Tag: Mark White

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Naming Names

Photo: Frederick Tappan with Cary Vaughn

District Attorney-elect Steve Mulroy took the opportunity last week to name the members of his newly created transition team, to be chaired by outgoing County Commissioner and local NAACP head Van Turner.

Turner, who recently acknowledged that he would be a candidate for mayor in next year’s Memphis city election, promised “a thorough, top-to-bottom review of the operations, priorities, and staffing of the District Attorney’s Office.”

Other members of the transition team are: District 29 state Senator Raumesh Akbari (D); District 83 state Representative Mark White (R); Demetria Frank, associate dean for diversity and inclusion at the University of Memphis Law School; Richard Hall, chief of police, city of Germantown; Muriel Malone, executive director of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission and former Shelby County assistant DA; Kevin Rardin, retired member of the Public Defender’s Office and former Shelby County assistant DA; Mike Carpenter, director of marketing and development for My Cup of Tea; Yonée Gibson and Josh Spickler of Just City; and attorneys Jake Brown, Kamilah Turner, Brice Timmons, and Mike Working.

Paul Young (Photo: Jackson Baker)

• Paul Young, the director of the Downtown Memphis Commission, gave members of the Kiwanis Club a comprehensive review of current and future projects for Downtown development on Wednesday of last week. One matter of public curiosity did not go unspoken to in the subsequent Q&A. Would he, someone asked, be a candidate for Memphis mayor next year as has been rumored?

Young’s reply: “Obviously, we’ve had a lot of conversations. And you know, it’s not time for any type of announcements or anything like that. I’m gonna continue to do the job at DMC to the best of my ability, regardless of when the season comes for the mayor’s race, but we definitely have had discussions.”

• Meanwhile, the Shelby County Republican Party, having been defeated for all countywide positions in the recent August 4th election, is doing its best to retain optimism. Looking ahead to the next go-round, the federal-state general election of November 8th, the local GOP held a fundraiser Friday at the South Memphis headquarters of the Rev. Frederick Tappan, who will oppose Democratic nominee (and recently appointed incumbent) London Lamar for the District 33 state Senate seat.

Imported for the occasion was state Senator Ken Yager of Kingston, the GOP’s Senate caucus chair, who assured local Republicans, for what it was worth, that “the Republican leadership are 100 percent committed to the election of Frederick Tappan.”

Tappan, pastor of Eureka TrueVine Baptist Church and founder of L.I.F.E. Changing Ministries, sounded his own note of commitment: “We can do this if we come together. We need one mind, have one mission, to become one Memphis. We don’t lean to the left, we don’t lean to the right.”

GOP chair Cary Vaughn, who would probably admit leaning somewhat to the right, said, “We took it on the chin a few weeks ago. But that was not the finish line. That was the starting line for November 8th, we’ve got a chance to redeem ourselves.” Vaughn mentioned several of the party’s legislative candidates, including state Senator Kevin Vaughan, state representatives Mark White and John Gillespie, and state Senate candidate Brent Taylor. “We have a chance to rectify the situation. And we have an opportunity, not just to finish, but to finish well.”

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Transfer of “Three Gs” Braked, Pending Talks

Germantown High School is one of the "Three Gs" under discussion in the General Assembly and between Shelby County Schools and Germantown.

According to state Representative Mark White (R-Memphis), Education chair in the Tennessee House, the fate of the Germantown public schools known as the “Three Gs” is still unsealed, despite a maneuver last week by his Senate counterpart, Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown).

District 83 Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis).

A bill requiring the three schools — Germantown Elementary School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown High School — to shift from the authority of Shelby County Schools (SCS) to that of the Germantown School District, appears to be shelved for the current legislative sessions, thanks to a gentlemen’s agreement of sorts.

What Kelsey did last week was rescue a frustrated effort to require SCS to yield authority over to the Germantown district. As Senate Education chair, he was able to reattach a key amendment to that effect from SB 898, which had been defeated in his committee, and add it to SB 924, a bill of his own.

Newly attached to the Kelsey bill, the legislation was forwarded to the Senate calendar committee, one step away from a vote on the floor.

But meanwhile, White withdrew his House bill containing the same enabling amendment, on the theory, he says, that the SCS board has agreed to discussions with Germantown authorities over the ultimate fate of the three schools. The “Three Gs” are long-time Germantown legacy institutions that in 2013 devolved into the orbit of SCS at the conclusion of the city/county merger/demerger period.

