Tag: Mark Norris

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Covington’s Rose Easily Wins GOP Nomination for State Senate District 32

CREDIT: JB

On a flood of Tipton County votes, most of them from  JB

THE AGONY OF DEFEAT: Lonnie Treadaway, who recently lost his bid to join the Memphis City Council, consoles Heidi Shafer as she confronts the numbers at her election-night party at Exline’s Pizza on Stage Road. Shafer was one of three Shelby Countians to lag behind GOP nominee Paul Rose of Tipton County in voting for the Republican nomination for state Senate District 32.

early voting, Covington businessman/farmer Paul Rose easily won the Republican nomination to succeed federal judge Mark Norris in the vacated District 32 state Senate seat.

Three Shelby Countians —former County Commissioners George Chism and Heidi Shafer, and former state Representative Steve McManus — brought up the rear behind Rose, all trailing the Covington candidate even in Shelby County. In Tipton County, Rose’s margin was 83 percent. Cumulatively, he won something like two/thirds of the overall vote in both counties.

None of the Shelby County candidates had anything but marginal vote totals in Tipton. Rose won 4,132 of the 4,632 votes cast there. In Shelby the vote went this way: Rose, 2,266; Chism, 1,512; Shafer, 1,322; McManus, 1,055.

Given the fact of the much larger overall pool of voters in Shelby County, it would seem obvious that a much higher turnout rate in Tipton County, coupled with an apparent determination of voters there to elect one of their own, figured large in the outcome.

Democrat Eric R. Coleman, with 377 votes in Shelby County and 166 in Tipton County won his nomination without opposition and will be matched against Rose on the March 12th general election ballot.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Works in Progress

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

“Nine days! That’s all we’ve got!” Thus did George Chism exhort the supporters gathered around him last Wednesday for a meet-and-greet/fund-raiser at the Bank of Bartlett branch on Highway 64. The reference by Chism was somewhat obscure, since voting in the special-election primaries for the vacant District 32 state Senate seat, which he and four others are seeking, won’t end until primary-election day on January 24th.

What former Shelby County Commissioner Chism apparently meant was that the climax of the special-election primary race would occur between January 14th, when ad hoc neighborhood voting sites became active, and January 23rd, election eve.

Chism, former state Representative Steve McManus, and former County Commissioner Heidi Shafer are competing for the Republican nomination for the seat vacated by former state Senate majority leader Mark Norris, a federal judge now, by appointment of President Trump. Meanwhile, the sole Democrat on the primary ballot, Eric Coleman, is assured of a chance to run against the GOP winner on the special general-election date of March 12th.

In any case and by any arithmetic, time is scarce, and all the candidates are hustling up multiple occasions to create or augment voter awareness of their identity and credentials. Chism claims among his supporters several of Shelby County’s suburban mayors, including Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald, who was on hand for his fund-raiser. Also there was David Reaves, who, like Chism served a single term on the County Commission and, again like Chism, was something of an outlier there, dedicated, or so said both of them, to the gospel of fiscal solvency.

Verbal homage by Chism and several other speakers was paid both to the idea that the seat, formerly held by Republican Norris, should remain in the GOP fold and to the idea that attention should also be paid to the Democratic voters in the district, which incorporates large parts of northern and eastern Shelby County, and Tipton County as well.

Similar concepts were to be heard a day before Chism’s event, when McManus had held a meet-and-greet at the Bartlett household of Republican state Representative Jim Coley. McManus was well aware that Democrats are beginning to gain a foothold in District 32. After all, he had been upset in 2016, losing his seat as state Representative for House District 96, in the southeastern suburbs of Shelby County, to Democrat Dwayne Thompson, who held on to the seat against the GOP’s Scott McCormick in November.

In the judgment of many observers, McManus had started slow in 2016, taking his victory for granted. Not so this time around. Advised by consultant Becky West, he was first among the candidates to air a TV spot and first also to sprout billboards in the district. Among the topics McManus discussed with visitors to his event were non-doctrinaire aspects of his prior service in the General Assembly, like his involvement in the legislation enabling the creation of tax-increment-financing districts (TIFs).

