk in administration circles of asking the legislature for a modest gasoline tax to finance some of the most drastic needs, but that idea was shortly deep-sixed by the usual suspects — i.e., those mossbacks in the General Assembly who evidently think infrastructure repairs get made by themselves at no cost to anybody.

After the debacle suffered by the administration in failing to get the legislature to approve Insure Tennessee, a Medicaid-expansion package that would actually have brought some $1.4 billion in federal funding to Tennessee, the governor evidently hadn’t the heart for asking the state’s smug solons to pass a tax to pay for something.

The idea of that earlier tour was to go around the state to describe in the most dramatic terms how unsustainable the state’s infrastructure situation would become unless some new funding could be found. But no request was made for any specific form of revenue at any of the local stops made by Haslam and Schroer. What the administration evidently hoped for was that distressed locals would petition the state for a new highway tax without anybody in state government having to ask for it. Needless to say, in the three months since there have been no such petitions presented.

Schroer was back in Memphis on Tuesday, telling a luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club of Memphis that the state’s infrastructure situation was unsustainable under current funding circumstances. Things had meanwhile been made even worse by the impact of a reduction, late in this year’s legislation session, of the portion of state transportation tax that FedEx had been paying.

Things were so bad, Schroer said, that “we can’t survive with everybody in Tennessee driving their car to work.”

Why not ask for a state gasoline tax then? Or at least open a dialogue about it?

“That would be ill-advised,” Schroer said.

Really? What is ill-advised is the state bumbling on toward a future of infrastructure shut-downs and break-downs without specifying a remedy for the funding shortage and making a case for it.

Even toddlers know that the Tooth Fairy doesn’t leave anything under the pillow without getting some sort of signal from somebody.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Democrats, Others Urge New Special Session on Insure Tennessee

CREDIT: JB

JB

L to r, participants at Thursday’s press conference were Harris, Miller, Parkinson, Coffield, Kyle, Stewart, Coffield, and Roberson.

With what turned out to a providential act of timing — within an hour or two of Thursday’s latest Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act — a group composed of state Democrats and local advocates of Governor Bill Haslam’s proposal for Medicaid expansion under the Act made a pitch in Raleigh for a new special legislative session to reconsider that proposal, Insure Tennessee.

The primary spokesperson for the group was state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville, and for obvious reasons her focus was on Democratic support for Insure Tennessee and partisan Republican attempts to obstruct it in a February special session of the legislature this year, as well as during the regular session itself.

Expressing pleasure at the brand-new Supreme Court decision, Mancini said, “passing Insure Tennessee becomes even more important now.” She noted that the aborted plan would have provided affordable health-care coverage for 280,000 currently uninsured persons statewide and “68, 000 right here in Shelby County.”

Pointing out that Haslam, a Republican himself, had been unable to garner support for his plan from the members of his party, Mancini said she and her fellow Democrats had persistently called on the Governor “and the Republican leadership” to support another special session, “and they have refused.” She accused Republicans of “focusing on politics rather than providing what the majority of Tennesseans want.”

Alluding to revelations (not always welcomed by the legislators in question) that a significant number of Republican General Assembly members who acted to stonewall Insure Tennessee were beneficiaries of blue-ribbon health insurance plans provided by the state, Mancini asked, “And why are they more concerned with hiding access to their own affordable health-care plans they get than they are with helping other Tennesseans get the same access?”

Other members of the predominantly Democratic Party group of presenters made such other points as that as many as 220 Tennesseans might have died during the last year for lack of an affordable health-care plan and that other matters of importance included jobs and the survival of hospitals, many of which have been over-burdened with emergency-room care for indigent patients.

State Representative Larry Miller, sponsor of the House resolution for Insure Tennessee (one which, like the Senate version, was blocked before it could get to the floor), promised to “name names” of local legislators deserving special blame for obstructing Insure Tennessee, and he did so, mentioning state Senator Brian Kelsey and state Representative Steve McManus.

State Senator Sara Kyle was equally blunt. “Stop being selfish!” she said, as a message to those Republicans who had bottled up the Insure Tennessee resolution in committee. “It’s a moral issue,” she added.

State Senator Lee Harris, the Senate’s Democratic leader, who had made a well-received appearance the evening before at a meeting of the Germantown Democrats, where he had addressed similar themes, made an effort to move the issue beyond pure partisanship.

Pointing out that polls show a clear majority of Tennesseans favoring Insure Tennessee, regardless of their party, Harris said the appeal for a new special session should by rights be directed to “a very narrow audience” of resisters, “a very small group of leaders on the other side of the aisle and extremists who have dominated the debate.”

Harris absolved “rank and file Republicans,” reminding his hearers that the plan’s author, Governor Haslam, was also a Republican, and he added a hat-tip for John Roberts, the GOP-appointed Chief Justice who had voted with the majority on Thursday to uphold the ACA against a lawsuit, King v. Burwell, that challenged it on largely technical grounds.

Another effort to bridge the gap between Democrats and Republicans was made by Ed Roberson, the current director of Christ Community Health Centers, a onetime Democrat who has been a financial officer in several prominent Republican campaigns over the past couple of decades.

Identifying himself as a Republican, Roberson professed solidarity with the others on Insure Tennessee and called it “unacceptable” that Tennessee should rank 44th in the nation in health-care and that Memphis should have been called the “unhealthiest” city in the country in one nationwide survey.

Roberson’s participation provided at least a measure of ecumenism to Thursday’s press conference, as did his presence side-by-side with Ashley Coffield, local director of Planned Parenthood — an organization that has often been at odds with Roberson’s over their different attitudes toward legal abortion but which in many instances provides overlapping medical care.

Participants at the press conference were Mancini, Harris, Miller, Kyle Coffield, Robinson, state Rep Mike Stewart of Nashville, and state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, whose local Raleigh office provided the venue.