At the time, the newly created Germantown School District could not guarantee to accommodate the schools’ large student population living outside of Germantown. The City of Germantown built a new elementary school and proclaimed Houston High School, on the elite suburb’s eastern perimeter, as the city’s official high school.

But there never ceased to be sentiment in Germantown to reclaim the buildings, all of which are within the city’s core and governmental center. There is still, however, no certainty that, if reincorporated into Germantown,  the schools would be open to current student populations comprised of an overwhelming majority of non-Germantown residents, nor will there even be a guarantee, Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo acknowledges, that the buildings would be used as public-school structures.

White said on Thursday, however, that the real point of his House bill HB 917, was to encourage conversations between SCS and Germantown on the matter, not to force a solution, and that he and Kelsey — who, according to White, has agreed to pull his enabling amendment from SB 924 — had concurred on withholding any legislative action unless there is no progress by the end of this year in talks between the disputing parties.

This arrangement is, of course, dependent on Kelsey’s following through with his pledge to withdraw his enabling amendment from SB 924 when that bill comes before the full Senate. Should he not do so, a House-Senate conference committee would be appointed to resolve differences between 924 and a companion House measure by state Rep. Scott Cepicki (R-Culleoka) to which it is now technically coupled.

State Rep. Dwayne Thompson (D-Memphis) is guardedly optimistic that the gentlemen’s agreement will go through, but he remains dubious about the prospect, soon or late, of the Three Gs passing from SCS to Germantown. “If you ask me,” he said, “that’s holding hostage some 4,000 students now enrolled in the schools for whom there is no conveniently located school that isn’t already overcrowded.”

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Wish Lists

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As expected, the Biden-Harris ticket was an easy winner in Democratic-dominated Shelby County last week; also unsurprising was the overwhelming support enjoyed by the Trump-Pence Republican ticket in Tennessee at large.

To the extent that there was any kind of suspense factor, it was in a pair of local races. Even as Democrats nationally made serious inroads on previously Republican suburban areas, the contests for House District 83 and House District 96, both on the suburban fringe, were unusually tight. Republican state Representative Mark White was able to hold off a stout challenge by Democrat Jerri Green, by a margin of 17,682 to 15,063, and the GOP’s John Gillespie had an even closer margin over Democratic candidate Gabby Salinas, 14,697 to 14,212.

Jackson Baker

House Speaker Cameron Sexton

Gillespie, who won the open seat vacated by former Representative Jim Coley, was one of two new members of the Shelby County delegation. The other was Democrat Torrey Harris, who easily won over longtime incumbent John DeBerry, forced to run this year as an independent, in House District 90.

Both Gillespie and Harris were on hand on Monday and Tuesday for the Shelby County legislative delegation’s annual legislative retreat, this year conducted virtually as a Zoom meeting.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, a first-day speaker, said he wants CLERB, the city’s independent civilian review board, to have subpoena powers of its own so that it need not go through the city council in probing accusations of police misconduct. The mayor also wants Memphis to have equity with Nashville in state funding received for mental health services. “We have many more mental health patients than Nashville, but Nashville gets more,” he said Monday.

The annual retreat, at which spokespersons for major local interests state their wish lists for the coming legislative session in Nashville, is normally held in January, just before the session begins, but got a bit of a jump-start this year.

Among the other desiderata on Monday, the first day of the two-day virtual session:

Patrice J. Robinson, chair of the Memphis City Council, asked the legislators to pass a bill banning payday lenders. She also wanted to see the decriminalization of medical marijuana and a continuation of the COVID-era expedient of allowing sales-to-go of alcoholic beverages from storefronts.

Robinson endorsed as well a bill that state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-District 31) said he would introduce increasing the local portion of the state sales tax — this as a means of recouping some of the financial loss to cities from the pending elimination of the state Hall income tax on dividends and investments.

Memphis Police Department director Michael Rallings focused on the gun problem, maintaining that increased prevalence of firearms was the main reason for a rise in certain categories of crime. “Thank goodness permitless carry was not passed,” Rallings said, musing on the last legislative session. Rallings also noted for the lawmakers that he considers Memphis to be “490 to 700 officers down” from an optimum roster number.