Another Republican candidate, former Commissioner Shafer, would hold a well-attended fund-raiser last Friday in Memphis, where her Commission district was located and where she lived until a family move to Lakeland last year. Like Chism and McManus, Shafer is unmistakably Republican in ideology, but her Commission service, both in 2018, when she served as the body’s chair, and beforehand as well, was marked by an obvious ability to work across the partisan aisle. She was the acknowledged leader of bipartisan efforts to mount the now ongoing legal effort both to curtail the ravages of opioid addiction in Shelby County and to compensate the county for damages caused by careless and unscrupulous over-prescription.

There was a bipartisan flavor, as well, to Shafer’s remarks at her Memphis event, at which she staked out positions for remedial action on both the education and health fronts. While not espousing previous Medicaid-expansion formulations as such, she made it clear that she would seek some means of remedying a circumstance whereby the state had not claimed its share of federal health-care funding, allowing it to go to other states by default.

Perhaps more than the other Republicans running, Shafer has a foothold in Tipton County, especially in the southern portion of it, a de facto bedroom suburb of Memphis. But she, like Chism and McManus, is aware of the vote-pulling power in Tipton County at large of a fourth Republican, Paul Rose of Covington. Rose, a businessman and a well-established presence in Tiption County, is a conservative who has emphasized his strong religious faith.

As of now, Rose is weaker than the others in Shelby County, but he would clearly stand to gain from anything resembling an even vote split between the other three.

Coleman, the sole Democrat running, is a business logistics specialist and evidently quite successful as such. He is an African American and a Navy veteran, severely wounded in the service of his country, and as such has a compelling backstory capable of winning him votes across party lines.

Coleman is not as hyper-active yet as the Republicans seeking the state Senate seat, but he has more time to develop his profile before testing it at the polls in March.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Candidates Vie for Vacant Norris Seat

It took a while for Mark Norris to become a federal judge. He was nominated by President Trump last year but was only recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate after numerous gridlock-imposed delays. It took a while, too, for Governor Bill Haslam to call for a special election to replace Norris in his vacated District 32 state Senate seat.

But now that things are under way, Republican candidates to fill the vacancy are wasting no time getting their campaigns under way. Former two-term Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer, who was one of the first to indicate her desire to seek the seat after Norris was nominated, made haste to get out of the gate, filing to run at the Election Commission on Monday morning. She indicated later Monday that she already has three fund-raisers scheduled for the near future.

New Democratic House Leader Karen Camper

Shafer, who represented an East Memphis district on the commission and chaired that body this past year, displayed some serious legislative skills there. Even before the District 32 opportunity opened up, she had expressed a desire to run for the legislature and at one point had her eyes on a race this fall for the District 96 state House seat won in 2016 by Democrat Dwayne Thompson in an upset of then GOP incumbent Steve McManus.

The Norris seat became a more inviting target, however, and she and her husband Carl subsequently turned their Memphis home over to their college-age daughter and moved into a new Lakeland residence, well within the District 32 limits.

In something of an irony, or at the very least an interesting coincidence, one of Shafer’s rivals for the District 32 seat is the aforementioned McManus, who forwent the option of trying to regain his House seat from Thompson (who won again over the GOP’s Scott McCormick) and was himself attracted by the prospect of the Norris vacancy.

McManus, too, is off and running, having already run a commercial for his candidacy on local TV this past weekend. In 2016, he had, in the judgment of many, demonstrated a palpable over-confidence in his race against the hard-working Thompson, and his defeat then may have amounted to something of a wake-up call for his future.

In any case, he is unlikely to be taken by surprise this time around and has significant leftover campaign cash from two years ago that will stand him in good stead for the current race.

Both Shafer and McManus are counting on support in East Shelby County, the heartland of the local Republican constituency, as was demonstrated by the weight of Republican voting in last August’s primary.

