In January, a new “blended sentencing” law will go into effect in Tennessee that could usher hundreds of children into the adult criminal justice system with fewer checks than the existing adult transfer process. It will also keep those kids in the juvenile justice system longer.
The law is “extremely harmful for youth in Memphis,” said Ala’a Alattiyat, coordinator for the Youth Justice Action Council. “It will not keep our community safer, and it will continue to perpetuate the cyclical nature of the justice system by making it harder for youth to exit that cycle.”
Children as young as 14 could be subject to blended sentencing. These children will be required to serve juvenile sentences until they turn 19. They will also face up to four years of adult prison or probation.
Initially, this adult sentence is stayed, meaning it will only take effect if certain criteria are met. Only one of these criteria concerns whether a child has committed another delinquent act.
As a result, kids could end up in adult prison without committing anothercrime, said Zoe Jamail, policy coordinator at Disability Rights Tennessee. Instead, the text of the law allows children to increase their risk of going to prison by breaking curfew or failing to graduate from high school.
Ultimately, children “who would otherwise never have been facing an adult sentence” will be swept into the adult system, said Jasmine Ying Miller, a senior attorney at Youth Law Center.
Blended sentencing is part of a broader effort by some lawmakersto make Tennessee’s juvenile justice system more punitive, even though rates of youth crime in the state have been declining for at least a decade.
Rep. John Gillespie. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50
The blended sentencing legislation, which also passed in May, was introduced and sponsored by several Memphis-area lawmakers. In the State Senate, the bill was sponsored by state Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis). In the House, the bill was sponsored by Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis), Rep. John Gillespie (R-Memphis), and Rep. G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis).
“State policies related to youth justice consistently and disproportionately target Memphis, which is a predominantly Black city,” said Alattiyat. As a result, “this type of law always ends up disproportionately targeting Black youth.”
Blended sentencing’s sponsors often imply — incorrectly — that youth are responsible for most of Memphis’s crime.
“We are living in a state of fear in Memphis, in the surrounding area,” Rep. Gillespie told colleagues during a House discussion of blended sentencing, “and it is almost entirely because of juveniles committing violent crimes that are going unpunished.”
These claims are misleading. Memphis-Shelby County Juvenile Court has said that adults are responsible for most crimes in the county. Children do seem to be disproportionately involved in car theft; about a third of those charged with vehicle-related crimes are youth offenders, according to the Memphis Police Department. Available data suggest that youth are less involved in violent crime.
According to statistics maintained by the Memphis-Shelby County Juvenile Court, juvenile crime did increase in 2022. But by 2023, juvenile crime had fallen to the same level as 2021. Overall, juvenile crime in Memphis has been on a steady decline since at least 2011.
Nevertheless, legislators insist that drastic action must be taken on youth crime in Memphis.
Rep. Mark White during a House committee hearing in March of this year. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50
“Juvenile laws traditionally have been there to protect the juvenile,” said White, who introduced the bill in the House. In his view, protection is no longer the right approach. “We’re living in a different time with some of the crimes committed by these 14, 15, 16, 17-year-olds.”
Currently, Tennessee’s juvenile justice system operates on two tracks: either children remain in the juvenile system — where they must be released by 19, no matter the offense they’ve committed — or they can be transferred to the adult system.
White believes that the first track, in which children remain in the juvenile system until age 19, enables juvenile crime. Under the current system,children “can shoot and kill a person at 17 and go free at 19,” he said.
Children accused of murder and attempted murder are usually transferred to adult court unless they have been abused or coerced, lawyers say.
Some juvenile judges also take issue with this part of the law; they’d like the option to keep older kids who have committed serious offenses in the juvenile system beyond 19.
“We all want a tool where we can extend jurisdiction to capture youth past the age of 19,” said Judge Aftan Strong, chief magistrate of Memphis-Shelby County’s Juvenile Court. “Extended jurisdiction” would give courts more time to rehabilitate young offenders, she said.
Blended sentencing bears little resemblance to this policy. And while juvenile judges are legally required to rehabilitate youth offenders, the architects of blended sentencing have made it clear that rehabilitation is beside the point.
White introduced an initial version of blended sentencing to the legislature in April 2023. The next month, White published an op-ed where he wrote, “We are well past the time of ‘we need to rehabilitate our youth.’” Instead, he wrote, the juvenile justice system should focus on “discipline, correction and punishment.”
A view of the state legislature floor during a House session in March 2023. Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50
In that same op-ed, White compared Memphis’ “undisciplined youth” to the 1870s yellow fever epidemic that killed or displaced 30,000 Memphians.
Ultimately, blended sentencing will likely incarcerate more children while failing to address youth crime, critics say. Empirical research on young people “does not support this viewpoint that you can punish your way into reducing crime.” said Cardell Orrin, Tennessee executive director at Stand for Children.
White is not concerned by this critique. “We have to have a system where [young offenders] understand the seriousness of what they did and that they will be detained in the system,” White told MLK50.
“A lot of the issues are coming from 2 percent-4 percent of our [youth] population,” he continued. “If we would just detain those people and make believers out of them, it may keep other people from reoffending.”
Four percent of Memphis’ population between the ages of 10 and 17 is roughly 2,700 children, based on available U.S. census data.
“We may have to go too far to one side trying to correct it in order to get back to sanity,” said White.
Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth and juvenile justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.
The 2024 election season had its share of both suspense and drama.
That was certainly true of the quadrennial national election for president (arguably the most momentous one since the Civil War), which went down to the wire and frazzled millions of nerve endings before a winner could be discerned.
As all prognostications had it in advance, the presidential picture seemed headed for a resolution later than election night itself. Such opaqueness as lingered in the vote totals abruptly dissolved by the morning’s light, however. Shockingly, Donald J . Trump was back. With a vengeance.
At the center of the suspense had been the three so-called “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was presumed that a victory for Democrat Kamala Harris in all three of these habitually Democratic states would give her the presidency, but just barely. A victory for former GOP president Trump in any of them could drastically derail that prognosis. In the event, he appears to have won them all, as he did in 2016.
Kamala Harris (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)Donald J. Trump (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Nor was drama absent from the local side of the ballot. There is little prospect of the local results being challenged, as is always possible with the presidential numbers, but their effect may linger and, in some cases, simmer.
This is especially true of the series of referenda that Memphis voters were asked to pass judgment on. As of late Tuesday evening, election commission totals had all the referenda winning handily.
The most significant ones — the outcome of which was never much doubted — had set city against state and enraged the guardians of statehouse authority well in advance of the individual items receiving a single vote.
In brief, the offending referenda items of Ordinance 5908, asked city residents to approve (1) restoration of permits for the right to carry firearms, (2) a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the city, and (3) a “red flag” proviso empowering the local judiciary to confiscate the weapons of demonstrably risky individuals.
All of the items are “trigger laws,” to be activated only when and if state law should permit them.
Even so, the Republican Speaker of the state House of Representatives, Cameron Sexton, had made bold to threaten the city of Memphis with loss of state-shared revenues unless the offending referendum package — unanimously approved by the city council — was withdrawn from the ballot.
That was enough to make the Shelby County Election Commission blanch, but the council itself was not cowed and, led by Chairman JB Smiley Jr., sued to have the measures restored. Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson obliged.
As did Memphis voters, in their turn. All three questions of Referendum 5908 passed by gigantic majorities of 100,00 votes or more.