The headliner on day two, Tuesday, was state Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, Republican of Crossville, who promised the legislators that the General Assembly’s calendar would be flexed with the uncertainties of COVID-19 in mind so that, as one example, they would have a little “extra time for filing their bills.”

Asked about his attitude toward marijuana legislation, Sexton said he would feel more comfortable with efforts to legalize medical marijuana if the federal government removed its status as a Schedule 1 drug. Sexton said he was in favor of local jurisdictions making decisions about such issues as school openings and guns on school property. He also said, apropos the dormant Memphis megasite, “We’ve gone too far to pull back.”

During his appearance before the legislators, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris noted his concern about skeptical statements made by Governor Bill Lee and state Attorney General Herbert Slatery regarding the results of the presidential election won by President-elect Joe Biden. That was one of the few times during the two-day session that partisanship as such became a subject of discussion.

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Political Trick-or-Treating

We know it’s the fashion in this age of Photoshop to doctor photographs, but this is ridiculous. Behold what happens to a harmless, even wholesome, snapshot (below, top) of Jerri Green, Democratic candidate for state House District 83, shown with Democratic state Rep. Dwayne Thompson of District 96 at last year’s Germantown Christmas Parade,

Those cut-ups at the House Republican Caucus got ahold of the picture and transformed it, for advertising purposes, into a shot (below) of Green as a Satanic eminence of some kind, posing gleefully in a scene of fiery destruction. The most remarkable question raised by the doctored photo is this: Who is the dude in the hat who shows up as a shadow across Green’s face? And how would the purported flames behind her create a shadow in front of her?

As for the allegations in the ad’s text, Green doesn’t remember calling anybody in legitimate law enforcement a “stormtrooper” but stands by her horror at the border camps where infants were separated from their would-be immigrant parents.

Green’s opponent in the November 3rd election is GOP state Rep. Mark White.

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Kustoff Defends Postal Changes

The U.S. Postal Service cannot “continue to act like Blockbusters in a Netflix world.” So said 8th District U.S. Representative David Kustoff in a Zoom address to the Rotary Club of Memphis. The matter came up in relation to concerns about the effect of reductions of postal services on mail-in ballots.

Speaking from his local office in Ridgeway Loop, Kustoff said those reductions reflected ongoing social changes — mainly the drastic reduction in first-class mail caused by the cyber-revolution — and had begun under President Obama. “The Postal Service will have to adapt,” he said.

On another matter, Kustoff took note of the fact that there has been no congressional follow-up to the original COVID-related stimulus payments and said that the window for passing another stimulus bill had, for practical purposes, shrunk to the dimensions of the next three weeks.

Congressman David Kustoff

Members of Congress stand ready to return to Washington to vote for a solution as soon as one is agreed to by the two parties, he said, but, “once we hit October, everybody will be in their districts and involved with campaigns.”

• COVID-19 has clearly affected the way running for office has proceeded, locally. Certain races that usually involve a significant amount of public appearances or door-to-door contacts are more than usually dependent on social media, mailouts, phone banks, and — not least — polls.

Much polling is, of course, carried out by disinterested parties and seeks genuine opinion sampling. But increasingly candidates invest in polling, including “push polls” that are phrased so as to insinuate various points of views, for or against. And there are “benchmark” polls, designed to elicit public attitudes on various issues so as to guide the campaign strategy of a given candidate.

Two polls that were dropped last week indicate the range. One, arriving in people’s message boxes, is entitled “The Voter Survey,” and, despite its generalized name, is not so anodyne as all that, including as it does several leading questions that “push” in the direction of some candidates as against others.

The other poll, on Facebook, asks a wide variety of questions about various candidates and offices, and, to the degree that it deals with positions, phrases those positions more or less fairly. It, like the other poll, seems to focus ultimately on the state House District 83 race between incumbent Republican Mark White and Democratic challenger Jerri Green — indicating that the District 83 race is considered up for grabs. More on these two polls anon.

• The Shelby County Commission is scheduled to meet next in committee on September 9th, and, if all goes as County Mayor Lee Harris has indicated, they’ll finally have a budget book from the administration to pore over. Uncertainty over the final shape of the 2020-21 budget has vexed the last several meetings of the commission, and the budget book, which has been firmly promised for delivery on September 8th by Deputy Mayor Dwan Gillom, could go far toward resolving several issues or opening up new questions. Or both.