Shafer’s commission work, much of it in alliance with Terry Roland of Millington, would appear to give her a headstart with the GOP voters of North Shelby County, and she is also well acquainted with the GOP base in the southern part of Tipton County, also part of District 32.

Both Shafer and McManus have to worry about a third candidate, construction executive Paul Rose of Covington, who is well known in Tipton County and moreover has significant contacts with the Shelby County Republican establishment as well.

Rose has indicated he intends to run hard on conservative themes, stressing Christian values and his support for the 2nd Amendment, a focus that should help him in the district’s rural areas.

Yet a fourth potential GOP candidate, not yet announced, is George Chism of Collierville, who served one term on the Shelby County Commission, then gambled on a run for county trustee this year but was defeated by Democrat Regina Morrison Newman, after winning the Republican primary.

So far, one Democrat, Eric R. Coleman of Bartlett, has picked up a petition to run for the District 32 seat. Coleman, a veteran of Naval service and a Wounded Warrior, is a business logistics specialist.

• Shelby Countians are prominent in legislative leaderships positions, at least among the General Assembly’s minority Democrats. In recent elections, District 87 state Representative Karen Camper was elected as the Democrats’ minority leader in the state House, thereby achieving a dual milestone as the first African-American woman to lead a major party in the legislature.

Shelby County Democrats dominated in leadership elections for the state Senate, capturing three of the spots available for the five Democrats in that body. Raumesh Akbari, a former state representative who won election to the Senate’s District 29 seat in this year’s election, was named caucus chair for the Democrats, while Sara Kyle of District 30 was elected vice chair, and Katrina Robinson of District 33, was named party whip.

• Local Democrats also made an impact, though one they surely regarded as less desirable, with the state Election Registry, drawing fines for late financial disclosures. Incoming freshman House state Representatives London Lamar of District 91 and Jesse Chism of District 85 were fined $8,175 and $5,000 respectively, while veteran state Representative Joe Towns of District 84, a perennial collector of fines from the registry, drew a total of $20,000.

• Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who has demonstrated an innovative bent during his first few months in office, has announced a “Health and Fitness Initiative” to begin on Wednesday of this week, with a “City Silo Vegan Barbecue” meal to be served at noon in the 6th floor lobby of the Vasco Smith County Administration Building to members and staffers of the county commission, members of the Healthy Shelby board, and the media.

The initiative will continue in January with what is billed as a “mini” five-minute bootcamp for the commissioners and media members, conducted by Memphis Tiger basketball star Will Coleman.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Norris Says He Now Doubts Judicial Confirmation

CREDIT: JB

 Even as various local Republicans hanker after the stat JB

Norris in Nashville during a previous legislative session.

e Senate seat of current Senate majority leader Mark Norris, doubts are arising as to whether the seat, presumably due to be vacated when Norris becomes a federal judge, will actually come open.

Although Norris’ judicial nomination, made last year by President Trump, has been approved on an 11-9 party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Norris was not included in a confirmation vote by the full Senate this week that saw two other Trump nominees approved — Memphis lawyer Tommy Parker, a former assistant U.S. district attorney, for a seat on the U.S. District Court for West Tennessee and Nashville lawyer William “Chip” Campbell for a U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee position.

So Norris was back at the same old legislative stand this week as the General Assembly convened in Nashville, still functioning as majority leader, in which partisan role he told his fellow GOP Senators they should be “putting our best foot forward and telling people all the good things we’ve done.”

As for his judicial future, Norris dropped hints that he could ultimately fail of confirmation, a prospect due to his record of having espoused in Nashville hot-button conservative positions on issues like immigration, Photo ID requirements for voting, and a series of measures relating to LGBTQ rights.

Norris, who told his fellow Senators, “Y’all may be stuck with me for a while,” was quoted by the Tennessee Journal as saying he had felt “crucified for the sins of others during his Judiciary Committee hearing” and that he had doubts he could command the full component of 51 Republican votes in a final showdown vote on his confirmation.

For the record, in any case, President Trump formally re-nominated Norris this week, a parliamentary action required because the Senate had recessesd last year without voting on him.

