Tag: Governor Bill Lee

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Of Dogs and Men

Pets have always been part of my life. Currently, my wife and I have three dogs and a cat. Two of the dogs are young. One of them, Turbo, a miniature schnauzer, is 17. He’s still eating and tottering around, but we know how this ends, eventually. Turbo will either die in his sleep or, more likely, will have to be put down, a sad process we’ve been through with other pets.

Once the decision is made that the old fella’s quality of life is gone, we’ll call the vet, who will come to our house, make the animal comfortable with a sedative, if necessary, then inject a lethal dose of pentobarbitol. The animal will die peacefully in a minute or so. It’s the saddest thing in the world, but surely it’s more humane than letting our furry loved ones linger and suffer in pain.

Olive VanWyngarden

Contrast this process with the one endured by 68-year-old Donnie Edward Johnson last week. You may recall that Johnson was executed in our name by the state of Tennessee for murdering his wife 35 years ago, a heinous crime. But no matter your feelings about that crime or the death penalty, surely no one truly believes a person should have to slowly die over the course of several minutes, gurgling as their dissolving lungs fill with liquid — literally drowning — a side effect of the lethal drug midazolam that Tennessee uses to execute condemned prisoners. Surely, we can do better as human beings.

It’s inhumane, it’s cruel, and it is unnecessary to execute someone in such a horrific way. Never mind that our proudly professed Christian Governor Bill Lee prayed upon this decision and decided that neither he nor Jesus would forgive Johnson’s sins — nor halt his execution. The rampant “Christian” hypocrisy that infests our politics is another subject for another day. And never mind that Johnson, by all accounts, had himself become a devout Christian and a model prisoner, and that his execution was opposed by some members of his victim’s family, who had forgiven him for his crime, and by many members of the clergy.

All to no avail. The hour of reckoning came. As he was strapped down, Johnson’s last words were, “I commend my life into your hands. Thy will be done. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.” After being injected with midazolam, Johnson sang hymns for two minutes, before loudly drowning in his own bodily fluids and finally passing from this world with a high-pitched gasp.

Johnson became the fourth Tennessee inmate put to death since the state resumed executions in August, and the 136th person put to death by Tennessee since 1916.

Some members of Johnson’s victim’s family stated they felt justice had finally been done. I think we should just acknowledge the death penalty for what it really is: revenge. There is nothing Christian about it. It is not what Jesus would do.

But the state is not supposed to be a religious entity, so “WWJD?” doesn’t come into to play here, legally. Therefore, the issue should be one of justice, not faith. But when we execute a fellow human being, we do have to have a kind of faith — in our justice system. Do we believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that none of those 136 men could have been unjustly executed? I don’t. There have been too many cases of people awaiting execution whose convictions were overturned, sometimes decades later, by DNA evidence or the discovery of coerced confessions or false witness testimony. Police officers can lie and cover up a botched arrest. Aggressive win-at-all-cost district attorneys can withhold evidence, making the winning of a case more important than finding the truth. It happens all the time.

But if we’re going to continue to execute people, maybe we should begin treating death row inmates like animals. Let a doctor sedate the condemned criminal and administer pentobarbitol. It would be over in a minute. Or maybe we should consider letting the inmate choose another popular way to die in Tennessee: taking a lethal dose of opioids.
I’m not sure what it says about us as a civilization when most death row inmates would probably prefer to die like a dog.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Choosing Choice: The Great School Voucher Deception

Except for conversations about a woman’s right to control her physical destiny, “choice” is a popular word among Conservative politicians and policy makers. For the businessman, it’s a near synonym for freedom, and something Rhetoric professors might call a “god word,” with high propagandistic value. “Choice,” is the banner word on The Beacon Center of Tennessee‘s page advocating for Educational Savings Accounts, like Governor Bill Lee’s re-branded and Tennessee House of Representatives-approved school voucher program. In a similar vein, fear of losing the ability to “choose healthcare providers” is key to most narratives opposing anything approaching universal healthcare coverage, just as it was when the same Beacon Center took credit for defeating medicaid expansion in Tennessee.