Other referenda passed on Tuesday would: strike down the city’s existing ban of runoffs in at-large elections (Referendum 5884), impose a two-year residency requirement for Memphis mayoral candidates (Referendum 5913), and authorize the city council to determine the salaries of the mayor, council members, the city chief administrative officer, and division directors (Referendum 5893).
All in all, it was a good night for the referenda, as well as for the council itself. And, arguably, for the citizens of Memphis.
Perhaps predictably, the form sheet also held for elective offices, with incumbents of both parties doing very well indeed.
Marsha Blackburn (Photo: United States Senate, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn held off a challenge statewide from Knoxville state Representative Gloria Johnson, her Democratic opponent, though in heavily Democratic Shelby County, Johnson was leading, 156,303 to 104,633.
Another Republican incumbent, 8th District Congressman David Kustoff led Democratic challenger Sarah Freeman by a 2 to 1 margin in Shelby County’s portion of the vote, 66,398 votes to 30,255.
Steve Cohen (Photo: U.S. House of Representatives, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Meanwhile, 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen was overwhelming his perennial Republican opponent Charlotte Bergman even more dramatically with vote totals in the county of 162,299 to 47,634.
On the legislative scene, the much-ballyhooed District 97 state House race saw Republican incumbent John Gillespie edging out his Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth, 15,859 to 14,600.
John Gillespie (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
And, in another state House race where Democrats nursed upset hopes, in District 83, incumbent Republican Mark White held off Democrat Noah Nordstrom, 19,283 to 13,713.
Mark White (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
Most attention — locally, nationally, and even worldwide — remained on the showdown between Trump and Harris.
As late as the last weekend before this week’s final vote, the presidential race was being referred to as a dead heat, a virtual tie, a sense of things apparently corroborated by a string of polls in the so-called “battleground” states — the Rust Belt trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin; the Sun Belt states of Nevada and Arizona; and the competitive Southern states of Georgia and North Carolina.
A freakish outlier poll in the presumably red state of Iowa showing Harris with a last-minute edge over Trump in Iowa, though, was an indicator of possible unexpected volatility.
That the presidential race had even gotten so measurably close was a reflection of a political standoff in which halves of the nation had seemingly cleaved against each other in a variety of different and sometimes paradoxical ways.
This was not the same old story of Democrats versus Republicans. Both of those coalitions had undergone profound changes over the years. No longer was the “working class” (ditto, the “middle class”) to be grouped in a single body. Upward mobility had revised people’s notions of class, then stalled in such a way as to confuse them further. Generational change was rampant, and ethnicity was no longer a dependable metric for determining political attitude. Disagreement over social matters like gender identity and abortion policy had sundered the old divides.
The center could not hold. It was not only, a la Yeats, that the falcon could not hear the falconer. Social media and impatient ways had created multitudinous new sources professing to be the latter.
The nation’s two-party political system had atrophied to the point that, seemingly, neither was able to generate a dependable bench of A-list players. Donald J. Trump, the Republicans’ once and would-be future president, had come from the worlds of seat-of-the-pants commerce and TV showbiz to reign over a hodgepodge of time-servers, has-beens, and sycophants in his party, and Democratic incumbent president Joe Biden, a survivor of his party’s dwindling corps of traditionalists, headed up the Democrats.
That’s how things were at the end of the early-year primaries, and there were no few voices wondering aloud: Was that all there was, this uninspiring rematch of moldy oldies?
To give Biden his due, he had done his best to wreak from overriding political inertia some promising legislation, especially in the rebuilding of the country’s decaying infrastructure. To give Trump his due, he had recovered from a stupefying series of misdeeds, including, arguably, an aborted coup against the political system, to regain his political stature.
When the two met on a late-June debate stage on the eve of the two party conventions, the 81-year-old Biden, who had fared well in the earlier presentation of his State of the Union address, crumbled so visibly and profoundly that to many, probably most, observers, the presidential race seemed over then and there, especially when the 78-year-old Trump would go on to defiantly survive a serious assassination attempt two days before the opening of the GOP political convention in July.
But desperation in the Democrats’ ranks had meanwhile generated a determination to replace the compromised Biden at the head of the party ticket. Enough pressure developed that the incumbent finally, if reluctantly, had to yield, and realistically, given the lateness of the hour, the most feasible outcome proved to be that of elevating Vice President Kamala Harris, the erstwhile California senator and former prosecutor, in Biden’s stead at the Democratic convention in August.
Once the matchup between Trump and Harris got established, it quickly settled into an even-steven situation, a kind of free-floating draw in which the two sides always stayed within reach of each other.
From the Democratic point of view, this would seem something of a miracle. Nikki Haley had based her runner-up GOP presidential race on the conceit that a female could win the presidency, either herself or, with the aging Biden still a candidate, his vice president, Harris, still regarded at that point as a nonentity. It was Haley’s way of mocking the opposition.
Indeed, even in Democratic ranks, Harris was long seen to be something of a liability, a drag on the ticket. That this was due to the way she had been used — or misused — by the incumbent president (in the ill-defined role of “border czar,” for example) became evident only when she was freed to become her own person.
On the stump in her own right, she proved to be a natural, with unsuspected reserves of charisma and an appeal that was fortified by her selection of the pleasantly homey governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, as her running mate. (Trump’s choice as potential veep, the edgy Ohio Senator JD Vance, was clearly head-smart and acceptable to Trump’s base among the MAGA faithful but kept bumping up against his own innate arrogance.)
The change in tone among the Democrats was almost instantly evident. It came to be symbolized in the concept of “joy” and in Harris’ slogan, “a new way forward.”
While coming across as a certifiable New Thing, she was also able, credibly, to posit herself as the defender of constitutional values against the alleged schemes by the usurper Trump to override them in the interests of personal power.
“We are the promise of America,” she would say, uniting her own purpose with those of her audience members.
Against this, against Harris, the ebullient rock-star presence on stage, Trump seemed buffaloed. In his fateful June debate duel with Biden, he had seemed vital, a hurricane of restless energy hurling scorn and unchecked charges at his befuddled opponent. Now it became more and more obvious that he, too, was a near octogenarian, with no new promise of his own to offer.
The shift in positions was fully demonstrated, post-conventions, in the follow-up debate with Harris when, matador-like, she had baited the bullish Trump with mockery of his rallies (which, in fact, were becoming more and more disorganized and less and less focused and empty of real content). His red-eyed response, that Haitian immigrants were eating the dogs and cats of Middle Americans in Ohio, was perfectly framed for the television audience by the split image of Harris’ gleeful wonderment at this out-of-nowhere non sequitur.
It was not long afterward that Harris’ progress was slowed somewhat, as much by a petulant media’s insistence that she submit to interviews as a sign of her seriousness as anything else. Dutifully, she did, and emerged with appropriate talking points — a middle-class tax cut, subsidies for small business and new housing starts, and legislation to suppress price-gouging. These would become highlights of the “to-do” list which she would juxtapose against what she characterized as the brooding Trump’s ever-multiplying enemies list.
It became a cliche of press coverage that the former president’s seething ire at an imagined “enemy from within” was displacing what his would-be handlers wanted him to discuss — a supposedly intractable inflation and the pell-mell overcoming of the nation’s borders by a horde of illegal invaders. Both menaces, as it happened, were in something of an abatement — the former by a plethora of relatively rosy economic indices, the latter by fairly resolute, if delayed, executive actions taken by the lame-duck president in the summer and fall.