But the Senator may not have enjoyed the fact that Trump, speaking in Nashville this week to the Tennessee Farm Federation, garbled his name by referring to him from the stump as “Mark Morris, state Senate Majority Leader.”

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Federal Judgeship Rumored for Norris

For months now state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville), majority leader of the Senate, has been suspended between a long-standing ambition to run for Governor and the possibility of an appointment to a federal judgeship. Norris deemed the latter prospect “an honor” when asked about it by the Flyer in February.

New reporting from various Tennessee media sources would indicate that the honor could be imminent. Both the Tennessean of Nashville and the Chattanooga Times-Free Press have run stories indicating that Norris has lately been the subject of the kind of FBI background check that precedes such a judicial appointment.

Two District judgeships are open, one vacated by Judge Hardy Mays, another by Judge Daniel Breen.
Appointment to one of the judgeships, besides being a career milestone in itself, would make irrelevant an existing dilemma faced by Norris in his acknowledged contemplation of a gubernatorial race.

The GOP-primary candidates already declared — former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd and Franklin businessman Bill Lee — as well as another possible entry, 4th District congresswoman Diane Black, possess sources of funding, including private wealth, that Norris would have difficulty matching. And state House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), who would draw on some of the same legislative support as Norris, is also thinking of entering the race.

Under the circumstances, there is little doubt that Norris, trained in Constitutional law and possessor of a contemplative mind beyond his demonstrated skills as a legislator and conciliator, would accept a judicial appointment.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Looking Ahead: The Electoral Picture

Nature, rather famously, abhors a vacuum. And, for better or worse, few vacuums exist, year by year, in the calendar of elections for Memphis and Shelby County.  

Leap years occupy a special space on the election calendar by reason of their being the occasion for presidential elections. In recent years, however, including the whole of the 21st century, Tennessee’s ever-increasing reliability as a red state has significantly eroded the excitement that used to go with its former status as a bellwether state, partisan-wise.

Once in a while, a fair amount of drama might attach to a Super Tuesday presidential primary in Tennessee, as it did, for example, in 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each had significant statewide campaigns going on the Democratic side. But normally there is an anti-climactic sense to those preferential primaries here, generally held in late February or March, the balance in both parties having already been tipped elsewhere — in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina.

State senator and gubernatorial candidate Mae Beavers

The same steady process of Republicanization (how’s that for a coinage?) has increasingly applied to the rest of the electoral menu — including the races in even-numbered years for governor, U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Tennessee legislature — though some suspense is often generated in primary elections.

Such is likely to be the case next year, in what is shaping up to be a hotly contested (and well-financed) GOP primary for governor — with former state Commissioner of Economic Development Randy Boyd and Nashville businessman Bill Lee, both well-heeled, already running, ultra-rightist state Senator Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet just declared, and 4th District U.S. Representative Diane Black, also wealthy, expected to jump in, along with presumed Shelby County favorite Mark Norris of Collierville, the state Senate majority leader.

Democrats, too, will likely have a primary choice, with popular ex-Nashville Mayor Karl Dean already campaigning and another party favorite, state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, seemingly sure to throw his hat in. (And hark!: Even so well-grounded a judge of the state political scene as the Tennessee Journal‘s Ed Cromer suggests this week that 2018 could be a comeback time for Democrats in the gubernatorial race.)

On the local election scene, next year’s Republican primary for Shelby County mayor is set for a showdown between Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland and County Trustee David Lenoir. On the Democratic side, former commissioner and longtime political broker Sidney Chism is one certain candidate. Others may emerge, with former commissioner and assistant University of Memphis law dean Steve Mulroy, who sought the office in 2014, being one possibility.

The identity of the latest primary challenger to 9th District Democratic congressman Steve Cohen, who has fairly easily knocked off several in a row, is uncertain, and 8th District GOP congressman David Kustoff would seem to be home free at this juncture.