“While stopping the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare was a necessary first step, it is still our responsibility as Tennesseans to find affordable healthcare solutions for our most vulnerable neighbors,” Beacon CEO Justin Owen told media. Instead of Medicaid access, Beacon supported  “right-to-try” legislation, allowing terminally ill patients access to choose certain unapproved FDA treatments. A Trump-backed Federal “right to try” bill was signed into law in 2018. As noted in The Atlantic, the catchy name and promise of personal autonomy disguised a decreased ability for people who aren’t medical experts to determine if treatments were effective or safe. 

If you don’t know The Beacon Center of Tennessee, previously called The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, they self-describe as “an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research and educational institute.” They’re the group that “exposed” former Vice President Al Gore’s energy use as part of an effort to counter “climate change alarmism.” They’re also affiliated with a right-wing cut-and-paste legislation web called the State Policy Network. It’s one of those places where movements to preserve and expand “choice” by way of free market insurance and publicly subsidized private schools are born. Tennessee’s decision not to expand medicaid didn’t make anybody more free, it put families at risk. Around 71,000 children were left without coverage. Now that Tennessee has moved a step closer toward embracing Education Savings Accounts (aka vouchers), another “choice”-forward initiative from the sewer of America’s policy factories, it’s important to understand how the word is paradoxical and may not always mean what it seems to mean.

Fred Hirsch, a former professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, wrote about the limits of choice. In his book The Social Limits of Growth, he showed how choice can’t be made available to everyone, no matter how clever we get with technology. This is particularly true in regard to superlatives; the best doctor, for example, or the best teachers. This sounds elitist at first, but means and privilege only mitigate the effects of scarcity, they can’t erase the fact of it. Hirsch calls these troublesome things “positional goods,” and Barry Schwartz, the  Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, expanded on the concept in The Paradox of Choice: How the Culture of Abundance Robs us of Satisfaction.

“We might all agree that everyone would be better off if there were less positional competition,” Hirsch wrote, swimming against conventional wisdom that competition is good in every case. “It’s stressful, it’s wasteful, and it distorts people’s lives.”

“Parents wanting only the best for their child encourage her to study hard so she can get into a good college. But everyone is doing that. So the parents push harder. But so does everybody else. So they send their child to after-school enrichment programs and educational summer camps. And so does everyone else. So now they borrow money to switch to private school. Again others follow.”

Sometimes the supply of positional goods just runs out — There are only so many spots in the best teacher’s classroom. Value also decreases as the result of overcrowding. Schwartz illustrates his point with a metaphor made for sports fans:

“It’s like being in a crowded football stadium, watching the crucial play. A spectator several rows in front stands up to get a better view and a chain reaction follows. Soon everyone is standing just to be able to see as well as before. Everyone is on their feet rather than sitting, but no one’s position has improved.”

 Those not standing, by reason of choice or inability, might as well be somewhere else, Schwartz concludes. They aren’t in the game.

Whatever you choose to call them, voucher systems aren’t a new idea. The University of Chicago’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote about the role of government in education in 1955, and choice advocates have been inspired by his arguments ever since. He determined that government should fund schooling. It should not run schools. Friedman advocated vouchers as a means of increasing freedom through choice in the marketplace.

Educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch related this history in her data-laden 2010 mea culpa, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. While working on national education policy for President George H. W. Bush, Ravitch had gotten caught up in choice mania, but came to regret it. Advocates of voucher systems and charter schools, “were certain choice would produce higher achievement,” and “reduce the rising tide of mediocrity,” she wrote. The collected data told a conflicting story. After reviewing the 20-year history of a voucher program in Milwaukee, Ravitch determined “there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind.” As with the football stadium metaphor, everybody moved, but nobody’s position really improved.