What Trump’s audiences were getting on the stump instead was the overflow of his ever more naked id, a witches’ brew of resentment and machismo — insults against his adversaries, threats to use the machinery of government against them, and improvisations on themes ranging from Arnold Palmer’s junk size to nostalgia for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Partly, this was due to what Harris characterized as her opponent’s presumed “exhaustion,” but partly, too, it was Trump’s instinctive reliance on what had always been the source of his appeal, an exposure of pure personality, a willingness, for better or for worse, to let it all hang out, to be The Show, a cathartic vehicle for release of his followers’ emotions.
It was this penchant, after all, that had allowed him to sweep past a stage full of practical Republican politicians during the primary season of 2016 and, later that year, to surprise the calculating and overconfident Hillary Clinton at the polls.
GOP eminences — even those who, like Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, despised Trump, or, who, like senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, had been vilified by him, learned that they were no match for his carnival-like presence and resolved to use him for their own purposes, only in the end to be used by him instead for his.
It remained a fact that, for all his defects, real and imagined, Trump was able to sustain a plausible hope of regaining the office he had lost to Biden in the pandemic-inflected campaign year of 2020.
And, beyond the presidential race itself, Republicans still nursed hopes of holding onto their slim majority in the House of Representatives as well as of capturing the Senate outright. At stake were such matters as healthcare, climate change, and reproductive policy domestically, as well as of meeting the economic challenge of China and in the conduct of foreign policy in the Middle East and vis-a-vis Russia in its challenge to NATO in Europe.
Democrats Johnson, Huseth at High Point (Photos: Jackson Baker)
As was surely to be expected, the next-to-last weekend of the climactic 2024 election campaign was filled with feverish activity of various kinds — with early voting into its second week and candidates trying to get as many of their partisans as possible to the polls.
A case in point was a pair of events involving Gloria Johnson, the Knoxville Democrat who is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Johnson, the state representative who gained national attention last year as a member of the “Tennessee Three” proponents of gun-safety legislation, has raised some $7 million for her bid — almost all of it from in-state sources, she contended proudly.
While that is no match for the incumbent’s $17 million or so, it has been enough to buy Johnson a series of concise and well-produced TV spots pinpointing Blackburn’s alleged shortcomings. And it even gives her some of the kind of influence that politicians call coattails.
Opponents Nordstrom and White at Belly Acres
Johnson was in Shelby County on Saturday, sharing time with two other Democrats, District 83 state House candidate Noah Nordstrom (like Johnson a public schoolteacher) and District 97 House candidate Jesse Huseth.
The first event was a joint rally with Nordstrom and state Democratic chair Hendrell Remus just outside the perimeter of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist early-voting station. Next, Johnson met up with Huseth at High Point Grocery for some joint canvassing efforts, after which Huseth, who opposes GOP incumbent John Gillespie, set out on some door-to-door calls on residents in that western part of his district.
The most unusual pre-election event on Saturday didn’t involve Johnson, nor was it, in the strictest sense, a partisan event at all. It was a meet-and-greet at the Belly Acres restaurant in East Memphis involving both Nordstrom and his GOP adversary, incumbent Republican state Representative Mark White.
Not a debate between the two, mind you. A joint meet-and-greet, at which both candidates circulated among the members of a sizeable crowd, spending conversational time with the attendees and with each other.
The event was the brainchild of one Philip D. Hicks, impresario of something called the Independent Foundation for Political Effectiveness. Hicks says he hopes the Nordstrom-White encounter, his organization’s maiden effort, can serve as a precedent for other such joint candidate efforts to come — presumably in future election seasons.
Inasmuch as political competition is, by its nature, an adversarial process, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine such events becoming commonplace, but, all things considered, this first one went amazingly well.
It wasn’t the same kind of thing at all, but there were elements of such collegiality between potential election opponents at an earlier event, a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Appling Road during the previous week.
That event included Memphis City Council Chair JB Smiley as its featured speaker, and Smiley, who is reliably reported to be thinking of a race for Shelby County mayor in 2026, spent a fair amount of time comparing notes on public matters (e.g., MLGW, the future of the erstwhile Sheraton Hotel) with attendee J.W. Gibson, a businessman who has basically already declared for that office.
The Flyer recently highlighted several referenda for Memphis voters on the November 5th election ballot. This week, which will see the onset of early voting (October 16th through October 31st), we look at partisan contests in several key races.
Legislative Races
Noah Nordstrom, tall, stately, with long blonde hair he ties into a bun, says people tell him he looks like Trevor Lawrence, the ex-Clemson quarterback who now pilots the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL. “Either that or Thor,” Nordstrom says. “I’ll take either one.”
Images aside, Nordstrom is paradoxically mild-mannered and not macho at all, indeed somewhat diffident, as befits his day job as a public school teacher.
Noah Nordstrom (Photo: Jackson Baker)
What else he hopes to take is the title of state representative for Tennessee’s District 83, an enclave that straddles the southeastern rim of Shelby County and the western edge of Germantown. Challenger Nordstrom, a Democrat, has his work cut out for him. The seat has been held since 2010 by Republican Mark White, a fixture in the state GOP’s legislative supermajority in Nashville and the chair of the House Education Committee.
Education, as it happens, is also the central concern of Nordstrom, who teaches Spanish at Overton High School and is sounding the alarm about what he calls the “radical” ideas of the current legislative Republican supermajority. The specific moment that galvanized him into running came, he says, “when I realized that my state representative, Mark White, is pushing the voucher bill.”
That bill, a main priority of GOP Governor Bill Lee, is described by Nordstrom as “a proposal that would defund our public schools across the entire state of Tennessee.” A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the premise of the proposed legislation is that substantial amounts of taxpayer money would be siphoned out of the general fund to provide tuition at private schools, which, arguably, are in direct competition with the long-established public school system.
“I live just over on the Memphis side [where] Memphis has set up against it completely,” said Nordstrom. Also, as he notes, “The leaders here in Germantown, the entire school board, and the mayor stood up and said, you know, we don’t want this. … Even the Republican-leaning communities don’t want it. And so I decided to throw my name in.”
Indeed, opposition to school vouchers is universal in Shelby County school circles, not only in the urbanized Memphis-Shelby County Schools, but in each of the six county municipalities — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — that won the right to establish their own public school districts during the school merger controversy of the county’s previous decade.
Opposition to vouchers is one of the key wedge issues, along with demands for gun safety, also linked to public schools, that Democrats — presumed to be a minority in District 83, as they certainly are in the state at large — hope can support a political comeback for the party.
“We can do better for our kids, and so that’s been one of the main issues,” Nordstrom said at the Future901-sponsored meeting, held in a Germantown household, where he recently spoke his views. “Obviously one of the other major ones is gun violence. It’s overwhelming to realize that you might not be able to save some of these kids. We see it every day, wondering whether they’re going to make it home safe.”
Gloria Johnson (Photo: Jackson Baker)
Unforgotten is the “good trouble” of spring 2023, when mass protests were held at the state Capitol following a lethal episode of gun violence at a Nashville school. In the aftermath, three Democratic House members, including Justin J. Pearson of Memphis and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a candidate this year for the U.S. Senate, were held to accounts by the Republican majority for their passionate support of protesters’ demands for gun safety legislation.
Pearson was expelled by the vengeful majority, along with Justin Jones of Nashville, the third member of the “Tennessee Three.” Johnson survived expulsion by a single vote. All three were celebrated nationally for their stands, and Pearson and Jones were hastily returned to office in special elections.
Realistically, Democrats don’t envision any immediate regaining of the hegemony the party held for much of Tennessee’s history, but they do hope to achieve at some point a competitive status with the Republicans, who established their dominance in the statewide election years of 2010 and 2014 and have never looked back.
