Tag: Jim Kyle

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Politics Politics Feature

Party Talk: Partisanship Draws Post-Election Attention

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The run-up to the statewide election of 2010 may have been, in retrospect, the first time the seismic shift in Tennessee from Democratic to Republican dominance became obvious.

Then-Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, had served for the maximum two terms and was about to vacate the office. The Democratic field that year was full of worthies, as you would expect with an open seat. So was the Republican field.

There had been ample harbingers of the shift to come. In 2007, the venerable John Wilder, a nominal Democrat, had lost his speakership in the state Senate to the GOP’s Ron Ramsey, and a year later, the Republicans had captured a one-vote majority in the House.

Jackson Baker

Zach Wamp

The changeover accelerated during the 2010 governor’s race, as the Democratic candidates, noticing a diminishing lack of enthusiasm for their cause, began dropping out one by one. Memphian Jim Kyle, then-leader of the state Senate Democrats and now a Shelby County Chancellor, commented at the time, “I kept looking for Yellow Dog [committed] Democrats, and kept finding Yellow Dog Republicans.”

The race came down to three Republicans in the end — Ramsey, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, and Chattanooga Congressman Zach Wamp.

Haslam, regarded as the more moderate of the three, won, and Wamp, who waged a credible race as an Everyman-styled conservative, finished second. The Chattanoogan’s subsequent political history is, by the standards of Tennessee politics, somewhat unusual. Still regarding himself as a conservative and a Republican, he has been at pains to present himself as a “post-partisan truth-teller.”

Which means that Wamp and his son Weston, who has made efforts to establish a political career of his own, have regarded themselves as free to publicly criticize Donald J. Trump.

Wamp has of late been actively tweeting in favor of acceptance of the presidential election results — an act surely unique enough among Republicans to merit special mention.

A recent Wamp tweet, rebutting the no-surrender Trumpians: “What? Common [c’mon?] guys. Truth matters. Get real. Quit making stuff up and misleading people. Conservatives must stand for truth. #CountryOverParty.”

Another one, directed at current national GOP chair Ronna McDaniel, a vocal defender of the Trump holdout: “I was working my butt off to elect conservatives before you were a grown-up. Today I am ashamed of your service as Chair of the RNC. Time for you and your ilk to go. Truth matters. Your lies hurt our cause.”

And yet another: “The National Council on Election Integrity is spending $2 million on an ad urging a transition. On the board of this org: @GOP like Michael Chertoff, Dan Coats, Bill Frist, @BillHaslam and @zachwamp. Get to Work.”

Meanwhile, as was noted here last week, Tennessee’s outgoing U.S. Senator, Lamar Alexander, is — however circumspectly — advocating for acceptance of the election results and the need for an effective transition. In a recent interview with the Tennessee Journal, Alexander cautioned: “What we have to watch for is that what happened to the one-party Democratic Party doesn’t happen to the one-party Republican Party. … Middle Tennessee was grabbing all the power and leaving East Tennessee and Memphis out. … And now we’ve gone full circle, where we have a one-party system, which again is starting to concentrate power in Middle Tennessee. … We Republicans have to watch out for being self-satisfied, not broad enough in our thinking. We don’t want to develop the flaws the Democratic Party started to develop in the 1960s.”

Meanwhile, the aforesaid Democratic Party will be looking for new leadership as of January, as Mary Mancini, who has headed the state party for the last six years, is stepping down. Potential successors are beginning to emerge, and more of that anon.

Under Mancini’s guidance, Democrats were able to increase the number of competitive races, including several in Shelby County. One of their winners, new District 96 state Representative Torrey Harris, replaced former Rep. John DeBerry, who was disallowed as a Democratic candidate by the state party and forced to run as an independent. DeBerry has been compensated for his pain by receiving a new job — annual pay, $165,000 — as an assistant to GOP Governor Bill Lee. That’s outreach and then some!

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Deidre Malone in Talks to Handle Council Referenda Campaign

Advertising executive Deidre Malone of Malone Advertising and Media Group has confirmed that she is in negotiation with representatives of the Memphis City Council to handle the “public information” campaign on three ballot referenda that a council majority has voted to fund to the tune of $30,000 to $40,000.

Deirdre Malone

Malone, a former Shelby County commissioner, had previously announced her personal support for the referenda.

The council’s action, contained in a previously unannounced add-on resolution by Councilman/County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., was swiftly passed by an 5 to 3 margin Tuesday night, and immediately embedded in the public record by a “same-night minutes” motion from Ford.

The expenditure of public funds for a one-sided campaign on behalf of the referenda, sans benefit of mayoral approval or opportunity to veto, is the subject of an emergency hearing for a temporary injunction and restraining order against it, set for later Friday in the courtroom of Chancellor Jim Kyle.