In recent meetings, the commission has been asked to lift a freeze on new hiring for several departments, both in the purview of elected officials and elsewhere. Those departments seeking relief from the freeze have pointed out that the proposed new positions would remain within fiscal limits voted on earlier. The commission has agreed to lift the freeze in one or two instances but in other cases has held judgment, pending receipt of the budget book.

Budget issues have been complicated by disagreements between the commission and the administration over an abundance of matters — ranging from the actual status and amount of funds on hand to the matter of authority over revising specific allocations. The original budget proposal submitted by Harris for the new fiscal year was rejected by the commission, which, after a lengthy series of meetings, proposed and voted on a different sort of budget altogether. In several areas, implementation of the budget has awaited the final details in the aforesaid administration budget book.

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Shelby Legislators in the Thick of It in Nashville

NASHVILLE — As the 2019 session of the Tennessee General Assembly concluded its first full week of activity last Friday, it became obvious that several Shelby County legislators are in the eye of the tiger. District 83 state Representative Mark White, a Republican, is chairman of the House Education Committee and, as such, is already riding that tiger.

During an introductory session of his committee last Wednesday, White scheduled two groups of presenters to testify before the committee. One group was a duo from SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education), the organization founded by former U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The SCORE representatives talked about the group’s efforts to collaborate with the state’s professed educational goals and were able to cite several successes in the state’s educational achievement.

The second group, composed of two representatives from the state Department of Education, got a stormier response from committee members. The subject that dominated discussion was the “debacle” (that has been the operational term) of the state’s failure so far to implement a completely workable testing apparatus for teacher and student assessment under the TNReady formula. TNReady is the state-devised system that replaced the testing system existing beforehand under Common Core, the nationwide eductional initiative whose uniform standards became controversial for a variety of reasons, some of them frankly political.

Questar, the vendor that has the contract under TNReady — one worth $150 million over a projected five-year period — suffered a number of system breakdowns last year that made reliable testing impossible under the online methods adopted and caused the legislature to pass measures late in the 2018 session that, in effect, nullified the validity of the results.

In the course of an intense questioning by Education Committee members, the Department of Education representatives acknowledged that Questar was still due to be paid $26 million of the $30 million pro-rated annual payment called for under the state’s contract with the company and, further, was eligible to make a submission under a re-bidding process undertaken by the department. Moreover, until that process is completed, Questar remains the vendor of record.

That was too much for District 90 state Representative John DeBerry of Memphis, a Democrat. “I want to know why that company wasn’t fired on the spot,” he demanded. “The fact of the matter is that that system failed our children, failed our mission, failed the state of Tennessee. … I watched our teachers, our administrators, our students, including my own grandchild, in tears.”

The fact, explained the Department of Education representatives, was that federal regulations required that a contract be in place and that the testing debacle occurred too late to arrange a replacement company. Hence the new RFP (request for proposal) process.

In any case, chairman White will have his hands full dealing with the issue, as will the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Republican Dolores Gresham of Somerville, with two Shelby Countians, Republican Brian Kelsey and Democrat Raumesh Akbari, serving as co-chairs.

And so will Penny Schwinn, the Texan appointed by Governor Bill Lee to replace the departed Candace McQueen as commissioner of education. Schwinn was deputy education commissioner of education in Texas and — ironically (or appropriately) — experienced first-hand there the job of amending a failed assessment program that paralleled Tennessee’s experience.

• State Representative Antonio Parkinson has figured importantly both in the debates about marijuana legislation of the 2018 session and (so far, indirectly) in the general outcry over House Speaker Glen Casada‘s advice to committee chairs that they have the power to prevent broadcasting committee sessions online over social media. Parkinson was prominent in live-streaming such activities last year and his actions are regarded as one of the catalysts for Casada’s advisory.

The future effect of Casada’s edict is uncertain for several reasons, including the fact that questions have been raised as to whether the policy could be applied to citizen attendees or media members.

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Shelby Countians in New Early Education Caucus

CREDIT: JB

JB

From left: Reps. DeBerry, Ragan, and White, and Senator Gresham

NASHVILLE —Three Memphis-area legislators are key members of an education-minded group that on Wednesday announced the formation of a new bipartisan, bicameral caucus focusing exclusively on early education policy — concentrating on pre-K through third grade — as a means of enhancing the state’s ongoing efforts to improve public education in Tennessee.