At the Future901 meeting in Germantown, there was a fair amount of partisan bear-baiting of Republicans, to be sure, but there were also expressions of concern regarding the increasing takeover of the GOP by MAGA ideology and a corresponding erosion, as attendees saw it, of commonsense shared values among Republican office-holders.
John Gillespie (Photo: Jackson Baker)
White, Nordstrom’s opponent, and state Representative John Gillespie, the incumbent Republican in House District 97, were specifically cited as case studies of GOP moderates shedding their scruples, or at least trimming them at the edges, while going along to get along with the MAGA-minded majority.
As Nordstrom noted, “Now the gun lobby is so strong they say, ‘Don’t vote our way and we’ll find a candidate for the primary, and we’ll pick you out.’ And that’s part of the reason why Mark White has gotten so much more radical. You know, at one point he opposed getting rid of the permitting system for concealed carry. And last year, he voted to arm teachers, and that’s because he knows they” — members supported by the gun lobby — “are comfortable.”
Democratic activist Diane Cambron, an attendee, concurred: “That’s one of the reasons why [District 96 Democratic state Representative] Dwayne Thompson is not running for reelection. He didn’t run for reelection this time because, according to him, when he first got elected in 2016 there were some moderate Republicans with whom he could work, but every year, those moderate Republicans drop out, they don’t run, and they’re replaced by younger, more radical Republicans, and that is what our Republican legislature is becoming. Even though they have a majority, they’re getting more and more radical all the time. There are very few moderate Republicans left.”
It should be said that White, the criticism notwithstanding, is widely regarded as being able to work across party lines. And, as the old joke has it, White can cry all the way to the bank. As is the case with most incumbents, especially well-heeled establishment figures, his cash receipts dwarf those of opponent Nordstrom, a first-time candidate.
His Education Committee chairmanship is consistent with his background in that, before attaining some success with a party-favor business, he was an elementary school teacher and a principal. He co-founded something called the Global Children’s Educational Foundation, which provided financial assistance and educational opportunities to impoverished children in Panama. And he won the Tennessee Community Organizations’ Legislator of the Year award in 2016 and the Tennessee CASA Association’s Legislator of the Year award in 2012.
He is no slouch, no easy target.
All of which is to say that Noah Nordstrom and the Democrats will have their hands full in District 83. They remain hopeful, though, that they can build on the incremental success they began in 2016 — ironically the year of Donald J. Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton nationally. The victory in 2016 of the aforementioned Dwayne Thompson over incumbent Republican Steve McManus in District 96 was just as much of an upset locally. As then constituted, District 96 also straddled city and county lines and the accustomed bailiwicks of either party.
Jesse Huseth (Photo: Jackson Baker)
So does House District 97, where the case can be made that Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth might even be regarded as a favorite over incumbent Republican John Gillespie. The two opponents have raised approximately the same amount of money, each with cash on hand of just under $100,000, and, as currently configured, the district lines encompass a territory where Democrat Jason Martin, a distant second to incumbent GOP Governor Bill Lee virtually everywhere statewide, actually out-polled Lee. And the same can be said of Joe Biden in his presidential race against Trump.
The district’s current configuration remains one of the mysteries of Election Year 2024, since Gillespie, as a member of the GOP supermajority, had the opportunity to call the shots during the redistricting that followed census year 2020. And he decided to discard two Republican-dominated county precincts in return for two politically ambivalent ones further west in Memphis proper, presumably lowering his chances for reelection.
There has yet emerged no satisfactory explanation for Gillespie’s decision. One theory is that, as someone not regarded as slavishly partisan, he fretted over the prospect of being challenged in this year’s primary by a MAGA type in the formerly configured district. Another is that he was determined to prove that he could still win the more problematic district as a presumed Republican moderate — one who conspicuously deviated from GOP orthodoxy on the issue of guns, among other issues. Yet a third theory is that Gillespie simply wishes to represent the concerns of Memphis’ Poplar Corridor business community.
In any case, the District 97 race is regarded statewide as something of a coin-flip race — a test case of sorts regarding future partisan tendencies and the Democrats’ best chance of altering the current statistical ratio in the House, which stands at 75 Republicans and 24 Democrats.
The race could hinge on the two candidates’ contrasting positions on crime, which reflect an ongoing showdown between state and city. Huseth is a strong supporter of three referenda on the Memphis ballot that seek citizen support for “trigger” laws that would allow possible local reinstitution of gun permit requirements, the banning of assault rifle sales, and the imposition of “red flag” laws allowing judges to confiscate firearms from likely offenders. The Democratic candidate is an adherent as well of District Attorney General Steve Mulroy’s call for a new Memphis crime lab that would facilitate detection and prosecution of violent crime.
Gillespie has allied himself with state Senator Brent Taylor, a declared foe of Mulroy, in aggressive sponsorship of legislation strengthening anti-crime penalties and counteracting local options on matters of sentencing. Gillespie authored a bill striking down the Memphis City Council’s ban of “preemptive” traffic stops based on minor infractions.
Partisan races exist in several other legislative districts, where the incumbents are heavily favored. The contests are: Democratic incumbent Larry Miller vs. Republican Larry Hunter in House District 88; Democratic incumbent G.A. Hardaway vs. Republican Renarda Renee Clariett in District 93; Democratic incumbent Antonio Parkinson vs. the GOP’s Cecil Hale in District 98; and Republican incumbent Tom Leatherwood vs. Democrat William P. Mouzon in District 99.
U.S. Senate
Democrats have not come out ahead in a statewide race in Tennessee since then-Governor Phil Bredesen fairly handily won reelection in 2006. By the time Bredesen was next on the ballot, in a race for the U.S. Senate in 2018, he was defeated with equal ease by arch-conservative Republican state Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Nothing more clearly indicates the sea change in Tennessee partisan politics which occurred in the meantime, with the rapid shift of Tennessee from the status of a bellwether state to one in which Republican domination of state affairs had become a given.
Blackburn is up for reelection this year, and Democratic hopes are vested in the aforementioned Gloria Johnson, who won prominence as a member of the “Tennessee Three,” the Democratic House members who drew the ire of the Republican leadership for their assertive support of gun safety protesters in 2023.
Both Blackburn and Johnson have well-deserved reputations for intense partisanship, with Blackburn being a mainline supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, of strong action against illegal immigration, and of MAGA causes in general, and Johnson being equally vigorous in espousal of Democratic positions on such matters as reproductive freedom and climate change. She has clashed repeatedly with Republicans in the legislature and, after being gerrymandered out of one state House seat by the GOP supermajority, returned to the General Assembly as the representative of another.
Efforts by Democrats and others to arrange debates between the two candidates have so far foundered on a confident and financially well-endowed Blackburn’s reluctance to entertain them, but various polls have suggested that underdog Johnson, beneficiary of a recent fundraiser at the Annesdale Mansion in Memphis, may be within striking distance.
Congressional Races
Incumbent Democrat Steve Cohen is heavily favored against Charlotte Bergmann, a perennial Republican opponent of his in the Memphis-based 9th District, while Republican incumbent David Kustoff in the 8th District has a scrappy challenger in Sarah Freeman of Germantown, who hopes to revive a dormant Democratic base in the rural enclaves of that West Tennessee district.
Sarah Freeman (Photo: Jackson Baker)
The effect of the 2024 presidential race on any and all of these local races is somewhat harder than usual to estimate. Normally a heavy Democratic turnout in Memphis precincts for the presidential race inflates the totals of Democrats running in local districts. And that effect could be augmented by a larger turnout than usual among women voters who favor the Democratic position on behalf of abortion rights and who might be influenced by the fact of a woman, Kamala Harris, heading the Democratic ticket. But local Republican candidates, too, can expect a boost, from whatever turnout the Trump/MAGA base can command.