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Politics Politics Feature

No Rest for the Weary

CREDIT: Kyle and Norris photos courtesy of Jackson Baker

Shelby Countians have figured in several post-election moves:

The Rev.  Kenneth Whalum Jr., a possible candidate for Memphis mayor next year, isn’t waiting until then to make some waves. Whalum is one of eight plaintiffs from across the state in a suit in federal court designed to invalidate the ‘Yes’ vote seemingly conferred by a majority of voters on Amendment 1, which grants the General Assembly considerable new authority in legislating on abortion matters.

The basis of the suit, which was filed Friday in Nashville, is the language of Article XI, Section 3, of the state Constitution, which states that voters “approve and ratify such amendment or amendments by a majority of all the citizens of the state voting for governor, voting in their favor.”

The plaintiffs, all of whom opposed Amendment 1 and all of whom aver that they cast votes in the governor’s race, say that the constitutional language should be taken literally and that the state has a duty to determine and count only those votes on an amendment question that were cast by persons who also cast votes for governor.

Records compiled by the office of Secretary of State Tre Hargett showed that 32,570 more votes were cast on Amendment 1 than for governor, 1,385,178 as against 1,352,608. The plaintiffs alleged that the disproportion was the direct result of what their attorney Bill Harbison of Nashville, president-elect of the Tennessee Bar Association, said was a strategy by proponents of the amendment of “intentionally abstaining from the governor’s race in an effort to manipulate the numbers in order to pass an amendment” and “a clear violation of [others’] 14th Amendment rights.”

It seems anything but clear to Hargett, a former state representative from Bartlett and a nominal defendant in the suit, along with Governor Bill Haslam, new state Attorney General Herb Slatery, and the seven members of the state Election Commission.

Hargett notes that state election officials have never tried to match votes on amendment questions with ballots cast by the same voters for governor but have measured amendment votes, more abstractly, against a threshold of 50-percent-plus-one of the total votes cast in the governor’s race. “It does not make sense any other way,” he has said.

Also weighing in was Brian Harris, president of Tennessee Right to Life and a coordinator for the Yes on 1 campaign. “Even if you wrongly discount those who may have voted for Amendment 1 but not in the governor’s race, there is still a margin of almost 20,000 votes in favor of the amendment,” said Harris.

Aside from legalities, some complicated mathematical reckonings may figure in this case, due for a first hearing in U.S. District Court in Nashville on January 12th. Meanwhile, legislative advocates of new restrictions on abortion are known to be readying bills in time for the new session of the General Assembly, opening up the same month.

• And speaking of enabling legislation, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) issued a press release on Monday, the eve of Veterans Day, announcing that he and state Representative Rusty Crowe (R-Johnson City) were drafting legislation to allow veterans’ organizations to conduct raffles and games of chance for fund-raising purposes, in accordance with the provisions of Amendment 4, which passed handily in the election.

The amendment expressly grants to 501(c)(19) organizations (veterans’ groups) the same ability to hold such fund-raising affairs as are currently permitted to 501(c)(3) organizations, so long as the veterans’ groups observe the same deadlines for submitting applications to do so — January 31st of a given year for an event scheduled to occur between July 1st  of that year and June 30th of the next. 

A technical point, even a housekeeping matter, but a necessary one. 

Norris, who doubles as chairman of the veterans subcommittee of the Senate State and Local Government Committee, said in the release: “Our legislation will allow this process to move forward and will ensure that the deadline affords these organizations enough time to get their applications in.”

            

• Hargett and Norris, along with state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, were among Republicans cited this week by The Commercial Appeal‘s veteran Capitol Hill reporter Rick Locker as likely candidates for governor in 2016. Though their ranks have progressively been thinned in recent years by an accelerating statewide shift of political power to the GOP, there are Democratic names involved in gubernatorial speculation as well.

One of them is that of Gordon Ball, who was recently defeated by Republican incumbent Lamar Alexander in this year’s U.S. Senate race.

The wealthy Knoxville lawyer, who made his legal reputation and his fortune suing big-ticket corporations, is meanwhile going through some significant personal changes.

On the plus side, Ball, a graduate of the University of Memphis Law School whose son Tanner is now a student here, told the Flyer last week that he plans to transition at year’s end from his life-long residence in East Tennessee to a residence on Memphis’ Mud Island. 

On the down side, Ball also saw his marriage of less than a year to wife Happy Hayes Ball, who accompanied him on his first several campaign trips to Memphis, come to an apparent end. He filed divorce papers last Friday, listing a variety of complaints, including his wife’s alleged unauthorized use of funds from his business account.

Ball’s estranged wife also figured in another possibly unauthorized action that became a campaign issue. It was her removal of a television set and several other furnishings from the couple’s condo in Destin, Florida, that prompted Alabaman Barry Kraselsky, who had purchased the condo from Ball, to sue for breach of contract over the missing items.

That dispute is yet to be adjudicated. Meanwhile, Ball, who has resumed his law practice, says he intends to play golf and take a post-election vacation in Naples.

• An uneasy truce that settled over the Shelby County Commission following a hearing on the body’s rules last week by Chancellor Jim Kyle was in danger of erupting into discord again in this week’s committee sessions.