Looking ahead into 2019, rumored possibilities to challenge Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland include former Democratic chair Keith Norman, pastor of First Baptist Church on Broad; Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, who ran for the office in 2015; and Terrence Patterson, president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

Meanwhile, in the current electoral “off year” of 2017, there is a special election in state House District 95 (Collierville, Germantown, Eads) for the seat vacated in February by former Representative Mark Lovell amid allegations of sexual harassment.

Though two independents, Robert Schutt and Jim Tomasik, are on the ballot, the race — to be decided next Thursday, June 15th — is considered to be between Republican nominee Kevin Vaughan, an engineer and real estate developer, and lawyer Julia Byrd Ashworth, the Democratic nominee.

The odds would seem to heavily favor Vaughan in a district that normally votes overwhelmingly Republican, but several factors at least theoretically give Ashcroft a fighting chance.

Among them: Vaughan’s involvement in a controversial local shopping-mall project; the unpredictability of turnout characteristic of all special elections (and amply demonstrated for this one by skimpy early-voting totals); and energetic under-the-radar efforts by Ashworth, who hopes to build on the success enjoyed last year by state Rep. Dwayne Thompson, a fellow Democrat who pulled off an upset win in adjacent District 96.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Closing Out the Session in Nashville

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The 2017 session of the Tennessee General Assembly, which came to an end last week, was one of the more momentous in recent years, as measured by the triumph of Governor Bill Haslam‘s “IMPROVE Act,” which levies significant gasoline and diesel price increases to begin the long overdue process of rebuilding and renovating the state’s thoroughfares.

There were fewer novelty bills and crank measures than usual, particularly in the area of social issues, though, unsurprisingly, a few measures friendly to the gun lobby found their way to passage — notably one entitled the Tennessee Hearing Protection Act, which basically removes restrictions from the sale of silencers for firearms.  

And Memphis, along with the state’s other urban centers, experienced a shot fired across the bow with the Senate’s passage, on the session’s last day, of a de-annexation measure by Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson). As originally submitted, the bill was a far milder version of the sponsor’s 2016 bill that would have given residents of areas annexed since 1998 an easy route to severance from the annexing cities. The new version requires that an approving referendum must be held, not just in the territory seeking de-annexation, but in the municipality at large. 

Another proviso, apparently shepherded into the bill by state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville), would have given cities with their own de-annexation formulas (like Memphis’ “right-sizing” plan) almost unlimited time to carry them out. But sharp questioning on the point by Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) forced a last-day amendment that compelled that such plans be carried out within a year after an enactment deadline of January 1, 2018.

The House will no doubt act on its version of the bill in the 2018 session.

• Two of the five Republicans who conducted the annual end-of-session press conference in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the Capitol in Nashville last Wednesday continue to figure in speculation about the 2018 governor’s race, and the time is growing nigh for them to make a definitive decision. The candidacy of one of the two, Norris, is a fairly sure thing. Anybody who drives a car in Shelby County has been exposed in recent weeks to Norris’ billboards looming over major thoroughfares. The billboards are also up in various other locations in West Tennessee. But Norris contended in Nashville last week that his purpose in having the signs erected had been merely to further legislation in the respective areas mentioned.

Right.

The other possible gubernatorial entry at the end-of-session press conference, House Majority Leader Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), continues to be noncommittal about a governor’s race, which would find her up against several multi-milionaires in the Republican primary. She’s between a rock and a hard place, with her speakership coming under annual challenge from members of her party’s ultra-right wing, who depict her as that most unfashionable thing for Republicans, a moderate. But it is that very identity, more accurately described as centrism, that helps give her a shot at the governorship.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

GOP’s Lee Puts His Hat In

Shelby County got a look on Tuesday at Franklin businessman Bill Lee, who formally announced his run for the 2018 governor’s race over the weekend and embarked on what he called a “95-county, 95-day RV tour” of the state.

Lee had acknowledged the likelihood of his candidacy when he appeared, along with other gubernatorial propects, at the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet in February. While in Memphis, he met with reporters and pursued a schedule that included a stop at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission and a visit with Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson, among other local meetings.