Election coverage and various polls keep emphasizing the dead-heat aspects of the national presidential election, but the fact is that, for voters in Memphis and Shelby County, there is minimal suspense associated with the presidential race.
The assumption is that — population demographics, past election performances, and partisan loyalties being what they are — the Republican Trump-Vance ticket should win easily statewide, and the Democratic Harris-Walz ticket should romp locally.
Which is not to suggest that the presidential race won’t affect other options on the November 5th ballot. There will undoubtedly be a carryover effect from the anticipated heavier turnout of voters expressing their preferences for president.
Clearly, this effect could be all-important in some races on the Shelby County ballot — especially the showdown in the District 97 race for state representative between GOP incumbent John Gillespie and Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth. This race, for the right to represent Memphis’ upscale Poplar Corridor, is being closely watched for its potential future implications regarding the statewide voter mainstream.
But in the long as well as the short run, the key portions of the local ballot could be four referenda directed at Memphis voters, the outcome of which could be more than usually significant.
The most highly publicized of these is City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5908, a three-parter couched in pollster-like terms that could serve as a potential trigger mechanism for enacting local gun safety measures in the future.
The referendum would serve to measure city voters’ sentiment for reinstatement of carry permits for firearms, for banning the local sale of assault rifles, and for enabling judges to issue extreme-risk (“red flag”) protection orders prohibiting gun ownership by certifiably risky persons.
Ordinance No. 5908, authorized by the city council in light of citizen alarm concerning violent crimes locally, ignited a back-and-forth legal and rhetorical struggle between city and state authorities, resolved finally by Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson in favor of allowing the referendum on the local ballot in the face of threats by state officials to withhold shared state tax revenues from the city.
Also on the ballot are several provisions involving the city charter that would have direct impact on the conduct of Memphis elections and city government at large.
City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5884 would strike down the ban of runoffs in mayoral and at-large city races that was established in 1991. The ban was imposed by the late federal Judge Jerome Turner as a safeguard against organized blanket voting against Blacks, then (but no longer) a racial minority.
City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5913 would impose a requirement that candidates for Memphis mayor would have to establish legal residence in the city for two years prior to election. This referendum, if passed, would resolve a legal dispute that arose in the mayoral election of 2023 — one that saw the viability of several prominent candidates come under question.
And City of Memphis Referendum Ordinance No. 5893 would “authorize the City Council by ordinance to fix and determine the salaries of the Mayor, City Council, Chief Administrative Officer, and Appointed Directors and Deputy Directors.”
This referendum, authorized by the council in light of several recent disputes between itself and the current mayoral administration, would tilt the weight of authority in favor of the council.
When Karen Camper, the Democrats’ leader in the state House, ran for Memphis mayor last year, she discovered that, her impressive credentials notwithstanding, she lacked the citywide name recognition of locally based officials.
Consequently, she never developed enough traction to compete effectively for the mayoralty. And her name recognition problem was exacerbated further by the fact that members of the General Assembly are prohibited from active fundraising during the course of a legislative session.
The reality, especially in the case of the minority party statewide, is that state legislators, however much they may shine in the environs of Nashville, simply lack enough day-to-day connection with local voters to become household names on their home front.
A possible exception to that rule may arise in the case of a legislator whose public activities impinge directly on a festering local issue — as in the case of Republican state Senator Brent Taylor, whose nonstop efforts as the sponsor of bills to affect the status of local law enforcement have doubtless earned him a certain local notoriety.
Taylor’s party cohort John Gillespie, equally active on similar issues in the state House of Representatives, is on the fall ballot as a candidate for re-election and has attracted similar attention, for better or for worse.
The aforementioned Rep. Camper, meanwhile, is attempting to familiarize her constituents in House District 87 with the activities of state government by means of an innovation she calls “State to the Streets,” an event she will unveil on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at New Direction Christian Church.
She calls it “a unique opportunity” for residents of District 87 to engage with more than 20 state and local government agencies, ask questions, voice concerns, and receive assistance on a wide range of topics, including healthcare, education, employment, and social services.
Among the services that will be spoken on by representatives of the affected state agencies are:
• Job search opportunities from the TN Department of Labor and Workforce Development
• SNAP benefits and Families First assistance from the TN Department of Human Services
• Help processing REAL IDs from The TN Department of Safety & Homeland Security
• Mental health, addiction, and substance abuse counseling from the TN Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services and the TN Sports Wagering Council
• Legal advice from the Memphis Bar Association
• Expungement and Drive While You Pay assistance from the General Sessions Court Clerk’s Office
• Help searching unclaimed property listings from the TN Department of the Treasury
• Voter registration and information from the TN Secretary of State’s office and the Shelby County Voter Registrar
“This is a great chance for me to talk with my constituents and hear their thoughts about the recently concluded legislative session and the direction of the state,” says Camper, and she may have something there.
• With the fiscal-year deadline approaching, Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission saw action on many matters — including the county’s proposed tax rate and numerous budgetary items — deferred for further discussion at the commission’s June 12th committee sessions, but one long-standing uncertainty was finally dealt with.
This was the question of $2.7 million in funding from opioid-settlement funds that had been embedded in the sheriff’s department budget, pending the commission’s decision on where to route them — whether to a proposed program for remedial medical treatment of inmates deemed incompetent to stand trial, or elsewhere.
Elsewhere was the answer, with $5 million going to CAAP (Cocaine and Alcohol Awareness Program), and another $18 million to juvenile court, where it will pay for a variety of wraparound services for youthful wards of the court.
Push is coming to shove in the public outrage stemming from the shooting death last week of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney. And the shoving, on behalf of stouter crackdowns on local crime, is coming from more sources than ever before.
Mayor Paul Young, who has arguably been somewhat slow on the draw in fleshing out his crime program, cruising along with an interim police chief and nobody yet to fill his ballyhooed position of public safety director, is suddenly all cries and alarms.
Sounding almost like some of the more active Republican critics of Memphis crime in the legislature, Young released a statement including these words: “Together, let’s petition our judges and the DA for stronger, swifter sentencing for violent offenses. If you are part of the judicial system, hear my voice first. We need to work together to do better for our community.”
DA Steve Mulroy himself expressed anger that a $150,000 bond that he’d previously set for previous crimes committed by the youth suspected in the death of Officer McKinney had been somehow amended by a judicial commissioner to allow the youth back on the streets through his own recognizance.
And Shelby County Commissioner Mick Wright, a leading critic of the current crime wave, was warning, on behalf of his commission mates, “We are not finished. … You’re going to see some judges get exited stage left if I have anything to say about it.”
It was a definite irony that, scarcely a week after the MPD had announced the 100th homicide in Memphis this year, Young scheduled this week’s public celebration of his first 100 days in office at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church.
Perhaps the mayor will use that occasion to outline further his and the city council’s plan for a new nonprofit organization to reverse the crime trend.
• Former Shelby County Democratic chair Gabby Salinas, who in recent years ran two close races against established Republican office-holders, has a different situation on her hands this year.
She’s running for the state House District 96 seat being vacated by Democratic incumbent Dwayne Thompson. Not a Republican contestant in sight so far, but Salinas has four Democratic rivals — Eric Dunn, Telisa Franklin, Orrden Williams Jr., and David Winston. She remains the favorite.
