Tag: Mark Lovell

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Politics Politics Feature

District 95 Showdown

CREDIT: Jim McCarter

The failure of the Shelby County Commission to appoint a successor to Mark Lovell, forced in February to resign his seat as state Representative in House District 95 amid allegations of sexual indiscretions, means no one will represent the district, based in Collierville, Germantown, and Eads, as the Tennessee General Assembly winds down its work this month.

Jim McCarter

Candidate Missy Marshall, Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (who came from Nashville to host a Marshall funhdraiser), and TNA co-host Connie McCarter. (Marshall’s fundraiser overlapped with the forum; she was able to make an opening statement and field one question.)

But all 10 of the candidates who qualified for a June 15th special election showed up to pitch their credentials for the 2017-18 legislative session at a Tuesday night forum at Collierville High School last week, sponsored by the Tennessee Nurses Association.

Three of them are sure to make it to the general election: trial lawyer Julie Byrd Ashworth, unopposed in the special Democratic primary of April 27th, as well as Robert Schutt and Jim Tomasik, both on the ballot as independents. Schutt, a recent Vanderbilt graduate, is a novice making his first race; Tomasik, a declared Libertarian, is a veteran of several runs for office and numerous activist causes, including the current de-annexation movement.

There are seven Republicans in the race: lawyer Joseph Aaron Crone; Gail W. Horner, also an attorney; sales representative Curtis D. Loynachan; Missy Marshall, a veteran of numerous appointed positions in state government, most of them in connection with health-related issues; Billy Patton, computer executive and Collierville alderman; Frank Uhlhorn, a small business owner and longtime Germantown alderman; and Kevin Vaughan, an engineer, real estate broker, and Collierville School Board member.

The bad news for those seven is that only one of them will survive as the winner of the special Republican primary, also held on April 27th; the good news is that, on the basis of the District’s established GOP voting habits, the winner of that primary will no doubt be favored in the general election.

That well-known Republican tilt figured indirectly in a kerfuffle that resulted in the County Commission’s recent defaulting on the opportunity to appoint an interim District 95 state Representative to serve out the current legislative session. 

The commission had voted unanimously to oppose a school-vouchers bill by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) that is moving toward a late-session resolution, but members’ initial intent to appoint an anti-voucher interim state Rep was shelved when Republican commissioners, with an assist from two GOP-leaning Democrats, balked at a campaign by east Shelby County Democrats to get one of their own appointed via the commission’s formal 7-6 Democratic majority.

If the Kelsey bill, authorizing a “pilot program” of 5,000 private-school vouchers for selected students at low-performing public schools in the Shelby County Schools district, doesn’t make it this year, it will almost certainly be back up next year. With the exception of voucher supporters Loynachan and Patton, the candidates at last week’s forum either waffled on the issue or opposed it outright.

The same pattern asserted itself on the issue of a bill enabling urban de-annexations, which a state Senate committee had decided, that very day, to put off for a year. This time the confirmed adherents of the bill were Loynachan and Tomasik, with Ashworth leaning to Yes. 

Loynachan and Tomasik were the definite No votes against revisiting some variant of Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal for TennCare (Medicaid) expansion under the still-standing Affordable Care Act. Vaughan was dubious, characterizing Obamacare as “so last week.” Patton, however, had a convincing reason to be on board: “My sister’s a registered nurse, sitting in the second row, and she informs me I need to be pro.”

A majority of the candidates also tended to favor some version of Haslam’s “Improve Act” proposal for a $10 billion rehab of the state’s infrastructure and roadways, financed by an increase in the gasoline tax while being offset to some degree by a series of tax reductions elsewhere. But Vaughan and Tomasik were concerned about the remaining tax burden, Ashworth saw “no compelling reason” for the gas tax, and lawyer Horner said she’d rather keep on paying her professional privilege tax, slated for relief, than “see the gas tax imposed on people who can’t afford it.”

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Cover Feature News

Nashville Gets Serious

CREDIT: Photographs by Jackson Baker

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

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

Photographs by Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

get some pressure from the press.

And thus did one era make way for another.

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

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

Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville wait their turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things may be changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Feature

Meatless Monday

CREDIT: JB

JB

Everybody knows the old saw about the process of legislation resembling sausage-making: meaning you don’t want to watch all the grisly stuff — the bloodletting, the grind, the slop, the drip, the smell — everything that goes on to create your hot dog.