“Basically, I’m on a listening tour,” Lee said. His personal bio includes lifetime residence on a cattle farm and management of a company that deals in heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and home improvements. He says he wants to focus on growing jobs and paying attention to overdue rural needs, all while avoiding the expedient of raising taxes.

So far, only Lee and former state director of economic development Randy Boyd, among Republicans, have made official announcements, but other likely GOP gubernatorial candidates are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, state House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville, and Congresswoman Diane Black of Gallatin.

So far, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is the only declared Democratic candidate, though state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is considered a probable entry.

• This week’s Flyer editorial, (p. 10), makes reference to a press conference scheduled for Thursday at the National Civil Rights Museum on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, a nonprofit group whose efforts are coordinated with those of the Equal Justice Initiative, a national organization.

In tandem with the press conference, which relates to the project’s plans to create memorials for victims of lynching (numbering in the neighborhood of 40, according to publicist Howard Robertson), the project has announced a memorial event for one of the victims, Ell Persons, “a 49-year-old black man accused without evidence of murdering Antoinette Rappel, a 16-year-old white girl.”

That event, an “interfaith prayer ceremony,” will take place on May 21st at 3 p.m., “near the site of Summer Avenue and the Wolf River,” where the lynching, not a hanging but a burning at the stake, took place exactly 100 years earlier.

Participants will include representatives of white and black churches, the NAACP, and other individuals and institutions. The public is invited, said Robertson.

• The first of six “community forums” scheduled as part of the effort to re-establish an official Shelby County Democratic Party will take place on Saturday at noon at Black Market Strategies at 5146 Stage Road. The host for that event will be state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

A second event, at 6 p.m. on May 3rd, will be held at the Gallery at 1819 Madison, co-hosted by the Shelby County Young Democrats and the College Democrats. There will be a third forum at the Pickering Center in Germantown on Tuesday, May 9th, hosted by the Germantown Democrats, and a final forum will be held at 6 p.m. on May 15th, at Abyssinian Baptist Church, 3890 Millbranch, under the sponsorship of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

They’re Back!

As the current session of the Tennessee General Assembly heads toward its conclusion, either late this month or early in May (see cover story, “Nashville Gets Serious”), two questions of serious concern to the Memphis area are about to be revisited.

Up for reconsideration this week are the voucher bill, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Harry Brooks (R-Knoxville), and a measure enabling de-annexation, sponsored by state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson) and state Representative Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah).

The voucher measure, a variant of which has been brought up unsuccessfully by Kelsey for years, may have its best prospects for passage yet — its odds improved by the fact that it is styled as a “pilot program” restricted to the Shelby County Schools district alone.

Brian Kelsey

That fact removes some of the onus from legislators elsewhere in the state who might be deterred by the prospect of immediate blowback affecting their own districts. In much the same manner, the way was cleared in 2012 for the Norris-Todd bill, which eliminated a freeze on new special school districts in Tennessee and allowed new suburban districts in Shelby County, when Norris-Todd was successfully revised to apply only to Shelby County. 

The difference, and it could prove to be major, is that support for Norris-Todd was relatively stout in the major suburbs of Memphis, represented by several key legislators, notably state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, the bill’s chief author, while a majority of Shelby County legislators, Republican and Democratic and from Memphis and as well as its suburbs, are on record as opposing vouchers.

And the Kelsey bill prompts doubts as to its ultimate constitutionality, inasmuch as it fails to qualify as a “private” bill — i.e., one supported by a county’s chief legislative body. That would be the Shelby County Commission, which voted unanimously in February to oppose the voucher measure.

In any case, the voucher bill, which has been hanging fire on the Senate side for a month awaiting action by the House, was placed on the calendar of the House Government Operations Committee last Thursday. Action was deferred until Wednesday of this week.

The Watson-Carter bill on de-annexation is essentially the same measure that was introduced last year, gaining quick passage in the House and getting immediate traction in the Senate, until an all-out resistance on the part of Memphis city officials, the city’s allies in other Tennessee cities, and the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce managed to get it postponed in the Senate State and Local Government Committee.