In a hearing on Thursday, Kyle opted not to rule in the matter of a suit brought against commission Chairman Justin Ford by a group of commission plaintiffs — six Democratic members plus Republican Steve Basar — who allege that Ford violated the body’s rules in arbitrarily keeping a proposed rules change off the commission agenda.

The chancellor told both sides that the commission, in essence, had no rules to break, inasmuch as each elected version of the commission is obliged to set its own rules, and the body elected in August has not yet done so.

Both sides to the dispute had assumed that the commission was bound by rules inherited from previous commissions. The rules change sought by the plaintiffs would have lowered the threshold necessary to enact further rules changes from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority. 

Democratic Commissioner Van Turner, one of the plaintiffs in the suit and chairman of the body’s general government committee, which was scheduled to meet on Wednesday, said he intended to bring up the whole matter of commission rules. Meanwhile, said Turner, Kyle’s ruling apparently left the county charter, which calls for a simple majority to decide such matters, as the commission’s sole authority.

Behind all the legal complications is a simple power struggle, pitting the commission’s Democrats and Basar, who was vice-chair in the commission’s last session but lost his bid to become chairman in the current session, versus the other five Republicans plus Ford, a Democrat who gained the chairmanship with GOP support.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Heat’s Still On in Shelby County Politics

As August turned to September, the political junkies among us found that very little had changed in their world. 

The heat of campaigning was over, to be succeeded by a late summer heat wave. Political advertising was conspicuously less frequent on radio and TV (which didn’t mean, of course, that deceit and misrepresentation were absent from the usual programming and commercials still available on the airwaves). In any case, more politics was just ahead.

Among the decisions still to be made were the four constitutional amendments that will appear on the November 4th statewide ballot. And the adherents and opponents of those amendments were already getting busy. More of that anon.

Meanwhile, the winners of the Shelby County general election were sworn in and girding for contests of other kinds. One of the most obvious of those was the matter of who would be chairman of the new Shelby County Commission. In particular, two of the five holdovers on a commission freshly elected from 13 single-member districts were girding for a fresh battle.

The two are Terry Roland, the Millington firebrand who, toward the end of his just-concluded first term, began trying to reinvent himself as an elder statesman of sorts; and Steve Basar, another second-termer whose constituency is based in East Memphis and the Poplar corridor. 

Both are Republicans and are counting on the resumption of the gentlemen’s agreement that has, more often than not since the advent of political primary elections in the early 1990s, called for the rotating of the commission chairmanship between Republicans and Democrats. 

The formula has been flouted in recent times — notably in 2011, when most of the commission’s Republicans joined with the political opposition to give Democrat Sidney Chism a second term, more or less to spite then-vice chair Mike Carpenter, a fellow Republican whose bipartisan ways had caused them to regard him as a “RINO” (Republican in name only).    

And there has been some isolated muttering among the Democratic newbies on the commission about banding together to elect one of their own as chairman for the 2014-15 term, but such an action would surely roil the waters, and there is no consensus among them for a candidate, in any case.

As vice chair, Basar would seem to have the advantage, especially since, unlike Carpenter, he has managed, despite a moderate, open-minded demeanor, to stay reasonably close to the GOP party line on major issues. Roland, however, is openly campaigning for the chairmanship, and it remains to be seen if he can put aside the politically divisive aspects of a persona which saw him, for most of the previous four years, functioning as the Democratic majority’s chief adversary.

For what it’s worth, during the commission’s swearing-in ceremony at the Cannon Center last Thursday, Roland sat on one end of the stage, next to four other Republican members, while Basar sat on the opposite end, next to several Democrats.

The new version of the commission will meet for the first time next Monday to resolve the chairmanship issue, among other matters, and what they decide will go far toward setting a tone for the new term.

• Meanwhile, there are already some political stirrings city-side, where the Memphis municipal election of 2015 is just a hop, skip, and jump away.

A year or so ago, before the vexing benefits issue and other budgetary conundra hit the fan so spectacularly, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton let it be known, at first through surrogates and finally via his own statement, that he would indeed be a candidate for reelection. Whether that remains the case, however, may depend on how easily and quickly the thorny issues that currently dominate the city-government agenda can be resolved, if at all.

The current Memphis City Council includes at least two mayoral wannabes — Jim Strickland, whose ambitions are long standing, and Harold Collins. There may, indeed, be others. It would be strange if council veteran Myron Lowery, who served  a brief but credible term as interim mayor in 2009 and who was defeated by Wharton in the special election held later that year, isn’t thinking of running.

In any case, Strickland can be counted on as a sure thing if Wharton ceases to be a candidate. Ditto with Collins, the subject of a persistent rumor that he already has been assured that the seat is likely to be open.

If Strickland should vacate his seat to run for mayor, a would-be successor is former Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz, who espoused the cause of the newly Memphis-based Shelby County Schools system during his term as commission chair in 2012-13 and who has moved his residence from Germantown into the city proper.