• As mentioned in this space of late, Democrats are seriously contesting the state House District 97 seat now held by Republican John Gillespie. Mindful of the potential perils of procrastination, they brought out some heavy artillery last week.
At a fundraiser for party candidate Jesse Huseth at the home of attorney Robert Donati last week, an important attendee was 9th District U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the county’s senior Democratic office-holder, who formally bestowed his endorsement on Huseth and was critical of Gillespie for legislative actions intended to shift various aspects of law-enforcement authority from the city to the state.
Cohen noted that the 97th, which was redistricted by the legislature last year, would now seem to be tilted demographically to Democrats in this election year — “up three points for Huseth and up five points for Biden.”
As Huseth himself put it, the East Memphis-based district had lost “four solid-red precincts and picked up two light-blue precincts and two light-red precincts.”
The point of the redistricting, which was carried out by the General Assembly’s GOP supermajority, remains something of a mystery, although it is said that Gillespie signed off on it, thinking it gave him more potential access to‚ and opportunity to serve, the business community.
• No doubt emboldened by the local unpopularity of Governor Bill Lee’s school-voucher program, which was formally opposed by the Memphis-Shelby County School Board and by the boards of the six municipal school districts as well, Democrats are taking another crack at the state House District 83 seat held by Mark White, House education chair and a champion of vouchers.
At least one Democrat is: political newcomer Noah Nordstrom, an MSCS Spanish teacher.
It is a matter of record that Republican Governor Bill Lee easily won reelection in 2022, routing his Democratic opponent Jason Martin with 67 percent of the statewide point.
The under-financed, relatively unknown Martin, an emergency physician from Sumner County, was never really competitive, winning only two of Tennessee’s 95 counties — the state’s two remaining Democratic strongholds of Shelby (Memphis) and Davidson (Nashville).
But more to the point of this year’s state elections, Martin also came out ahead two years ago in state House District 97, site of a likely showdown this year between GOP incumbent John Gillespie and his probable Democratic challenger, businessman Jesse Huseth.
Gillespie was first elected in 2020, when he edged out Democrat Gabby Salinas at a time when District 97, which straddled the eastern boundary line of Memphis, was already evenly enough divided to make for a competitive race.
As Martin’s strong showing indicated, redistricting after the 2000 census shifted the district’s center of balance even more definitively into Memphis. But Gillespie was able to win reelection two years ago over unsung Democrat Toniko Harris.
During his first two terms, Gillespie maintained the kind of moderate political profile that was called for in a district that, in the current parlance, is neither red nor blue but purple. But, as was noted here two weeks ago, Gillespie has moved perceptibly to the right on party-line issues, those having to do with law enforcement, especially.
He has sponsored legislation that would nullify the Memphis City Council’s action, in the wake of the beating death of Tyre Nichols by an MPD unit, to prohibit police from making preemptive traffic stops for minor offenses. And Gillespie moved his bill to that effect onto the House floor (and to passage) after, his critics maintain (on the basis of conversation captured in a somewhat ambiguous cell phone video), he had assured Nichols’ parents he would hold it for later.
Democrat Huseth sees no ambiguity in the video, maintaining that Gillespie “lied to the family of Tyre Nichols after promising to postpone the vote one week to allow them to attend. This is life under the Republican Supermajority and it has to end.”
Gillespie can count on generous financing as an incumbent, but Huseth, who has a fundraiser scheduled for next week and more in mind, clearly intends to run tough, with assistance from campaign manager Jeff Ethridge, the able activist who is the newly elected president of the Germantown Democratic Club.
• As suspended Criminal Court Judge Melissa Boyd moves ever closer to being ejected from office altogether, Shelby County voters are looking forward to the prospect of two special judicial elections in the not too distant future.
A legislative panel voted unanimously last week to recommend the removal from office of Boyd, who has been charged with various irregularities, including use of cocaine on the bench.
A successor will also be needed for Circuit Court Judge Mary Wagner, who has been named to the state Supreme Court.
Both circumstances will require a judicial panel to recommend potential successors to Governor Bill Lee, who may, at his discretion, select from the list or ask for additional names.
In both cases, whoever gets the governor’s nod would ordinarily serve until a special election can be arranged on the next August ballot that is scheduled at least 30 days from the date that the vacancies become official.
But the pending vacancies might not be filled at all if a bill advancing in the Assembly this week is passed. The bill by Rep. Andrew Farmer (R-Sevierville) and Sen. Frank Niceley (R-Strawberry Plains) would realize what has been a long-discussed redistributionist goal in some quarters — by the expedient of transferring the two aforementioned judicial seats from Shelby County to districts elsewhere in the state.
Tennessee Republicans cannot stand the federal government telling them what to do — especially when a Democrat’s in the White House — but they do love telling Tennessee’s biggest cities what to do.
Republicans cry “overreach,” in general, when the feds “impose” rules that “overrule the will of the people of Tennessee.” (All of those quoted words came from just one statement on abortion from Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who yells “overreach!” the loudest.) But they call it “preemption” when they do it to Memphis and Nashville — their favorite targets — leaving big-city locals to bemoan that same overreach.
When punching up at the federal government, Tennessee conservatives send angry letters to the president lamenting rules they have to follow to get big “seductive” tax dollars. But they don’t often win much in this process.
When they punch down at cities, the power struggle really comes down to rural conservatives exerting whatever influence they have to temper (squash) the sometimes “woke” ideas of urban progressives. They have a lot of power to do this, as state law does, usually, preempt local law.
So, Republicans do what they want in the Tennessee General Assembly and say, “See you in court,” because cities don’t typically give up their authority without a legal fist fight. (This happens so much state Democrats say Republicans pass lawsuits, not laws.)
But cities lose these fights often. Some of that is thanks to the powerful state AG’s office, who gets in the ring for state conservatives. That office has even more punching power with a brand-new $2.25 million, 10-member unit. It force-feeds conservative priorities in Tennessee cities and blocks D.C.’s liberal agenda.
Here’s an example of this double-edged subversion: Skrmetti, the Republican AG, cried “overreach” when a 2022 USDA rule said LGTBQ kids had to have access to lunch at school. But when Memphis and Nashville tried to decriminalize cannabis in 2016, a state Republican said, “You just can’t have cities creating their own criminal code, willy-nilly.”
Same coin. Two sides. Yes, state law rules most times, but the premise of the argument is the same. State citizens and city locals know what’s best for them and pick their leaders accordingly. Then, an outsider who, maybe, doesn’t share their values, swoops in to make locals comply with theirs. It’s like, “Hi, you don’t know me but you’re doing it wrong and are going to do it my way.”
In this game, Memphis has been on the ropes at the legislature this year. State Republicans want to take away some of the power from the Shelby County district attorney. They want to remove a Memphis City Council decision on when Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers make traffic stops. They also wanted to dilute local control of the Memphis-Shelby County School (MSCS) board with members appointed by the governor. But they decided against it. Details on many of these and some from the past are below.
Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers have looked up, wondering if they could really cut ties with the federal government. They took a serious, hard look at giving up $1 billion in federal education funding for state schools. They wanted to do it “the Tennessee way.” Left to guess what that meant, many concluded they hoped to eschew national discrimination protections for LGBTQ students.
This year, a state Republican hopes to establish state sovereignty. He wants to draw a clear line between state and fed powers and to install a committee to watch that line. It’s not a new idea, but it’s always had “don’t tread on me” vibes.
The road from Memphis City Hall, to the State Capitol, to Congress and the White House is littered with complaints (usually court papers) about political subversion. All the hollering and legal fights along the way have to leave voters wondering, who’s got the power?