The three Shelby Countians are state Representatives Mark White and John DeBerry and state Senator Raumesh Akbari. A fourth co-founder, state Senator Dolores Gresham, hails from Somerville in Fayette County. Akbari and DeBerry are Democrats; the others are Republicans. White and Gresham are the chairs of the House and Senate education committees, respectively.

White and the others, joined by state Representative John Ragan (R, of Oak Ridge), Ron Gant (R-Rossville), and Dennis Powers (D-Jacksonville), unveiled their intentions at a press conference in the Cordell Hull Building.

The new caucus as yet has no specific agenda, White said, other than to gather as much information as possible on the strategies, new developments, and best practices of early education, from the best speakers and researchers available. He said the inspiration for forming the caucus came from DeBerry, a member of the House education caucus, who, in the face of studies showing that only 37 percent of Tennessee third-graders were reading at their grade level, opined, “We’ve got to go nuclear.”

The Early Education Caucus is open to all members of the House and Senate and will hold its first post-organizational meeting on Thursday of this week, following the week’s final floor sessions.

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Nonpartisan Event Stirs Partisans

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In politics, as in everything else (maybe more so in politics!), no good deed goes unpunished. When state Representative Mark White (R-Memphis) and Senator John Stephens (R-Huntington), co-chairs of the Tennessee legislature’s West Tennessee Economic Development Caucus (WTEDC), decided to schedule four nonpartisan events in the weeks prior to the November 6th election, they seem not to have anticipated negative feedback.

But they got some. Big-time.

When White aide Paul Marsh, on behalf of the two co-chairs, recently sent out a letter to a network of civic and governmental leaders announcing a series of four regional meetings of the WTEDC with the candidates for governor and U.S. senator, he conscientiously specified that all four — gubernatorial candidates Karl Dean (Democrat) and Bill Lee (Republican) would take part, sequentially. Ditto with the two candidates for Senate — Phil Bredesen (Democrat) and Marsha Blackburn (Republican).

Jackson Baker

GOP’s White and Democrat Craig Fitzhugh at WTEDC event

As planned, the schedule called for Dean on Monday of this week in Jackson; Bredesen on October 18th, also in Jackson; Lee on October 22nd in Martin; and Blackburn, back in Jackson on October 23rd. Monday’s meeting with Dean, the former mayor of Nashville, took place as scheduled at the offices of the Southwest Tennessee Economic District, which will be the site for the other Jackson meetings as well.

Members of both political parties and presumably some independents as well were on hand Monday, as, with White presiding, Dean and others discussed the status of the West Tennessee Megasite in Haywood County and other ongoing or potential development projects in the region. The group conversation was collegial, focused, and nonpartisan, a veritable object lesson in civic responsibiliity.

It remains to be seen, however, if that kind of comity holds up for the next go-round — the meeting with Bredesen. Upon receipt of Marsh’s original letter, at least two recipients — both Republicans — responded with curt and identical refusals: “No, thank you” regarding the Bredesen meeting. And it became clear that both decliners, Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald and state Representative Jim Coley, represented the tip of an iceberg. Several other Republicans found ways of conveying their displeasure, apparently seeing the planned occasion as some sort of partisan disloyalty.

Undiscouraged, White took pains to reassure his party brethren that no such treason was afoot, that the series of meetings with contenders for statewide office were part of no political agenda but were merely intended to be disinterested occasions for sharing ideas and information.

On Wednesday of last week, however, The Tennessean of Nashville carried a report of a hostile reaction to the scheduled Bredesen appearance from the famously partisan and unbashful state Representative Andy Holt (R-Dresden), a legislator famous (or infamous) for such capers as an anti-whistleblower bill that Governor Bill Haslam vetoed as unconstitutional and for dumping hog waste into fresh-water streams, an offense that earned him a fine from the EPA.

Holt vaunts his position on the rightward fringe of the Republican Party, too, and was quoted by the Tennessean as denouncing the WTEDC’s plans to meet with Bredesen.

Said Holt: “I’m a member of this Caucus, but I want it to be VERY CLEAR, that I am not, and have no intention of EVER hosting Phil Bredesen at any event with which I’m associated!” Holt wondered, “Who’s [sic] idea was this?” He called the Bredesen scheduling and the public invitation to it  “egregious political miscalculations” and threatened to resign from the caucus. 