“Business leaders like the idea of turning the schools into a marketplace where the consumer is king,” Ravitch wrote, taking on presumptions that choice and competition are necessarily a public good. “But the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers. Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.”

Schwartz concludes that the scramble for positional goods creates what’s commonly called “the rat race.” That’s expressed here as “the burden of locating suitable schools” in a sea of “buyer beware.” That parents cannot “take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program” isn’t a failure of teachers or public school systems or the communities where public schools are located. It’s an enduring expression of political and economic will backed by an unwarranted faith in market-based solutions.

“When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable,” Schwartz wrote in The Paradox of Choice.

“As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.” 

That’s the problem with punishing and stigmatizing needy schools and pumping public education money into private markets. Or, as Ravitch put it, “With so much money aligned against the neighborhood public school and against education as a profession, public education itself is placed at risk.”

That absolutely seems to be the goal. 

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

After Prolonged Debate, State House Passes Voucher Bill; Senate to Vote Thursday

 

Although one more vote, on the floor of the state Senate on Thursday, will be required for its ultimate passage, Governor Bill Lee’s measure to provide private-school vouchers (termed “education savings accounts” in the lingo of the bill) narrowly passed the state House of Representatives on Tuesday by a 50-48 vote.

That resolution came after an unusual and prolonged suspension of voting in the chamber, during which supporters of the bill carried out complex negotiations that resulted in a change of vote from No to Yes by Knoxville state Representative Jason Zachary (R-Knoxville). Zachary was said to have bargained for assurances that the bill would cease at some point to apply to Knoxville.

That change, should it actually be reflected in the final version of the bill, would be only one of several that were accomplished during weeks of consideration. Also on Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee okayed a slightly different version of the measure by a one-vote margin, keeping some aspect of suspense alive as to the bill’s ultimate fate.

As it is written now, the bill amounts to a pilot project, applying only to the counties of Shelby (Memphis) and Davidson (Nashville), a fact that drew outraged opposition from representatives of the two areas. Another disliked feature of the bill, involving compensatory payments to school districts for each student receiving voucher money from the state, was altered so as to progressively reduce the amounts of the compensatory payments year by year.

State Representative Jason Powell (D-Nashville) challenged the bill’s constitutionality and its redistribution of funding “away from our children,” while Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), a veteran campaigner against any and all measures aimed at local sovereignty in education measures, speculated aloud about the lack of responsible curbs on potential fringe institutions that could receive the funds reallocated from traditional public schools.

Lee himself seemed confident that he would soon have a version of the bill on hand for his signature and issued a statement thanking the House for its action.

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News News Blog

Faith Leaders Urge Governor Lee to Welcome Immigrants, Refugees

CREDIT: Courtesty of U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Courtesty of U.S. Customs and Border Protection

immigration detention center.


Eight faith leaders from the Memphis area joined about 70 others from around the state Tuesday afternoon in delivering a letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, urging him to affirm the value of welcoming immigrants and refugees.

In the letter, the signatories identify themselves as faith leaders, “representing many traditions and denominations across Tennessee, concerned about the future of our state.”

Leaders from the Memphis area include:


• Peter Gathje of the Memphis Theological Seminary
•

Joan Laney and Morgan Stafford, as well as

Revs. Larry Chitwood,

Bernardo Zapata, 

Fred Morton, and Tondala Hayward of the United Methodist Church.

• Rev. Luvy Waechter Webb of Evergreen Presbyterian Church

The letter says that “no Tennesseans should be made to feel unwelcome,” and that refugees and immigrants “make our communities stronger.”

[pullquote-1]

“We are, therefore, deeply saddened by much of the recent rhetoric and legislative actions that run counter to these deeply held beliefs,” the letter reads. “In this legislative session alone we have seen bills aimed at denying birth certificates and housing to immigrants, as well as an extreme resolution in support of ending birthright citizenship. These actions display our state, and our state’s government, as unwelcoming and cruel.”