But at least you get a hot dog. What happened at the Monday meeting of the Shelby County Commission was a kitchen mess with no meat to show for it. An anticlimax. A fizzle. A toot. A zip. A swing and miss.

No, scratch that last one. The batter who swings and misses at least is trying to connect. Nobody took the bat off his shoulder on Monday. And we can safely say “he”; the one woman on the Commission, Republican Heidi Shafer, took the day off. She didn’t miss a thing, after all.

Everybody who was there had something to be embarrassed about. 

Monday, March 20th, was the last possible day to set up a schedule, pending a special election in June, to name an interim replacement in the current legislative session for state Representative Mark Lovell, the freshman legislator from District 95 in the Tennessee House of Representatives who, amid allegations of sexual misconduct, resigned his seat after serving barely a month.

District 95 is a sprawling area, including hunks of Germantown, Collierville, and Eads. All these are high-growth areas that surely deserve to be served by somebody during the 2017 session of the legislature.

They won’t be. District 95 will not have votes recorded for it on issues of such gravity as Governor Bill Haslam‘s pending gas tax and infrastructure plan, medical marijuana, urban de-annexation, health care, an overhaul of the state’s tax structure, and on so much else. 

As bad as that is, that’s not the worst of it. Shelby County at large, by virtue of this abject default on the part of its governing legislative body, has failed to signify any sort of large general will on the issues confronting the state and the county — on all the ones just listed and one more that it had taken special note of and vowed to have an effect on.

This was the issue of school vouchers. A month ago, the commission, all 13 members of it, representing precincts and neighborhoods from the inner city to the outer suburbs, worked themselves into a condition of moral purpose and high resolve and voted resoundingly, without a nay vote, to defend public education by sending someone to Nashville in Lovell’s place who would cast a vote against the annual bill — introduced this year, as usual, by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) — that would authorize the diversion of taxpayer funds from public schools to use as tuition money for private schools.

This year’s version, creating a “pilot program” in Shelby County, was aimed directly at Shelby County Schools, already underfunded and struggling for survival.

A number of credentialed would-be interim legislators were ready to apply and be interviewed by the commission for the right to go to Nashville on behalf of District 95 — even if that meant service only for a week or two. After all, the voucher matter, as the commissioners knew, was usually one of the last things left hanging that late.

Then a group of Shelby County Democrats got the bright idea of prevailing on their party’s technical 7-6 majority on the Commission to get a Democrat up there to represent District 95, arguably the most Republican district in Tennessee. For a scant few days, mind you, hardly long enough to make any sort of dent on behalf of the legislature’s nearly extinct Democratic Party but long enough to potentially antagonize any Republicans straddling the fence on vouchers.

And the naked partisanship of the proposal alienated the commission’s Republicans to the point that they moved away from their previous position of solidarity with the body’s Democrats and convinced themselves that a better course would be to forgo sending any District 95 representative at all. And so it turned out on Monday. As if to mock the presumptuousness of it all, two Democrats used to siding with the Republicans in a pinch had the squeeze put on them and did so again. A majority voted not to make an appointment.

The bottom line: No Democrat and no Republican to represent District 95, nobody at all from the district to vote on vouchers or anything else.

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Politics Politics Feature

Partisanship vs. Solidarity?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As is pointed out in this week’s Flyer editorial, the Shelby County Commission, the elective body entrusted with budgetary oversight over public education in the county, has made a point of voting unanimously against the school-voucher bill now moving through the General Assembly.

It did so for both financial and philosophical reasons. And the commission’s unanimous vote was reached in full anticipation that the voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), would, as has been the custom in legislation on this subject, be among the last measures coming up for a final vote in the current legislative session, due to expire in April.

The commission’s vote was a clear signal of its attitude toward vouchers, and it was made in anticipation of the fact that it would soon have the opportunity to designate an interim successor in state House District 95 to Mark Lovell, the Republican representative who, faced with allegations of sexual misconduct, was recently forced to resign by the leadership of his party.