Several of the Republicans present at Monday’s WTEDC meeting with Dean expressed dismay at Holt’s attitude. State Representative Jimmy Eldridge, currently a candidate for mayor of Jackson, was particularly vexed. “Can you believe that? We’re trying to have a meeting of minds here. This is completely nonpartisan!” And Eldridge was seconded by several others.

Count it as a healthy omen, even a sign of potential redemption for state government, that such was the prevailing reaction toward a nonpartisan event in a highly charged political year among the Democrats and Republicans gathered in Jackson, all of whom practiced the most elaborate courtesies toward each other.

• As it happens, Bredesen has been the focus of attention in numerous other ways of late. The former governor, whose innate centrism and willingness to reach out across the political aisle had previously been serving him well, took a good deal of flack last week from his fellow Democrats, who judged him to be overdoing it.

Many Democrats expressed displeasure that Bredesen had reacted to taunts from GOP opponent Blackburn by publicly disowning Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York during the two Senate candidates’ recent televised debate. But that reaction was nothing compared to the outrage that greeted Bredesen’s statement endorsing President Donald Trump‘s designation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court after an abbreviated FBI investigation of Kavanaugh for alleged sexual misconduct and before the final party-line vote in his favor in the Senate.

Meanwhile, whatever the reason for it, the polls, which had been showing Bredesen with a significant single-digit lead reversed course, and Blackburn began to top such samplings as were made public.

No doubt compounding the Democratic candidate’s discomfort was a series of hard-hitting TV attack ads from the Blackburn camp. Some of these were patently misleading — notably one which attempted to connect the former governor with the current opioid-addiction problem (apparently based on the fact that, among other things, his stock portfolio includes some shares of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical group). That approach is a blatant attempt to do a turn-around on the fact that Blackburn was the author of Pharma-friendly legislation that 60 Minutes identified as a major factor in inhibiting the DEA’s ability to control the proliferation of opioids.

• The campaign of Democrat Gabby Salinas for the District 31 state Senate seat is calling foul on a mailer sent out by her opponent, Republican incumbent Brian Kelsey. Headed by a picture of Kelsey and his wife, Amanda, with a family dog and replete with other domestic themes and references, the mailer states, “Brian Kelsey’s Family Has Called Shelby County Home for Seven Generations. He’s From Here. He’s One of Us.”

Salinas is a cancer survivor whose family emigrated here from Colombia during her childhood to pursue treatment for her at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. A spokesman for her campaign maintains that the “nasty” mailer, a “not-so-subtle dog whistle” is “attempting to raise the question of Gabby’s heritage and background as an immigrant and naturalized citizen.”

Kelsey’s response (via Kelsey’s campaign manager, Jackson Darr): “It’s very simple. It means that Brian lives in Shelby County. Senator Kelsey has deep roots here. … Brian participates daily in Shelby County life. That’s what it means to be one of us.”

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Break in the Weather

The political situation, locally as well as statewide, might appear to be in something of a lull, but the apparent calm could well presage something of a storm.

That would certainly seem to be the case at this week’s committee meetings on Wednesday of the Shelby County Commission, where at least two of the agenda items are sure to generate sparks.

One is a referred-back-to-committee item on funding the Shelby County District attorney general’s office to deal with car and body cameras employed by law enforcement; the other is a Shelby County Schools audit report and a discussion of SCS’ capital improvement needs. 

The request by D.A. Amy Weirich‘s office for $143,378 to pay for “additional personnel and equipment to process in-car and body-worn cameras” got a turndown two weeks ago by what amounted to a skeleton crew of commission members meeting under the rubric of the commission’s law enforcement committee.

It fared little better when presented to the full commission at last Monday’s regular public meeting. Though there were advocates to go ahead with the funding matter, there was significant opposition as well, particularly relating to the body-cam issue, which turned out to have enough jurisdictional, philosophical, and fiscal overtones to justify a 10-1 vote for another committee go-over — this one sure to be more fully attended.

The SCS matters are sure also to generate some close attention as the commission swings into the initial stages of its budget season. This is especially so, given the school district’s emergency request for an additional $40 million to stave off Draconian cuts, accompanied by some heated exchanges back and forth between the commission and the SCS administration and board.