Though most of the legislation that the letter refers to has failed in the Tennessee General Assembly this year, the letter says the discourse surrounding the bills, “whether they pass or not, is harmful.”

[pullquote-2]

The legislation of concern is largely sponsored by Rep. Bruce Griffey (R-Paris), who has said he wants to make Tennessee the “last place” an undocumented immigrant would want to live.

Rep. Bruce Griffey (R-Paris)

The first piece of legislation, HJ R47, is a resolution that would have affirmed President Donald Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. The resolution failed last week in a House subcommittee.

Griffey is also responsible for HB 0562, a bill that would have imposed taxes on money transfers in order to raise funds for the construction of a wall at the country’s southern border. That measure also failed earlier this month in a House subcommittee.

Another bill introduced by Griffey, HB 0614, would have made it a crime for landlords to lease to undocumented immigrants. It was sent to a summer study Tuesday afternoon in the House Commerce Committee.

One of the few remaining immigration-related bills sponsored by Griffey is HB 0662. It would prevent the state from registering birth certificates to a child born to “a mother who is not lawfully present in the United States unless the father is a U.S. citizen” and can provide documentation to prove it.

It is not clear when that legislation will be heard in a House committee again. 

“Hateful rhetoric and the threat of extreme legislation creates fear within our communities, families, and congregations,” the letter continues. “We ask that you put yourself in the place of a refugee family or the Tennessee-born child of immigrants. Would you feel welcomed, loved, and accepted in this state amongst this current dialogue?”

Pleading to Lee’s faith, the letter asks the governor to “live up to that call by affirming the value of immigrants and refugees from out state.”

“We know that you are a person of faith, and we know that faith leads you to value and respect the worth and dignity of all people, no matter their documentation status or country of origin,” the letter reads. “May you remember that they too are Tennesseans, and they too are children of God.

“We are praying that you set an example for this legislature and all Tennesseans by showing what it means to lead with compassion and moral conviction.”

The faith leaders’ Tuesday actions were co-organized by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, the Tennessee Justice Center, and Open Table Nashville.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Leaving the Blanks Unfilled on the State of West Tennessee

Governor Lee

Some time in the fall of 2017, when his gubernatorial candidacy was newish and his name identification across Tennessee was still in the birthing phase, Bill Lee issued what he billed as a 10-point “Commitment to Memphis and Shelby County.”

The points tended to the abstract rather than the concrete. Examples:

“— I commit that Memphis and Shelby County will play a significant role in our efforts to improve education, economic development, and enhancing public safety across West Tennessee.”

“— I commit to working with local leaders to find tailored solutions for the challenges of Memphis and Shelby County.”

“— I commit to a regional approach for economic development that ensures West Tennessee is competitive with Arkansas & Mississippi.”

Obviously, these — and others like them in the list of 10 — were fine objectives; just as obviously, they were nonspecific in the extreme, not the detailed and localized prescriptions that the Franklin businessman’s campaign billed them as.

The week of “State of the State” addresses just completed by Lee, now the governor, appears to reinforce the same impression of blanks needing to be filled in.

A case in point was the last of the three, billed as a “State of West Tennessee” address in a ballroom at the University of Memphis on Thursday evening, in the wake of the governor’s traditional “State of the State” address at the Capitol on Monday and a “State of East Tennessee” address in Knoxville on Tuesday.
[pullquote-3] Assuming the Knoxville speech followed the same outlines as the one in Memphis, it would have been more accurate to characterize the two outlier occasions as mere repetitions of the Monday night address in Knoxville and Memphis. In any case, the latter contained no new content and no expressly localized references at all, unless one counts Lee’s courtesy acknowledgements of dignitaries present before he settled into his remarks. (And even these acknowledgements, with few exceptions, were highly generalized within a request that “all elected officials” stand and be recognized.)

What followed the small talk and a brief statement of commiseration with area victims of flooding from the nonstop recent rains, was the same recollection of mountain-climbing in the Grand Tetons with daughter Jessica that had begun the speech to the gathered legislators and the state broadcasting networks on Monday.