Steve Mulroy (Photo: Steve Mulroy | Facebook)
District Attorney Power Battle
A legal battle over who has the power to decide on some death penalty cases has been waged since Republicans passed a bill here last year.
That bill stripped local control of post-conviction proceedings from local district attorneys and gave it to Skrmetti, the state AG. In Memphis, the bill seemed largely aimed at Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, with some concerned he may be lenient for those facing the death penalty.
“This sudden move appears to be a response to the choices of voters in both Davidson County and Shelby County, who elected prosecutors to support more restorative and less punitive policies,” Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said at the time.
Larry McKay, who received two death sentences for the murders of two store clerks in Shelby County in 1981, requested a court review of previously unexamined evidence in his case. Despite the new law, McKay’s attorney sought to disqualify Skremtti’s office from reviewing the case because he was not elected.
His attorney argued the new law infringes on the responsibilities of local district attorneys. The big changes made in the legislation also violated the state constitution, the attorney said.
Mulroy agreed.
“The newly enacted statute is an unconstitutional effort to divest and diminish the authority granted to Tennessee’s district attorneys general by the Tennessee Constitution,” Mulroy said at the time. “The new statute violates the voting rights of such voters because it strips material discretion from district attorneys, who are elected by the qualified voters of the judicial district.”
But state attorneys did not agree.
“The General Assembly was entitled to take that statuary power away from the district attorneys and give it to the Attorney General in capital cases,” reads the court document. “They have done just that and their mandate must be followed.”
But in July Shelby County Judge Paula Skahan ruled the Republican legislation did violate the state constitution. New arguments on the case were heard by the Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals earlier this month. No ruling was issued as of press time. However, an appeal of that ruling seems inevitable, likely pushing the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Pretextual Stops
State Republicans are actively trying to undermine a unanimous decision of the Memphis City Council to stop police from pulling over motorists for minor things like a broken taillight, a loose bumper, and more.
This council move came three months after MPD officers beat and killed Tyre Nichols, who was stopped for a minor traffic infraction. The local law is called the Driving Equality Act in Honor of Tyre Nichols.
Council members said police time could be better spent, that the stops expose more people to the criminal justice system, and, as in the Nichols’ case, could be dangerous. The stops also disproportionately affect Black people, who make up about 64 percent of Memphis’ population but receive 74 percent of its traffic tickets, according to Decarcerate Memphis.
The council’s decision made national headlines. But it found no favor with Republican lawmakers.
Rep. John Gillespie (R-Bartlett) introduced a controversial bill this year that would end that practice and reestablish state control over local decisions on criminal justice.
“We’re simply saying a state law that’s been on the books for decades is what we’re going by here,” Gillespie told Tennessee Lookout earlier this month. “And if there are people that have problems with what state law is, then maybe they should change state law instead of enacting local ordinances that are in conflict with state law.”
He initially cooled on the matter, promising to pause his bill for further review after Nichols’ parents spoke at a press conference.
“I am just appalled by what Republicans are trying to do in this state,” Nichols’ father, Rodney Wells, said at the event.
Gillespie promised Nichols’ family he’d hold the bill but surprised many earlier this month when he brought it to the House floor for a vote, which it won. Some said Gillespie acted in bad faith. State Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) said he straight-up lied to Nichols’ family and subverted local power to boot.
“You, as a person who lives in Shelby County, seek to undo the will of the people of Memphis and Shelby County,” Pearson said on the House floor. “The Wells family spoke with him briefly; he told them this bill wouldn’t come up until probably next Thursday.”
The Senate approved the bill last Thursday. It now heads to Gov. Lee for signature.
Six school board members for Memphis-Shelby County Schools met with three state lawmakers representing Memphis on Feb. 14, 2024, at the state Capitol. Their agenda included pending legislation from Rep. Mark White and Sen. Brent Taylor, both Republicans, to authorize Gov. Bill Lee to appoint additional members to the board. (Photo: Courtesy Memphis-Shelby County Schools | Chalkbeat)
MSCS School Board
State Republicans want to control schools here, too.
Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis), chair of the House Education Committee, filed a bill earlier this year that would add six governor-appointed members (read: more Republican influence) to the MSCS board. When he filed the legislation, he said he was unimpressed with the slate of those vying for the district’s superintendent job and concerned about students falling behind state standards on reading and math.
“I’m very concerned about the district’s direction, and I just can’t sit back any longer,” White told Chalkbeat Tennessee. “I think we’re at a critical juncture.”
However, MSCS board chair Althea Greene said at the time that White’s proposal was unnecessary.
“We may have had some challenges, but more interference from the General Assembly is not warranted at this time,” she said. “We have to stop experimenting with our children.”
Since then, the MSCS board chose Marie Feagins as the district’s superintendent and she got to work early, before her contract was supposed to start. Also, White paused his bill earlier this month to give board members a chance to submit an improvement plan. White said the plan should show how they’ll improve on literacy, truancy, graduation rates, teacher recruitment, underutilized school buildings, and a backlog of building maintenance needs, among other things, according to Chalkbeat.
While it’s the newest move in state “overreach” into schools here, it’s hardly the first. State Republicans once seized dozens of schools in Memphis and Nashville as laboratories for what they called “Achievement School Districts.” After more than a decade, these schools only angered locals, showed abysmal student performance, and now seem to be on their way out.
Cannabis
For six weeks back in 2016, Memphis City Council members debated a move that would have decriminalized possession of small amounts of cannabis in the city.
Hundreds were (and are) arrested each year on simple possession charges, and most of those arrested were (and are) Black. Council members didn’t want cannabis legalization; they wanted to steer folks away from the criminal justice system. They hoped to keep them out of jail and avoid a criminal record, which could hurt their chances at housing, employment, and more.
The city council — even though some had reservations about it — said yes to this. So did the Nashville Metropolitan Council. State Republicans said no.
Upon their return to the Capitol in 2017, they got to work ensuring their control over local decisions on the matter. A bill to strip this control easily won support in the legislature and was signed by then-Gov. Bill Haslam, who said he acted on the will of state lawmakers.
“You just can’t have cities creating their own criminal code, willy-nilly,” Rep. William Lamberth (R-Cottontown), the bill’s House sponsor, told The Tennessean at the time.
Then-Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion that said, basically, cities can’t make laws that preempt state law. With that, Memphis resumed regular enforcement of cannabis laws.
Ranked Choice Voting
In two elections — 2008 and 2018 — Memphians chose how they wanted to pick their politicians, but they never got a chance to use it. State Republicans said no.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) would have allowed voters here to rank candidates on a ballot, doing away with the need for run-off elections that always see lower voter turnout. It was new and different but voters here “decided, over and over again, to give it a try,” reads a Commercial Appeal op-ed from 2022 by Mark Luttrell, former Shelby County mayor, and Erika Sugarmon, now a Shelby County commissioner.
However, state Republicans then-Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and Rep. Nathan Vaughan (R-Collierville) filed a bill to upend the voters’ decision for good with a bill to end RCV in Tennessee. Kelsey said it was about voter clarity. Opponents said it was about more.
“If the bill passes, it will disrespect Memphis voters, make a mockery of local control,” Luttrell and Sugarmon said in the op-ed.
In the end, the state won. The bill passed and RCV was banned, with added support and sponsorship of Memphis Democrats Rep. Joe Towns Jr. and the late Rep. Barbara Cooper.
State Sovereignty
“So, you hoe in your little garden and stay out of our garden,” said Rep. Bud Hulsey (R-Kingsport).