• The 2016 legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly is formally over, but questions regarding what it did and didn’t do are still provoking serious — and, in some cases, heated — reactions.

Mary Mancini, the chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, scheduled a press conference for Tuesday of this week “to discuss the recently ended legislative session and the upcoming elections.”

According to Spencer Bowers, the TNDP communications director, actions to be discussed (which is to say, deplored) at the event, scheduled for the steps of the War Memorial Building, include the passage of a bill allowing professional counselors to reject gay and transgendered clients on the basis of “sincerely held principles” and another allowing college and university employees to carry weapons on campus, along with Governor Bill Haslam‘s refusal to veto the bills. The agenda for the Democrats’ press conference also included mention of an expanded list of Democratic candidates running in congressional races and in legislative races across the state, to challenge the Republicans’ current super-majority status in the General Assembly.

On Wednesday, three prominent Shelby County Republican members of that selfsame General Assembly will present their own takes on the legislature’s deeds, misdeeds, actions, and omissions at a noon luncheon of the National Federation of Independent Business at Regents Bank on Poplar Avenue.

The legislators are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Brian Kelsey of Germantown, and House Education Committee chair Mark White of Memphis. The trio will surely have both satisfactions and disappointments in the wake of the late session. Their complaints are likely to be in an opposite direction from those of Mancini and the Democrats.

• There is, however, one lament in which the official statements of the two parties are close to being on the same page. This is in regards to the matter of Measurement, Inc., the North Carolina company entrusted with preparing and grading testing materials for the state’s new TNReady program of student/teacher evaluations.

Days after public statements by Haslam disparaging the performance of Measurement, Inc., the Tennessee Department of Education revoked its contract with the company, which failed to generate workable materials for online testing and then failed to deliver printed testing materials as well, for any but grades 9 through 12.

In a press conference at the Raleigh legislative office, state Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), state Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris (D-Memphis), and SCS School Board member Stephanie Love slammed the unreadiness of the TNReady program. Parkinson called for a three-year extension of the current moratorium on expansion of the state’s Achievement School District and for scrapping of any official testing procedure until a satisfactory one might be developed.

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Roadblock

“It was a technical knockout, no contest. It was embarrassing,” said erstwhile Democratic primary candidate Tyson Pratcher about the first real debate Monday night between the three remaining candidates for the 9th District congressional seat — Democratic nominee Steve Cohen, Republican nominee Mark White, and independent Jake Ford.

In the judgment of Pratcher (and almost every other unbiased observer), Cohen, an experienced state legislator with a quarter-century’s worth of experience, was the “winner” of the hour-long encounter at the Central Library, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. And there was no doubt who the loser was, at least relatively speaking — first-time candidate Ford, who needed only a credible outing, on top of two prior strong performances, to be able to mount a serious challenge for the seat being vacated by his illustrious brother Harold Ford Jr.

The GOP’s White had his moments, especially at the close when he uttered a passionate call for partisans of all causes to dissolve their differences in a common effort to find solutions to basic problems — including, presumably, the educational deficiencies and high mortality rate of the district that White had been previously emphatic (and empathetic) about.

And there was no doubting White’s sincerity in expressing such home truths as “A country without borders is not a country” and “We need fathers in homes.”

But it was Cohen who best articulated specific answers, as when, in response to a question about Iraq, he deftly communicated a sense of domestic urgency: “We had shock and awe. … We destroyed their country, and now we’re spending our time rebuilding that country when our country needs rebuilding. … Memphis has places like New Orleans. They just haven’t been exposed by the awful hurricane that New Orleans suffered.”

There are two kinds of people, Cohen said. “There’s one kind, the ruling class, that sends people to war and another kind that goes to war, and the kind that sends people to war don’t seem to think about it or see and hear those people.”

The veteran state senator also made proposals for an uncompromising ethics code at the federal level and denounced both the Patriot Act and a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as doing damage to the Constitution.

There were times Monday night when Jake Ford seemed the self-assured, even eloquent candidate who, in the preceding several days, had deftly fielded questions during a radio interview with friendly host Jennings Bernard and then later had seemed both knowledgeable and compassionate at a public seminar on health care.