The speech ended the same way as well, with a rumination on the moment that Lee and his daughter were inching their way along a mountain ledge high above an abyss below, with an intense awareness that looking back or looking down would be perilous in the extreme and potentially ruinous. As in Nashville, and presumably in Knoxville as well, this became a metaphorical exhortation for the state’s citizens and its government leaders as their exemplars to keep their attention focused, not on doubts or misgivings, but on the end goal of the climb upward — in Tennessee’s case, to lead the nation, as Lee would have it.
[pullquote-2] And that goal — or, rather, those goals were the same ones enumerated in the State of the State on Monday — worthy ones, for the most part, though the governor’s somewhat Trumpian pledge to be “unapologetic” regarding “American exceptionalism” doesn’t sound any less jingoistic or worrisome on second or third hearing.

The heart of the “State of West Tennessee” address was as word-for-word with the Nashville original as can be imagined — though a mite condensed here and there. The same points and the same categories were recapped — an educational system featuring parental “choice” and synchronization with the needs of “job creators;” a criminal justice system balancing “swift and severe” punishment for the violent and unredeemable with compassion and re-entry assistance for the non-violent; “high quality health care” (without need for Medicaid expansion, though that aspect remained unspoken); and a cost-effective government.

As before the GOP supermajority in the Capitol, the speech was punctuated with designated applause points — “designated” in the literal sense that a member of the governor’s entourage would get them started (or try to) by extra-loud clapping from the back of the hall in case, say, the Memphis attendees did not grasp on their own, the promised glory of there coming to pass a state rainy-day fund of $1.1 billion, “highest in the state’s history.”

All these deja-vu aspects were noted by the frustrated members of a local media queue as they awaited the governor’s appearance, post-address, in a side room of the ballroom floor. Surely, they reasoned, this was the time to pin him down.

And try they did. First question was a wonky one inquiring about the mechanics of Lee’s proposals for stepping up the role of charter schools. Could he elaborate? “We’re looking to create an authorization — a state authorization that would make it easier to open up good charter schools and easier to close those that are not performing,” said Lee, which was close to his exact words in the speech.

Earlier on the very day of his speech, the state House had passed the controversial “fetal heartbeat” bill. Would he sign it? “I have said and would continue to say that I would support legislation that lowers the number of abortions in the state.”

How, in the absence of Medicaid expansion, could the state ensure the solvency of its hospitals and the accessibility of medical care? “The best way to insure the quality of health care is to lower costs.” And a few more words to that effect.

One reporter was puzzled that a speech purporting to discuss the state of things in West Tennessee, had failed to make a single mention of the sprawling and (some thought scandalously) incomplete 174-acre industrial mega-site along the borders of Haywood and Fayette counties. Just under $200 million in state funds had been expended on the site so far, with an estimated $100 million yet to come. And no serious nibbles to date from potential “job creators” of the big-ticket variety or otherwise. What were the governor’s thoughts?

“I have a lot of thoughts about it. I have met with the folks in that region a couple of times now, and at our cabinet level we are focused on how we can best utilize the mega-site. I believe we ought to have it ready, we need to pursue a tenant for it, and that will be a focus and a priority of ours.”

Why has he taken a position against decriminalization of marijuana? “I think that would not be good for our state.”
[pullquote-1] What did he have to say about the state’s numerous potentially divisive racial issues? “There’s more that unites us than divides us.”

Those were the kernels of the governor’s responses. In fairness, he expanded on a few of them but not to any degree of real elaboration. Over and over, he would beg a question, or ignore it, or find a way to restate it. This has, rather famously, been the pattern as well of his interchanges with Capitol Hill reporters.

It was also the manner of his gubernatorial campaign. As was the case then, Lee has adopted a policy as governor of letting bromides, generalities, and talking points do his speaking for him. That was a helpful tactic during the campaign, when all he needed to do was to be the last man standing. It is arguably less so now, when he is the only one left to guide the state across the treacherous mountain ledge of its future.