• Definitive word finally came down last week as to how the party nominations for state Senate District 30, to succeed Chancellor-elect Jim Kyle, must be conducted. Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper delivered an opinion that would:

1) Require nominations to be made by the two major parties’ local governing bodies — the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee and the Shelby County Republican Steering Committee;

2) Limit the number of eligible voters to those committee members who represent precincts that lie within Senate District 30.

In the case of Democrats, who elect most of their executive committee members by House District, this effectively franchises all members representing House Districts that contain such precincts. 

Republicans also elect many of their steering committee members from House Districts, but a majority of their committee members are at-large and will also be enabled to vote.

3) Require House members seeking the Senate nomination to withdraw from the November ballot before attempting to win their party’s nomination for the Senate.

This requirement placed a clear burden upon rumored candidates like Democratic state Representatives Antonio Parkinson and G.A. Hardaway, inasmuch as the withdrawal of either from the November ballot would necessitate a write-in campaign to fill the ballot void for their party’s House race.

All candidacies, whether by party nomination or by independents, must be certified by a date 45 days from the date of the November 4th election. That would seem to make September 20th the effective deadline for application to the Election Commission.

Shelby County Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson promptly set up a meeting of the party executive committee for 7 p.m. next Monday night at the IBEW meeting hall on Madison. Inasmuch as District 30 is heavily Democratic, this meeting is likely to resolve not only who the party nominee is but who the next senator will be.

Among the known candidates are former state Senator Beverly Marrero, former Tennessee Regulatory Authority member Sara Kyle (wife of the outgoing senator), and Parkinson, who confirmed his continuing interest this week. Hardaway would seem to have decided against seeking the seat, and among other Democrats whose names have figured in speculation is that of Carol Chumney, a former state representative, city councilmember, and mayoral candidate.

At least one prominent Republican has expressed interest in the Senate seat. That would be physician/businessman George Flinn, a former county commissioner and frequent candidate for other offices — most recently the U.S. Senate, which he unsuccessfully sought in the recent Republican senatorial primary, losing out to incumbent Lamar Alexander and the primary runner-up, state Representative Joe Carr of Lascassas.

Flinn informed attendees of last week’s meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club of his interest. The Shelby County Republican Steering Committee is likely to consider the matter Thursday.

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News The Fly-By

Tennessee Becomes the 16th State to Legalize Hemp

CREDIT: Verastuchelova | Dreamstime.com

Tennessee may not be the most progressive state on many issues, but the Volunteer State is leading the way on at least one issue — legalized hemp farming.

Last week, Tennessee joined 15 other states in legalizing the growing and harvesting of hemp. The state law that was signed in May went into effect on July 1st.

In the bill, the state specifies the newly legal plants as those that are “grown from seed certified by a certifying agency” and do not have a “THC concentration more than 0.3 percent on a dry mass basis.”

The versatile hemp plant is used in manufacturing everything from automobile components to building materials for homes, as well as in clothing, paper, and fuel — either biodiesel or bioethanol from different parts of the plant.

When consumed, hemp seeds, often sold in grocery stores as “hemp hearts,” provide a complete protein and a high dose of omega-3 fatty acids.

While hemp and marijuana stem from the same species of plant, marijuana varieties — those with high THC concentrations — come from the flowers and leaves of the plant, while hemp is made from the fiber and seeds of a low-THC plant. An analogy that is frequently used to separate the two cannabis varieties describes the differences between a wolf and a Chihuahua — both members of the Canis lupus species but different breeds.

State Senator Jim Kyle (D-Memphis) voted in favor of the bill and said the bottom line was creating new jobs for Tennesseans.

“It’s a national movement in some of the agricultural states trying to find new products,” Kyle said. “We lost a lot of jobs when the textile industries went overseas. But hemp apparently has properties where you can use it in manufacturing — it’s a fiber, just like cotton, and consequently, since it is a fiber like cotton and it can be used like cotton, that may present some economic opportunities in parts of the country that could grow the product.”

The bipartisan effort went unopposed in the state Senate, the language careful to distinguish between marijuana and hemp. Kyle said the hemp issue and the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana are two separate issues and shouldn’t be lumped together.

“If it creates economic opportunities — job opportunities — for people, that’s a good thing,” Kyle said. “Despite the fact that we’re talking about hemp, if you look past that, and you don’t connect this issue to the medical marijuana issue, you have a chance to pass something in Tennessee. I think it was viewed as an economic issue and not as anything else. The proponents of the bill went out of their way to make sure that was clear and that’s why it passed 28 to nothing in Tennessee.”

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News The Fly-By

Amazon Grace

Tennessee’s tax-free honeymoon with Amazon is officially over.

Tennessee residents will now see an additional charge on their Amazon purchases, as the online retailer is now required by the state to collect sales tax.

