Tag: John Tanner

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Crap Shoot in the 8th

I’m thinking of moving to Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District so I can vote for Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane. Karen, or “Free” as I like to call her, is an independent candidate, one of 20 people vying to become GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher’s replacement, including four other independents, two Democrats, and 13(!) Republicans.

There are 13 Republicans running because the 8th District has been gerrymandered into a lockdown seat for the GOP. All one of these 13 boys has to do is win, say, 20 percent of the votes and they’re on their way to Washington, D.C. The actual election in November is a foregone conclusion.

And thanks to the GOP gerrymandering of the 8th District that occurred after the 2010 census, I wouldn’t have to move very far to vote for Free — just to the “finger” on the map that juts its way deep into east Memphis, into the heart of what used to be Democratic 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen’s district, including the area where many of the city’s Jewish voters live. Huh, what could they have been thinking?

No problem, they gave Cohen Millington in exchange. Seems fair, right?

Gerrymandering is the source of our congressional gridlock. It’s a system that allows office-holders to literally pick who gets to vote for (and against) them. The majority party in power after the census obtains the right to draw the borders of our districts and other various political bailiwicks. They almost always do so in a way that splits and scatters the opposition party’s voters and solidifies their own. That’s why members of Congress are very seldom defeated, unless it’s by a member of their own party in a primary. Since they don’t have to work across party lines in their home districts, there’s very little inclination to do so once they get to Washington. They just have to keep the homefolks in their own party happy.

And that’s why there is a mad scramble among 13 Republicans to win the GOP nomination in the 8th. Once they’re in, they’re in for as long as they want to be there.

Just eight years ago, things were reversed. Longtime Democratic Congressman John Tanner controlled the 8th District, winning election after election. In 2008, the GOP didn’t even field a candidate. Tanner won the general election with 180,000 votes to his write-in opponent’s 54 — almost literally 100 percent of the electorate!

Then Tanner retired, and in the 2010 “wave” election, Fincher beat Democrat Roy Herron. In the post-census redistricting, the 8th District got gerrymandered to ensure that it would remain Republican, at least until the next census. That was done by moving much of eastern Shelby County, a GOP stronghold, from the 9th District to the 8th.

Which is why the Memphis television and radio airwaves are now filled with ads from Republicans, each trying to outdo the others with their red, white, and blue credentials. David Kustoff is going to end Islamic terrorism; George Flinn is going to abolish Obamacare (with the help of those two white-haired biddies who love him so); and real conservative Brian Kelsey is going to be the most conservative conservative who ever conserved. It’s why we are being visited by the dregs of the recent GOP presidential nomination process — Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and others — who are pitching for one or the other of the Goopsters. It’s why city boys are putting on their best button-down plaid shirts and visiting tractor pulls and county fairs.

There’s been little independent polling, making this race a crapshoot in the most literal and metaphorical sense. The early thinking was that Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had the inside track, which would be fine with me, frankly. He at least tried to push for Governor Haslam’s expansion of Medicare, indicating that he has a brain and actually cares about the area’s uninsured population and Shelby County’s overburdened hospitals. Having another congressman from Memphis couldn’t hurt. It certainly beats having one from Frog Jump, like Fincher.

I mean, as long as Karen Free Spirit Talley-Lane is out of the running …

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tanner’s Prescription

One of the most enduring presences on the Tennessee political scene has been 8th District congressman John Tanner of Union City, a Democrat who, since his first election to the office as a state legislator in 1988, has never been seriously tested by an opponent, Republican or Democratic.

One of the reasons is that Tanner, though a leader of the Democrats’ conservative “Blue Dog” faction, faithfully attempts to strike a balance between competing points of view as well as to propitiate the expressed will of his constituents. Better than most faced with such a task, he avoids the “on the one hand/on the other hand” mode of temporizing, though the final result of his thinking doesn’t necessarily please everybody.

Such might be the case with his answer to a question posed to him last Friday night, when Tanner, something of a foreign-policy maven, was the featured speaker at the culminating “Frontline Politics” event sponsored by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce at the East Memphis Hilton.

Whom should we side with in the ongoing confrontation in Pakistan between the autocratic government of Pervez Musharraf and ostensible democratic reformer Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister freshly returned from exile? Not an easy question, and Tanner, after ruminating out loud over the pros and cons of the matter, finally came down, reluctantly but decisively, on the side of the status quo. What’s at stake in the region is stability, the congressman said, and that’s especially needful in the case of Pakistan, not only a de facto ally in the so-called war on terror but a country in possession of a decent-sized nuclear arsenal.

Not everybody will be satisfied with Tanner’s conclusion, especially those who see the issue posed in Pakistan to be the simple one of tyranny versus democracy. And who, after all, can fail to be inspired by the spectacle of all those protesting lawyers in business suits who let themselves be carted off to jail by the current regime’s police?

Even so, there are good reasons to heed Tanner’s caveat, especially since one of Musharraf’s accomplishments in office, through fair means or foul, has been to repress the ever-present minions of al-Qaeda, who are well represented in Pakistan and who are thought to be providing a haven there for Osama bin Laden. How certain can we be that Bhutto, who had tendencies toward authoritarianism (and corruption) herself before being thrown out of office in 1996, would be able to keep the lid on the problem?

Beyond that, our experience in Iraq has surely taught us something about the dangers of overthrowing dictators. Saddam Hussein was no paragon, to say the least. But he was A) secular and B) strong enough to hold the festering parts of that country together against potential (now long since actualized) religious anarchy. Much the same can be said of Musharraf, and it has to be considered, as Tanner indicated, whether the cure for authoritarian regimes (which are surely to be preferred to totalitarian ones) can be worse than the illness.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tanner Sparring with Fellow Democrats Over Iraq

The 9th District’s Steve Cohen isn’t the only local member of Congress to be in the middle of a verbal firefight these days. Tennessee’s 8th District congressman John Tanner, who represents part of Memphis and much of northern Shelby County, is feuding with fellow Democrats over a bipartisan measure he’s sponsoring to relax the terms of a congressionally mandated withdrawal from Iraq.

In response to criticism from MoveOn.org and other critics who want more direct and immediate withdrawal measures, Tanner, a leader of the Democrats’ congressional Blue Dog faction, said, “When these soldiers, sailors, and airmen are buried, they’re not buried as Republicans or Democrats. I care a hell of a lot more about them than I do about partisan politics.”

Liberal blogger Matt Stoller comes back at Tanner with this bit of sarcasm: “[He] is willing to go the mat to beat back those crazy anti-troop liberals that actually want to compel Bush to withdraw troops, since that apparently is partisan politics.”

The two sides of the controversy can be followed here and here.