While a special election to replace Lovell is set to conclude on June 15th, well after the completion of the General Assembly’s work, the commission made haste to set up machinery for the interim appointment whereby applications would be made available from March 21st to March 27th, interviews would be conducted March 29th, and an appointment made April 3rd, in time for the eventual appointee to be serving in the House for the duration of the current session.

Estimates of how long that period could be range from a week to the greater part of a month, but the assumption, again, was that the interim state representative-designate would have an opportunity to vote on the voucher question.

That was how matters stood until a move was initiated among various local Democratic activists to take advantage of the commission’s current composition — seven members elected as Democrats and six elected as Republicans — to appoint a Democrat as the interim state representative from District 5. 

That initiative was first made public in a letter sent to the commission’s seven Democrats by Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club and a member also of the 13-member ad hoc group appointed recently by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville to revive the Shelby County Democratic Party. (For a variety of reasons, including what Mancini called “many years of dysfunction,” the dissension-prone local party was formally decertified by the state Democratic executive committee last year.)

Cambron’s letter began with a clarion call: “We have a unique opportunity to send a new progressive voice to the state capitol from Shelby County.” Cambron made the case for local party activist and state Democratic committee member Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, “a leading progressive activist, a club member, and a staunch Democrat who will not hesitate to stand up for the values that we are.”

Cambron said it was “critical that Adrienne is chosen to fill the vacancy for State House District 95” and went on to contend that four of the commission Democrats had committed to support her candidacy, while three — he named Eddie Jones, Justin Ford, and current chairman Melvin Burgess — had not. 

“This is simply not acceptable,” Cambron wrote. “Our Democrats must be unified and stand up against the radical right-wing agenda coming out of the State Capitol.”

In reality, not all of the four Democrats Cambron claimed as committed to Pakis-Gillon would confirm the fact, and at least one made it clear that he resented being put on the spot, as did one of the three Cambron mentioned as uncommitted. 

The Republican members who had put themselves on the record against vouchers began to react negatively to what they saw as the introduction of an extraneous partisan factor. Several of them noted the availability of anti-voucher Republicans among potential applicants for the interim position and said they saw the move to appoint Pakis-Gillon as a conscious rebuff to the constituency of District 95, one of the more consistently Republican-voting areas in the state. 

A motion by GOP Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to forgo the previously agreed-on appointment schedule achieved only a tie vote in committee and therefore technically failed, but it picked up support from Republican David Reaves of Bartlett, a former Shelby County Schools board member who had spearheaded the commission’s move to appoint an anti-voucher interim state representative. 

As of this week, the situation was fluid, with neither Democrats nor Republicans having a unified position on the matter, and with the body’s previous solidarity on the vouchers issue so riven by disagreement on the partisan issue that there is now serious doubt as to whether an interim appointment can even be made.

The situation will have to be resolved on March 20th, the date of the commission’s next public meeting, or there will not be time for the appointment process to be carried out. Not only would District 95 lack a vote on a matter which is predicted to have a close final outcome, but the commission’s original intent to use the appointment to make a statement on vouchers will be surrendered as well.

Only once before has the commission broken with the tradition of filling a vacancy with a member of the same party as the person being replaced. That was in 2009 when a majority of seven Democrats chose fellow Democrat Matt Kuhn as an interim commissioner to replace Republican David Lillard, who had left to become state treasurer.

That move produced an immediate fallout in Nashville, where Republican legislators from Shelby County protested by imposing a stall on the commission’s legislative agenda, grudgingly relenting somewhat later when Republicans like then GOP Commissioner Mike Carpenter and then District Attorney General Bill Gibbons made public pleas for action on the agenda.

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Politics Politics Feature

Dual Decisions in District 95

Consensus would seem to be an uncertain prospect, as Shelby County commissioners face the task of naming an interim replacement for the District 95 seat in the state House.

Neither the Commission’s seven Democrats nor its six Republicans seem prepared to act as a bloc on the matter of a successor to Mark Lovell, the Eads Republican who was pressured into resigning from the legislature last month after serving 45 days in the position he wrested from former incumbent Curry Todd in the August 2016 Republican primary. 

The departure from the General Assembly of Lovell, the proprietor of the annual Delta Fair and other business enterprises, followed allegations of sexual misconduct involving a staffer at the General Assembly. Lovell has denied any wrongdoing and has said he merely acceded to the urging of unnamed members of the House Republican leadership who, he has said, expressed a wish to sidestep whatever potential taint might result from a new controversy, following one that ended in the expulsion last year of GOP House member Jeremy Durham of Franklin.