For years, Amazon purchases made by Tennessee residents were tax-free at the time of purchase. Emails were sent out annually, letting consumers know how much they had spent on Amazon purchases the previous year so taxes could be filed accurately, but it was up to the shopper to include those taxes in their tax forms.

According to Amazon, in certain states where the website does not have a “physical selling presence” and there are no laws specifically requiring sales tax to be added, the retailer is not required to collect such tax.

That’s due to the Internet Tax Freedom Act that was reenacted by former President George W. Bush in 2007. However, states are still able to enact laws requiring online retailers to collect sales tax.

Senator Jim Kyle of Memphis, who opposed the tax in committee, said requiring the sales tax has not been shown to deter online shopping, and Amazon collecting taxes will not make small businesses more competitive with online vendors.

“It’s still a tax increase that this Republican-led government has brought us,” said Kyle, a Democrat. “You can spin this however you want to, but people like you and me are paying for it.”

Republican Senator Brian Kelsey, who voted in favor of the tax, didn’t return calls for comment.

In Tennessee, the previous deal struck by former Governor Phil Bredesen allowed Amazon to build two distribution centers in the state, creating 1,500 full-time jobs and, despite the “physical selling presence,” the deal made it so that Amazon would not be required to collect taxes.

The current governor, Bill Haslam, signed a bill in 2012 that required Amazon and other remote sellers to not only collect state tax on goods, but also to build a new distribution center and maintain at least 3,500 full-time positions until 2016 — an additional 2,000 jobs than was in the previous agreement with Bredesen.

“There are a lot of contributing factors that go into our thought process as we decide where to place our fulfillment centers,” said Nina Lindsey, a spokesperson for Amazon. “Most importantly, we want to make sure a fulfillment center is placed as close to the customer as possible. We look closely at the local workforce, and we’ve found great talent in abundance across [Tennessee].”

The bill grandfathered in the two distribution centers in Chattanooga and Charleston built in 2011. Distribution centers in Murfreesboro and Lebanon opened last year. Last November, The Tennessee Journal reported an expected $8.8 million increase in revenue from the tax.

Tennessee joins 18 other states in being charged tax on online sales. Mississippi and Arkansas residents, however, remain free from tax collection by the online retailing giant.

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Politics Politics Feature

Texts and Subtexts

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The auditorium of the Vasco Smith county building was full, as it normally is when there’s a controversy to be resolved or an appointment to be competed for. In the case of the Shelby County Commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, both conditions pertained.

Given that most of the attendees were on hand to boost the chances of one of three candidates to fill a Probate Court vacancy (and most of those to support candidate Kathleen Gomes), someone suggested leapfrogging down the commission’s agenda to Item 19, the court appointment of an interim judge to replace retiring judge Robert Benham.

The candidates, all lawyers, were Gomes, who boasted many years’ experience trying cases in Probate Court; state senator Jim Kyle, who heads the diminished band of Democrats in the state Senate; and former Shelby County commissioner Julian Bolton.

Gomes was nominated by Heidi Shafer, Kyle by Sidney Chism, and Bolton by Walter Bailey. As befitted the turnout on her behalf, Gomes had the most testimonies by audience members. Bolton’s mother and sister spoke on his behalf. Kyle spoke to his “30 years making decisions in the public realm” and his “ability to work with everybody.”

Commissioners also toasted their favorites. Chris Thomas noted that he himself was a Republican while Gomes was a Democrat and touted that fact as proof that his preference had nothing to do with politics. The claim generated a laugh line when Chairman Mike Ritz, also a GOP member but one increasingly inattentive to the party line, said straight-facedly to the more avowedly partisan Thomas, “Oh, you’re a Republican?”

In speaking for Kyle, Commissioner Terry Roland also made the claim that his choice was above politics. All the candidates were “equally qualified,” said Roland, but, “Me and this gentleman [Kyle], we go way back … [pause] to Ophelia Ford days.” That was a reference to the Senate’s consideration of a contested special state Senate election in 2005, one eventually resolved in favor of Democrat Ford and against Republican Roland. 

Roland said Kyle had not “done right” by him then. But since? “I’ve got to know his heart … have come to respect this gentleman, immensely. I’m throwing my support to Jim Kyle.”

As was fairly well known before Monday’s meeting, and was explicitly volunteered by Roland in a conversation before the meeting, Tennessee lieutenant governor Ron Ramsey, the state Senate speaker and a staunchly conservative Republican, had endorsed Democrat Kyle and had made a point of communicating the fact.

It was less well known, except in Democratic Party circles, that something of an understanding — or at least a hope — existed that Kyle’s Senate seat, if vacated, might be awarded by the commission at some point to former state senator Beverly Marrero, who was defeated in last year’s Democratic primary by Kyle in the district they both shared after GOP-controlled redistricting.

The Senate-appointment issue, in any case, was the source of a sore spot that developed during the voting. After the first ballot, Kyle had six of the seven votes needed, Gomes had four, and Bolton had two. Bailey, who had committed to Bolton on the first ballot in homage to his ex-colleague, quickly announced he was switching his vote to Kyle, giving him seven votes and, for the space of a few seconds, making him the apparent probate judge-designate.