He was explaining to the House Public Service Committee last year how the country’s founders designed the separation of powers between the state and the federal governments, how it was supposed to work, anyway.
But federal government agencies — not elected officials — issue rules pushed on to “we, the people,” he said. They tear families apart. They split marriages. They end lifelong friendships, he said. They bring bankruptcy and suicide. He gave no more details than that. But he was sick of it and said the bill he brought would fix it.
When some Republicans here aren’t busy in committee or court, rending control from local governments, they like to think about state sovereignty. They want to defend Tennessee from the feds, especially when a Democrat is in the White House. They want to know what the exact rules are and to tell D.C. “don’t tread on me.”
Since at least 1995, bills like these have been filed here and there in the state legislature. There’s a new one pending now. In them, “sovereignty” sometimes sounds like a preamble to “secession.”
Hulsey’s bill didn’t go that far. He really wanted to set out a way to nullify D.C. rules he didn’t like. Lee’s office was against it, though. Senate Republicans were, too. The idea failed to even get a review in the Republican-packed Senate State and Local Government Committee. Conservatives worried “nullification” could also nullify big federal tax dollars.
That 1995 bill demanded, “The federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers.” Another Republican sovereignty bill later would have voided the powers of any representative of the United Nations once they entered the state.
One in 2014 (that was signed by the governor) simply expressed the state’s sovereignty to set educational standards. A 2016 bill said the feds “seduce” states to go along with their new rules with federal funds they treat as grants, not as tax funds for the state. Another in 2013 would have formed a committee to see what financial and legal troubles could be in store for Tennessee if it scaled back or quit the “state’s participation in the various federal programs.”
Ten years later, this idea is back. The “Tennessee State Sovereignty Act of 2024” would form a 10-person committee to watch and see if any federal rule violates the Tennessee State Constitution. If it does, “it is the duty of both the residents of this state and the General Assembly to resist.”
Now, if that don’t say “don’t tread on me” …
In the Senate, the bill was deferred until near the end of session (usually meaning they’ll get to it if they can). A House review of the idea was slated for this week, after press time.
Education Funding
Sovereignty bills rarely go anywhere but in talking points for reelection campaigns.
However, last year high-ranking Republicans took state sovereignty a step beyond rattling a saber. They announced a bold plan to have a serious look at if and how Tennessee could cut ties with the feds and their $1 billion in education funding. If it did, Tennessee would have been the first state in history to decline such funds.
“We as a state can lead the nation once again in telling the federal government that they can keep their money and we’ll just do things the Tennessee way,” House Speaker Rep. Cameron Sexton said at an event in February last year.
He didn’t outline what the “Tennessee way” entailed, though he complained about testing mandates and strings attached to funding. Many said the big federal string Republicans wanted to cut was the one attached to Title IX mandates. Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that get federal money. The Biden administration has promised an update to these that could strengthen protections for LGTBQ students.
Tennessee has passed more anti-LGBTQ laws than any other state, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The week of March 4th alone, 18 such bills were before state lawmakers and targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; made it easier to ban books; and attempted to legalize discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
State Republicans have passed bills to mandate transgender students only play on sports teams that match their gender at birth. They have mandated which bathrooms trans people have to use (a decision struck down by a federal judge). They’ve allowed teachers to go unpunished if they refuse to use pronouns that students identify with. They’ve wanted certain books with LGBTQ themes banned at school. They’ve wanted LGBTQ, especially gender identity, issues banned from discussion in sex-ed classes. This list goes on and on.
However, the precise motive for looking into cutting those federal education dollars was never stated. Some said it was always good to review the relationship between nation and state. In the end, Republicans spent a lot of time and money to research the idea but set it aside. They took the federal money and the strings attached anyway. But taking it so seriously was maybe that “don’t tread on me snake” just shaking its rattle.
“Deep in my Soul”
Separation of powers is a doubled-edge sword. It’s that cartoon drawing of a big fish eating a small fish that is getting eaten by the even bigger fish. It’s a “layer cake” form of federalism.
Call it what you will, but it’s clear locals want to make their own decisions. For Hulsey, the Republican talking about who tends whose garden, the idea runs deep.
“I stood up on that House floor over there a few weeks ago and we raised our hand, and we swore to 7 million people in this state, we swore not that we would rake in all the federal money we could get,” Hulsey told committee members. “We swore that we would always defend the inalienable rights of Tennessee people by defending and upholding the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of Tennessee.
“We should not be for sale. I want to tell you that deep in my soul, I have a conviction that is deep-seated. I believe that if state legislatures in this country do not stand up and hold the federal government to obey the Constitution of the United States, we could very easily lose this republic.”
Photo: Representative John Gillespie | Facebook
John Gillespie
John Gillespie, the Republican incumbent in state House District 97, has kept a relatively moderate profile in the two terms he’s served since winning his seat over Democrat Gabby Salinas in 2020, focusing on non-ideological matters like drag-racing bans and deviating from GOP orthodoxy on gun legislation.
But all that may be changing. Gillespie is now following the lead of the House Republican leadership and another Shelby County GOPer, state Senator Brent Taylor, in sponsoring hard-line crime legislation destined to strip away local law-enforcement prerogatives.
A controversy arose last week after a cell phone video was circulated of a conversation in Nashville in which Gillespie appeared to be assuring the visiting parents of the late Tyre Nichols that he would hold up on seeking an immediate vote on his bill to nullify city council restrictions on the kind of preemptive traffic stops that would end in the savage beating death of young Nichols by MPD officers who are now facing trial for murder.
Instead, Gillespie put the bill on the floor for a relatively quick party-line passage.
The incident may loom large in this year’s legislative elections, in which Gillespie will be opposed by businessman Jesse Huseth, a Democrat who has already released a statement deploring Gillespie’s conduct of the matter.
• Tami Sawyer, recent winner of the Democratic nomination for General Sessions Court clerk, is keeping her activist’s hand in, blogging her discontent with both a pending appearance at the University of Memphis by Kyle Rittenhouse, the youth acquitted of killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest event, and Rep. Gillespie’s short-circuiting whatever commitment he may have given on rolling his bill.
• A hat tip to my daughter Julia Baker of TheDaily Memphian for noting that the aforementioned Brent Taylor, notorious for his constant verbal and legislative targeting of local DA Steve Mulroy, is on the same page as Mulroy regarding the need for a new crime lab in Memphis.
• Veteran watchers of presidential State of the Union addresses over the years are used to seeing 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen ready on or near the aisle for banter or conversation as the president — of whatever year or whatever party, for that matter — is either headed to the podium or finishing up afterward and headed out.
Those aisle seats have to be staked out well in advance, and Cohen, using staffers early on to help hold down a place, is something of a master of the art.
Sometimes he shares local artifacts with the passing chief executive. In 2008, he was seen on national television handing George W. Bush a University of Memphis booster’s cap to be autographed. Watching at home, then Tiger basketball coach John Calipari saw it all and later got in touch with Cohen, putting in a bid for the cap and pledging to get it into the U of M Sports Hall of Fame. Cohen turned it over, but the cap never made it to its intended destination. Not long afterward, Coach Cal — cap presumably in tow — decamped to the University of Kentucky.
Always Cohen manages to have something to say. Last Thursday night, he caught Biden going in and took the time to encourage the president to pitch his remarks to the Democratic side of the assembled audience of lawmakers and to give the Republicans hell. Presumably Biden already had that strategy in mind. In any case, that’s what happened.