And, while the commission may be influenced to some degree by matters of personal character and the likelihood of avoiding scandal in making a choice about an interim successor, the brevity of the term to be served by a replacement dictates that other considerations will loom larger.

Mark Lovell

There is a certain sentiment on the commission that appointing anybody at all in District 95 might be beside the point, inasmuch as whoever might be named would likely serve for a very brief period, perhaps only a week or two before the adjournment of the legislature, which would probably occur in middle or late April.

As Democratic Commissioner Eddie Jones (who favors making an appointment) observes, “Whoever we send up there may end up serving less time than Mark Lovell did.”

The earliest date that a commission appointee could arrive in Nashville to serve would be April 3rd. The current schedule calls for applications for the interim position to be made available between March 21st and March 27th, with applicants to be interviewed by the commission on March 29th and an appointment to be made during the Commission’s regular public meeting of April 3rd.

Complicating that scenario further is the fact that, on the scheduled appointment date of April 3rd, a primary campaign to fill out Lovell’s full term in District 95 may be underway in both political parties. An official writ last week from Governor Bill Haslam declaring the seat open and calling for a special election established a primary date of Thursday, April 27th, with a general election to be held on Thursday, June 15th.

And the deadline for filing candidate petitions is Thursday, March 16th — a date early enough to reveal who, among the applicants for the interim commission appointment, wants to occupy the seat both temporarily and for the duration of a full term.

In the case of interim appointments, the commission favors applicants who express no intention of running in a special election for a given seat, so as not to give any active candidate in the election a head start on others. That factor may not be so important this time around, even though — as indicated — the appointment process and the special election campaign will be overlapping.

As Republican Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett pointed out, several key votes are generally left to be resolved in the final week or two of a legislative session. “We need to appoint somebody to represent the district,” Reaves said, especially since an issue of more than usual interest to commissioners — that of school vouchers — is likely to still be hanging fire at the tail end of the session. “And the District 95 seat has generally been a swing vote on vouchers in previous sessions,” he says.

A similar opinion was put forth by GOP Commissioner Mark Billingsley of Germantown, who notes that the commission recently recorded a unanimous vote opposing vouchers — the awarding of public funds to pay for education in private schools. “Vouchers would ultimately erode our public and municipal school systems,” Billingsley maintains.

Even the few commissioners who are dubious about making such a short-term legislative appointment, like Republican Steve Basar, whose district encompasses much of East Memphis, concedes that there is unanimity on the point of vouchers.  “I’ll go with the will of the body on that, but I’m really not in favor of filling the seat for just a couple of weeks,” he says.

The Democratic members of the commission concur on the importance of the voucher vote, and on the need for a District 95 representative to endorse the rest of the commission’s adopted legislative agenda, which includes support for medical marijuana.

The commission Democrats could be vexed by another matter — whether to assert the fact of their numerical majority to appoint a fellow Democrat or, conversely, to adhere to a tradition of filling vacancies according to the accepted party preference of the district in question.

No one disputes that House District 95, in southeast Shelby County, votes overwhelmingly Republican in any partisan election, but various Democratic activists in Shelby County, like Dave Cambron, president of the Germantown Democratic Club, are campaigning for the party to name its own to the position.

In support of that position, Cambron points out that the White County Commission, with a 7-6 GOP majority,  has just named a Republican, Paul Bailey, to succeed Democratic state Representative Charles Curtiss in a vacated House seat.

Two Democrats have expressed interest in the District 95 seat — Julie Byrd Ashworth and Adrienne Pakis-Gillon. Pakis-Gillon, a veteran activist who has run previously for a state Senate seat, has been contacting commission members in quest of their support for the interim post. An email sent out to fellow Democrats by Cambron suggests that all but three Democrats lean toward Pakis-Gillon, but Democratic commissioners on both sides of Cambron’s count express doubt that any such determination can be made.

Circumstances as of now would seem to favor the appointment of a moderate Republican for the brief end-of-session interim. Reaves put forth a name — that of his former Shelby County School Board colleague, David Pickler.