Then occurred what is surely the most awkward and potentially embarrassing moment in the commission career of Democrat Steve Mulroy, a Kyle voter on the first ballot. Immediately upon Bailey’s switch, Mulroy announced his own. Instead of voting for Kyle, he would pass.

Mulroy later said that he had made no promises to Kyle and had voted for him on the first ballot as a courtesy but had always anticipated voting for Gomes in what he expected would be some subsequent ballot. Whatever Mulroy’s motives, his action was, to say the least, an eyebrow-raiser, and he had best not be expecting a place on Kyle’s Christmas card list this year.

This was the second time in a two-year span that Kyle had suffered a sudden reverse at the hands of a fellow Democrat on the commission. In 2011, he had applied for the position of interim member of the Unified School Board, just then being appointed by the commission, and was within a vote of victory when Democrat Justin Ford decided to cast his vote for Republican Kevin Woods, Kyle’s opponent and, thereby, the victor.

It should be noted that Mulroy was not the only Democrat ultimately recorded as voting for Gomes. So were Melvin Burgess and Henri Brooks.

• Brooks would figure as one of the principals in another surprising development Monday, and this one, too, had some importance. This was regarding a resolution authorizing the payment of some $103,889.28 to the lawyers engaged by the commission to litigate the ongoing school-merger controversy. This is the kind of vote that normally, with all 13 members voting, gets an 8-5 outcome, with the supporters of school merger in the majority and opponents, mainly suburban members who support municipal school districts, in the minority.

This time the resolution failed, however, getting only six of the seven votes needed for passage. The vote was taken in the immediate aftermath of a philippic made by Brooks against Chairman Ritz, a merger supporter, whom she accused of speaking to her rudely. Whether for that reason or some other, Brooks abstained from voting. And Democrat Bailey, another merger supporter, was temporarily out of the chamber.

Presumably, the commission will have opportunities to vote again on the matter at a subsequent meeting.

• The other major development at Monday’s meeting was the commission’s vote, by the aforesaid 8-5 margin — seven Democrats plus Ritz versus five Republicans — to approve an ordinance, on third and final reading, to exempt from Shelby County residence requirements all of the erstwhile Memphis City Schools teachers coming into the new county system via merger.

Another ordinance, proposed by Millington’s Roland, a vehement foe of merger, would have authorized a referendum on the issue of revising the county charter so as to eliminate the residency requirements for all county employees. To reject this ordinance after passing the preceding one would be “hypocrisy,” said Roland, who went on to say, “I know a lot of people in Nashville. Surely you wouldn’t want the legislature to see this.”

When his proposal went down 8-5 (though with a different mix of ayes and nays than usual), Roland, who has taken to suggesting with increasing intensity and frequency that he, in effect, sits at the right hand of Ron Ramsey, thundered that the legislature might be brought to overrule the commission’s previous vote to enlarge the permanent Unified School Board from seven to 13.

• The Tennessee General Assembly was, however, moving quickly toward a scheduled mid-April adjournment, and, though school legislation favored by Shelby County’s suburban municipalities — bills to enable municipal schools and private-school vouchers, among others — still had some hoops to pass through, they seemed headed toward final passage this week or next.          

In a longish chat with reporters last week, Ramsey made the case for the legislature’s current pell-mell progress toward adjournment as a matter of recovering what had once been the norm. Ramsey also strongly advocated legislation, now scheduled for consideration in the assembly’s final week, that would allow the nomination of U.S. Senate candidates by party caucuses in the legislature rather than, as at present, in open public primaries.

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Politics Politics Feature

Kyle or Mulroy?

CREDIT: Kyle by Seanna Lyn Brandmeir; Mulroy by Justin Fox Burks

Something of an irony may be shaping up for 2014, the next fully fledged political year in Shelby County. (One year out of every four is in theory election-free in Memphis and Shelby County, and 2013 is one such year; a plethora of special elections has somewhat jimmied the cycle in recent years, however.)

The main local entrée on next year’s political menu will be the race for Shelby County mayor. Incumbent Republican Mark Luttrell is considered a certainty to run for reelection, and there is of yet no consensus among Democrats as to who should oppose him.

One name that is always mentioned in such a context is that of state senator Jim Kyle, the Senate’s Democratic leader. After a pro forma period of letting his name float, Kyle normally withdraws his name from consideration. Next year could be different, if for no other reason than Kyle’s frustration with being a member of an increasingly powerless minority in Nashville.

Last week, the formative one for the 2013 session of the General Assembly, was a rough one for Kyle, who seems to be on the losing end of a campaign for a rules change requiring the dominant Republicans to hold their caucus meetings in public.  