He had even sounded worldly-wise, as he periodically did Monday night. Answering a question about ethics reform, Ford said, “As we all know, we live in a system that operates under capitalism. People are always going to find a way to advance their agenda.”

And Ford’s opening and closing remarks were fluent enough. It’s what came in between that was problematic. Here and there he was admirably to the point — expressing support for civil unions, for example, and for a timetable for extricating American forces from Iraq.

What was most dumbfounding about his performance Monday night was not just that, on three separate occasions, he was forced to confess that he had no answer to the rather basic question being asked but that one of those questions concerned itself, in the most general possible sense, with Medicare — a subject area clearly and directly related to things discussed in last week’s health-care forum, when the candidates (excluding Cohen, who was being feted by Cybill Shepherd at a fund-raiser) had been presented the questions ahead of time.

Ford’s response: “You would almost have to know a lot about the system itself, and at this time I do not have all of the answers here.”

Though that was a non-answer to the question at hand, it seemed a possible answer to something various observers had been speculating on last week: Were Jake Ford’s smooth performances on the radio and at the health-care forum dependent on his having foreknowledge of what he was going to be asked and time to prepare an answer?

In answer to another question Monday night, Ford said, “I don’t know the solution right now. I don’t have the answer right now. I want to go to Congress to learn.” More than once, he deferred answering something, promising in apparent good faith to research an issue so as to come to grips with it later in the campaign.

Well and good, but it didn’t square well with the candidate’s answer as to why it was he chose to run as an independent rather than competing in the Democratic primary.

Ford’s statement about that was complicated and hard to parse. If he hadn’t done so, he said at one point, “I don’t think this forum would even have been held.” That was either a truism or an attempt at denying that several comprehensive forums were held during the primary season. Bottom line, one that was ironic under the circumstances: His independent candidacy presented “an opportunity to discuss the issues in an informed way.”

The best-case scenario for Ford: He will have other opportunities to do so. His father, former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., was talking up his abilities over the weekend, making a case that his second son had been widely underestimated.

Meanwhile, Jake Ford’s celebrated older brother, the congressman whose job he now seeks, Harold Ford Jr., was having a big-time week, surging ahead of Republican rival Bob Corker in a couple of mainstream polls taken on their U.S. Senate race and reportedly opening up a 46-to-39 gap in one of his own.

Tracking the congressman on Sunday, it was easy to see why. His first public appearance that day was at Centenary United Methodist Church, where he functioned as a de facto preacher, bringing a sermon on public stewardship that neatly walked the line between the secular and the divine, yet was rousing enough to draw frequent “Amen” choruses from the congregation.

Later in the day, Representative Ford presided over a well-attended, near-ecstatic rally at his headquarters, one in which he cited new polls showing his edge over Corker growing and noted that Newsweek magazine had elevated the Ford-Corker race to “number one” in the nation. The congressman invoked the spirit of Democratic solidarity, saying of Corker, “If you want somebody who votes with Bush all the time, then he’s your man!”

At one point earlier Sunday, Ford had also dropped in on an NAACP forum that was being held at Mt. Olive CME Church for candidates in various races. Brother Jake was not there, but White and Cohen were, and the latter, in answer to a question, made a point of yoking it to his support for “my candidate for the U.S. Senate, Harold Ford Jr.” Pointedly, the congressman did not respond in kind.

A question that has vexed any number of Democrats in the weeks since the August 3rd primary is this: What has prevented a joint embrace of support between Democratic nominees Cohen and Harold Ford Jr.?

Former Congressman Ford was candid about some of the reasons on Sunday. “What kind of father wouldn’t support his own son?” he said at one point. At another, he acknowledged a further reason: Memphis mayor Willie Herenton’s combination of public support for Cohen with derogatory remarks about Jake Ford and the Ford clan at large.

But, maintained the senior Ford in something of a revelation, he had, immediately after the primary, sent the victorious Cohen a message through Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, who would later join Herenton in a public endorsement ceremony for Cohen.

“I said let’s all get together and do this thing,” Ford said, evidently meaning a unity proclamation. “I gave it 36 hours, and I never heard anything back from Cohen.” The implication was that the newly nominated Cohen had not answered the feeler by touching base with him.

For the record, Cohen — who had gone so far on election night as to suggest that his defeat in the 1996 9th District race by Harold Ford Jr., “a great charismatic congressman,” might have been a good thing — denies having received any such communication.