That reprisal was based on the understanding that Memphis deserved the option of proposing its own formula for de-annexation — one presumably kindlier than the Watson-Carter version, which provided a fairly easy means for any area annexed by a city since 1998 to hold a referendum to gain its independence. A hastily appointed city/county task force came up with a formula for “right-sizing” the city and allowing a relatively graceful exit of such hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment as South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke.

But the right-sizing plan envisioned that implementation would be postponed until 2021, a fact unsettling to local de-annexation activists. And, instead of promptly giving the plan an up-or-down vote, the city council has opted for a more deliberated response, allowing for a series of public meetings in the potentially affected areas and envisioning possible referenda in those areas later on.

Both those facts moved Carter and Watson to schedule new action on their bill, which was first reset for last Thursday’s calendar of the Senate State and Local Government Committee and then postponed for action by the committee on Tuesday of this week.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Getting Out the Vote

The tradition of presidential-election years holds that the American electorate really doesn’t begin to pay serious attention to the candidates’ campaigns until Labor Day has come and gone. That holiday happens this weekend, and the local branches of the two major parties got a running start on things with events held last week.

The Republicans brought out some of their leading lights Tuesday night at the annual Master Meal banquet of the East Shelby Republican Club, the county’s largest. First up on the dais at the Great Hall in Germantown was David Kustoff, who recently won the GOP nomination for the 8th District congressional seat and, given the Republican propensities of that district these days, has every expectation of serving in Washington next year.

Kustoff made it clear that he hopes to do so in tandem with a President Donald J. Trump, to whose candidacy he gave unstinting verbal support. Though the brash New York billionaire has had highly publicized trouble gaining traction, even in pockets of his own Republican base, Kustoff said predictions of a Trump defeat by Hillary Clinton were the results, essentially, of myopia on the part of an unsympathetic media, and he called the roll of candidates, ranging from Ronald Reagan to current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who, he said, had won out despite negative forecasts in the press.

Kustoff’s commitment to the cause of Trump was further embodied in the opening on Wednesday night of this week of a “combined election headquarters” at 1755 Kirby Parkway, housing the “Kustoff for Congress” campaign as well as Trump’s Memphis-area efforts and the campaigns of other local GOP candidates.

Also toeing the line for a top-to-bottom Republican effort at the Master Meal were state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, and visiting state GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood, although Luttrell, who had also sought the GOP nomination in the 8th, gallantly focused most of his praise on Kustoff.

Perhaps the most telling commentary Tuesday night came from Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, who earned a Trump-like shoot-from-the-mouth reputation of his own during his rise as a political figure. Against all expectations, Roland, who has already launched a campaign to be elected county mayor in 2018, became something of a conciliator — enough so that, as he neared the formal end of his one-year term as chairman on Monday of this week, he received standing ovations from his commission colleagues at each of the legislative body’s last two public meetings. By way of suggesting that Trump’s own rough edges might smooth out during a term as president, Roland, who is West Tennessee chairman of the Republican nominee’s campaign, said of Trump, “Folks, six years ago, that was me!”

• For their part, a sizeable swath of the county’s Hillary Clinton supporters turned out last Wednesday night at a standing-room-only meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club that required the opening of a partition to combine two separate meeting rooms at Coletta’s Restaurant on Appling Road.

Among those present for the occasion were Tyler Yount of Chattanooga, a statewide organizer for the Clinton campaign, and Rickey Hobson of Somerville, the Democratic nominee in the 8th District congressional race. Although attendees of the recent Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia were there to recount their experiences at the convention, the main focus of the meeting was that of organizing a get-out-the-vote effort in Shelby County.

Although the long-troubled Shelby County Democratic Party organization is temporarily defunct after its decertification week before last by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini, and apparently won’t be reconstructed until a local party convention can be held in March, various informal Democratic groups — the Germantown Democrats, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and the county’s Young Democrats among them — seem intent on organizing a significant GOTV effort.

According to Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron, a headquarters to house a coordinated local Democratic campaign will be opened on Poplar soon.