Moreover, having barely won reelection as leader of the truncated Senate Democrats with a 4-3 victory late last year over fellow Memphian Reginald Tate, Kyle last week saw Republican members of the Shelby County delegation engineer the election of the GOP-friendly Tate as delegation chairman over state representative Antonio Parkinson, whom Kyle had supported.

If Kyle should once again reject a race for county mayor, a very real Democratic prospect is Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, who is term-limited from running for reelection in 2014. The commissioner often serves as point man for Democratic initiatives and did so again of late with his proposal for a wage-theft ordinance.

As a white Democrat with significant Poplar Corridor appeal, Mulroy might indeed be able to marshal a strong campaign against Luttrell, and he is inclined, as are most politicians, to aspire upward rather than laterally, which would be the case if he sought a Memphis City Council seat in 2015, as some have suggested to him as an alternative.

The aforementioned irony in a Luttrell-Mulroy race would be a limited one, actually — confined to the fact that the current mayor was himself an outspoken advocate for action against wage theft during his race for mayor in 2010. The then sheriff and mayoral candidate told a gathering of Midtown progressives, as we reported at the time, that he favored “legal alternatives to the incarceration of the mentally ill and stepped-up actions against ‘wage theft,’ the exploitation of workers, mainly Hispanics, by unscrupulous employers.”

Luttrell was a virtual nonparticipant in the recent county debate over wage theft, however. Mulroy’s county ordinance, which was directed against such offenses as employers’ holding back employees’ wages or declining to pay overtime, was narrowly rejected on its third reading on Monday after a systematic campaign against it by local business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce.

Crucial to the outcome was the conversion of Democratic commissioner James Harvey from proponent of the ordinance to opponent.

A companion wage-theft ordinance, sponsored by Myron Lowery, is still pending in city council. • Planned Parenthood, the venerable provider of what it describes as “high-quality, affordable sexual and reproductive health care for millions of women, men, and teens” and which has been under consistent attack of late by social conservatives, in and out of government, for its enabling of abortion procedures, has a big night planned for Tuesday, January 22nd.

In tandem with the Center for Research on Women (CROW) at the University of Memphis, Planned Parenthood is sponsoring an event entitled “Religion, Law, and Reproductive Rights: The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.” The event, which has numerous local sponsors, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the University of Tennessee Medical Association, includes a documentary film and a panel of speakers from the ranks of law, politics, and local clergy.

The free event will be held at the U of M’s University Center Theater from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

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Politics Politics Feature

Looking Ahead

“The tide is turning.” That’s Jim Kyle‘s confident declaration about the forthcoming election season in state government. Kyle, the Memphis Democrat who leads his party in the Tennessee state Senate, cites a number of precedents for his belief that 2008 will be a triumphant year for long-suffering state Democrats, who have been seeing their legislative numbers recede for a decade or two.

“Democrats just took over the Virginia state Senate, for one thing. And we’ve got more Democrats running in Republican districts, even in East Tennessee, than we ever had before,” Kyle said Tuesday — the very day that his opposite number, GOP Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, was due in Shelby County for a meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club.

Ramsey, a Blountville Republican, came with Mark Norris, a Shelby Countian who is currently serving as the Senate Republican leader and who, Kyle and most other observers believe, wants to succeed Ramsey as Speaker and lieutenant governor should the GOP regain the tenuous majority it held for most of this year’s session and should Ramsey go on to run for governor in 2010, as all the selfsame observers expect.

“Oh, he’s running. No doubt about it,” said Kyle of his GOP counterpart’s gubernatorial hopes — though Ramsey’s immediate concerns are likely to be the same as Kyle’s: to gain a majority for his party in next year’s statewide legislative races. (For what it’s worth, the Democratic majority in the state House — 53 to 46, at the moment — is unlikely to be overturned, though the Republicans will surely try.)

As things stand now, the two major parties are tied in the Senate at 16-16. There is one “independent,” former Republican Micheal Williams of Maynardville, who was a reliable ally of (and vote for) John Wilder, the venerable Democrat who was deposed as Speaker early this year when Democrat Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville cast a surprise (and decisive) vote for Ramsey during Senate reorganization for the 2007-’08 term.

Kurita thereupon became Senate Speaker pro Tem, displacing Williams, who simmered quietly for a while then announced in mid-session last spring that he was leaving the GOP. Though he didn’t join the Democrats as such, he aligned with them for procedural purposes, giving Kyle’s party a technical majority by the thinnest possible margin.

When Chattanooga’s Ward Crutchfield, a longtime Democratic pillar in the Senate, was forced to resign after copping a guilty plea as a defendant in the Tennessee Waltz scandal, the Republicans nominated Oscar Brock, son of former U.S. senator Bill Brock, to vie for Crutchfield’s seat.

But Brock was beaten by Democrat Andy Berke in this month’s special election and with a percentage of the vote, 63 percent, that Kyle contends is 10 points in excess of the normal Democratic edge in the District 10 seat.

“That’s one more reason why I think the tide is moving our way,” Kyle said.