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Politics Politics Feature

State of the State

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

NASHVILLE — Tennessee Governor Bill Lee delivered his first State of the State address Monday night in the House chamber of the state Capitol to an enthusiastic audience composed overwhelmingly of representatives and senators belonging to the current Republican super-majority.

In a State-of-the-Union-like format involving several nods to individuals, symbolic of his themes, seated in the balcony, the governor stressed four major aspects of state government: education, the criminal justice system, health care, and governmental economy.

His two key points regarding education were his support for “education savings accounts” (ESAs), voucher-like outlays to reinforce what he sees as necessary educational “choices” for parents and for stepped-up backing of charter schools as a means to the same end. Apropos the ESAs, Lee promised to infuse the existing public education system with an additional $25 million by way of balance, and to fully fund the state’s BEP (Basic Education Fund), conspicuously underfunded in recent years.

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee’s State of the State

As he has indicated previously, Lee is proposing a package of criminal justice reform that, he says, would maintain “swift and severe” justice for violent offenders but ease and assist the re-entry of nonviolent offenders into society and reduce or eliminate the costs of their efforts to expunge their criminal records.

Lee’s prescriptions to improve health care were somewhat piecemeal, involving such matters as more money for medical instruction and for safety-nut funding in rural areas, and task forces to deal with suicide prevention and mental health.

Finally, the governor promised “that government [will] be operated with integrity, effectiveness, and as little cost as possible.” (Governor Lee’s complete remarks are posted on the Flyer‘s “Political Beat Blog.”)

Memphis state Representative Karen Camper, the Democrats’ minority leader in the House, rebutted the State of the State in an event held later in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol. Most notably, she took Lee to task for shying away from embracing Medicaid expansion, maintaining that the failure to do so is somewhat responsible for the current rate of hospital closures and the consequent delay in response time for medical emergencies in the state’s hinterland.

• The campaign for positions in Memphis city government is well under way, and we will make an effort to document them.

One of the most serious coming-out events of late was a reception/fund-raiser held last Thursday evening at the home of Lisanne and Tom Marshall in support of Jeff Warren, a physician and former long-term member of the former Memphis School Board. He is now a candidate for the Super District 9 position on the council being vacated by Reid Hedgepeth.

Warren’s bent, as he indicated on that board during the tempestuous period leading to the ultimately abortive merger of city and county school systems, was to try to reconcile the contradictory positions of others. That aim proved to be beyond his, or anybody else’s, ability during the pre-merger period, when he resisted the Memphis board’s majority in favor of surrendering its charter.

In any case, Warren has fairly successfully yoked some unusual companions in support of his council campaign. In his corner at the initial event were numerous representatives of the established local order. Typical was host Marshall, architect of several significant local projects and influential former councilman himself. Jack Sammons, a running mate of Marshall’s during their council years and now a groomer-in-chief of council members acceptable to the power elite, was on hand, as were such traditional political patrons as Billy Orgel and Ron Belz.

Warren also would seem to have support among established political liberals. He has enjoyed support in the past from Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, longtime governmental activist Sara Lewis, and David Upton. He’ll also have lots of money. None of this makes him home free, but all of it together is enough to make Warren the candidate to beat.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Mixed Messages on Gambling Legislation

Although a bill that would allow betting through sports-books in Tennessee  advanced in the state House Departments and Agencies subcommittee last week, other measures to liberalize gambling were headed off, two of them via pressure from Governor Bill Lee, according to a Memphis legislator.

As a direct response by an alleged intervention by Lee, two bills that were to be heard in a House committee on Wednesday, both sponsored by state Representative Larry Miller, were delayed, and one, HB 130, proposing a Constitutional Amendment to allow the legislature to authorize casinos, was taken off notice.

The other Miller measure, HJR 142, which would authorize the state comptroller to conduct a study of the financial impact on Tennessee of legalized gambling in adjacent states, was “rolled” a week, and is scheduled to be taken up at the subcommittee’s meeting this coming Wednesday.