Of course, the Republicans are not sitting idly by without mounting a strategy of their own to gain control of the state Senate. They, too, evidently intend to compete seat by seat, district by district, as Kyle says the Democrats will, and one obvious GOP target is octogenarian Wilder of Somerville, who has so far given no indication whether he will seek reelection to his District 26 seat.

“Nobody knows. He’ll just have to decide how much he wants to be in the Senate for four more years,” said Kyle, who carefully skirted the issue of whether Wilder, who served as Speaker for 36 years until the narrow January vote that cast him out, might have ambitions of regaining the position. As Kyle noted, several other Democrats — not least, himself — might decide they want to be Speaker when the time comes.

Republican state representative Dolores Grisham, also of Somerville, has signaled her desire to compete for Wilder’s seat, and she expects to be strongly funded for the effort. “I don’t have any worries about John Wilder’s seat in a race against Dolores Grisham,” Kyle said drily.

In any case, the state Senate will be technically, and actually, up for grabs next year, and the two parties will both be making serious efforts. That fact may preclude Kyle’s making waves by recruiting a primary opponent for Kurita, whom he still has not forgiven for her vote on Ramsey’s behalf.

“We don’t,” the Democrats’ Senate leader said simply when asked how he and Kurita were getting along. That’s one thing that probably won’t change in 2008.

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Politics Politics Feature

A Matter of Timelines

Jim Kyle is watching the calendar. The state Senate’s Democratic leader wants his Memphis colleague, state senator and 9th District congressman-elect Steve Cohen, to go ahead and resign his District 30 seat — “hopefully before the end of the month” — so that whoever ends up being appointed Cohen’s successor will have a chance to start raising money for reelection.

Cohen, whose relations with Kyle over the years have ranged from chilly to formally correct, disagrees. “I think anybody who’s seriously interested in running for senator ought to start raising money now. There’s plenty of time,” Cohen insists.

The deadline that Kyle is looking at is January 9th, the start of next year’s session of the Tennessee General Assembly. After that date, state law prohibits sitting legislators from doing any fund-raising until the end of the session — traditionally, at some point between late April and mid-summer.

Kyle figures the Shelby County Commission, which has a 7-6 Democratic majority, will — and should — appoint a viable Democrat who will be a candidate for reelection in a special election next year. But if Cohen delays his resignation — until sometime in mid-December, say — Kyle fears the commission won’t be able to start and complete the appointment process in time for the new senator to do any fund-raising before the start of the legislative session.

His reasoning is that, once a vacancy exists (and not until it does), the commission must use one meeting for advertising a vacancy, allow time for applications, and then devote time at the next commission meeting, two weeks later, for a vote on an interim successor to Cohen. The commission has two meetings set for December — on the 4th and 18th.

Kyle’s concern: If Cohen delays his resignation until late in December, as he has indicated he might, the interim senator will have to wait on raising any campaign money for several months, while, presumably, a prospective opponent from the other party can use the time to hold any number of perfectly legal fund-raising events.

Cohen — pleading leftover legislative duties, among other considerations — is unmoved, noting the precedent set in 2004 by then state senator Lincoln Davis, who had been elected to Congress from the state’s 4th District.

Disagreement between the two Shelby County Democrats has not been uncommon over the years. They have frequently taken issue with each other both in private and in public — and over both private and public matters. A case involving both at once was Cohen’s 1995 vote supportive of then Governor Don Sundquist‘s successful move to eliminate the state Public Service Commission — one of whose freshly elected members was Sara Kyle, the senator’s wife. (She later was appointed to the substitute Tennessee Regulatory Authority.)

Kyle’s tongue-in-cheek statement of support for Cohen during the latter’s successful run for Congress this year reflects the ambivalent nature of their relationship: “Nobody in the state Senate will be happier than me to see Senator Cohen in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Meanwhile, Cohen has so far declined to indicate a preference among the potential Democratic candidates to succeed him. At least two — Kevin Gallagher, Cohen’s congressional campaign manager, and David Upton, his longtime political ally — are personally close.

Kyle, who met with several county commissioners on Monday, limits his preference to several general criteria — among them, that whoever is chosen by the commission should support Democratic senator John Wilder of Somerville for reelection as Senate presiding officer/lieutenant governor and be able to run a capable race for reelection.

Other Senate hopeful names in the hopper: former city attorney Robert Spence and state representative Beverly Marrero (another Cohen friend) among Democrats; and businessman Kemp Conrad and lawyer D. Jack Smith among Republicans.

• Cohen spent last week in Washington undergoing freshman orientation along with 49 other newcomers to the U.S. House, including 41 Democrats. On his weekend return at Memphis International Airport, the congressman-elect clarified two matters previously reported elsewhere.

He said he had never indicated that he intended to seek outright membership, as a white, in the Congressional Black Caucus and that he had decided to shelve any plans to push a national lottery. “I’d end up competing with myself,” said the 12-term state senator who is credited with creating the state lottery in Tennessee.