Asked about the two bills, Miller said essentially that he’d been warned off by a liaison person from Lee’s office, who visited him last Tuesday on the governor’s behalf, “flagged” the Constitutional Amendment (which is to say, warned him off); Miller says that he intends to bring the Constitutional Amendment bill back, but only after some serious organizing of support.

Miller says his decision to delay HJR 142, calling for the impact study, was also related to the word he’d received from the governor’s emissary.

“It just seemed to me that this was not a good moment to be asking for a decision on measures involving gambling. I’m going to try to build up some more momentum,” said Miller, who indicated that he intends to bring back a version of HJR 130 at some point and to go ahead, as indicated, with consideration next week of the financial-impact measure.

Apropos Miller’s foreboding about timing, Representative Bruce Griffey (R-Paris) got a turndown on Wednesday in the Department and Agencies subcommittee on another bill for a Constitutional amendment to allow bingo games for charity (HJR 102).That measure was turned down on voice vote after Griffey received an admonition from subcommittee chairman Bill Sanderson (R-Kenton) that legal bingo had a “tragic history” in Tennessee and that a former Secretary of State [Gentry Crowell] had committed suicide [in 1959] at a time when his office was under investigation for corruption in relation to regulation of bingo games.

Sanderson identified the scandal as being “Tennessee Waltz,” but that FBI sting came later. The one in 1959 was designated “Operation Rocky Top.”

Griffey asked for a roll-call vote on the subcommittee, but Sanderson ruled that his gavel had already come down and that the matter could not be renewed.

There was no indication that Griffey’s experience was in any way related to gubernatorial intervention, but it did perhaps underscore the climate for such bills right now and Miller’s reluctance to put his bills up for grabs.

A spokesperson for the governor was unable to confirm that Governor Lee had intervened with Miller concerning either of his measures.

Meanwhile, HB 1, the aforementioned sports betting measure allowing sports-books and online sports betting received a tentative okay in the Departments and Agencies subcommittee and was passed along to the full State Committee. The bill would allow local-option voting on the creation of sports books and would allocate some proceeds to vo-tech education.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

ACLU, Governor Speaking “Same Language” on Justice Reform, Weinberg Says

CREDIT: JB

JB

Hedy Weinberg at Rotary Club of Memphis

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, wants it on the record: She is confident that Governor Bill Lee is “very committed to criminal justice reform” and that “we speak the same language” on that issue.

Weinberg made the declaration as part of an ACLU goals review on Tuesday of this week in a luncheon address to the Rotary Club of Memphis. And, after she had concluded her remarks, she submitted to a question-and-answer session and was asked by Rotarian Otis Sanford of The Daily Memphian and the University of Memphis if she was “confident” that Lee “will follow through on this and make a difference with this very ultra-conservative legislature.”

Weinberg answered in the affirmative: “I don’t agree with [him on] everything, but I do have confidence and will be very happy to partner with him.”

In his inauguration address last week, Lee addressed the goal of “safe neighborhoods” and promised to be “tough on crime and smart on crime at the same time.” He elaborated: “[H]ere’s the reality. 95 percent of the people in prison today are coming out. And today in Tennessee, half of them commit crimes again and return to prison within the first three years. We need to help non-violent criminals re-enter society, and not re-enter prison.”

In her remarks to the Rotarians, Weinberg praised Lee as well as the Tennessee County Services Association, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce,(the Tennessee Association of Goodwills, and the Beacon Center of Tennessee as partners committed to provide progressive remedies to issues of recidivism, non-violent crime, and what she termed Tennessee’s current policies of “over-incarceration.”

The General Assembly has in recent years seen an increasing incidence of cooperation between legislators of the left and right in bills aimed at criminal justice reform. Though she noted remaining islands of obstruction among legislators, Weinberg hailed what she saw as a dawning era of bipartisan agreement on reform issues.