Tennessee leaders continue to push legislation they say would protect kids online, but civil rights groups say promotes censorship.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti led a group of 31 attorneys general from red and blue states earlier this week urging Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). The bill is sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee).
The law would require some mandatory safety protections for minors on social media sites such as TikTok and Facebook. These would be the strongest settings available up front, said Skrmetti, “rather than burying these features behind opt-in screens.”
The KOSA would also take away what Blackburn called “manipulative design features and algorithmic recommendations that keep children endlessly scrolling.” It would also give parents new tools “to identify harmful behaviors and improved capabilities to report dangerous content,” Blackburn said in a statement.
In the letter to Congress this week, Skrmetti was joined by AGs from conservative states such as Alabama and Mississippi but also such progressive states as New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
“As the chief legal officers of our states, we’ve seen firsthand how social media companies prioritize profits over our kids’ safety,” Skrmetti said in a statement. “KOSA provides additional tools to protect children’s mental health from the harmful effects of social media.”
Despite bipartisan support, KOSA has drawn criticism from civil rights groups such as the ACLU, which argues the bill could infringe on First Amendment rights. Critics contend that provisions requiring platforms to prevent harm could lead to censorship of legitimate and educational content, particularly around sensitive topics such as sexual health and mental wellness. The group heavily criticized the bill when the Senate passed it in July.
“KOSA compounds nationwide attacks on young peoples’ right to learn and access information,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “As state legislatures and school boards across the country impose book bans and classroom censorship laws, the last thing students and parents need is another act of government censorship deciding which educational resources are appropriate for their families.”
The ACLU said that the list of design features outlined in the bill are defined so broadly that platforms would likely have to censor any content that was found objectionable by the government. That content could include anything from sexual health resources to information about gender identity, or how to get help for an eating disorder.
Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old student, also voiced concerns about the legislation’s potential to harm rather than protect youth. “It’s called the Kids Online Safety Act, but they have to consider kids’ voices, and some of us don’t think it will make us safer,” Verma said in a statement. “We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available. We need lawmakers to listen to young people when making decisions that affect us.”
The AGs’ letter says social media platforms target minors, know their products are addictive, but only care about the bottom line. “Many social media platforms target minors, resulting in a national youth mental health catastrophe,” reads the letter. “These platforms make their products addictive to minor users, and then profit from selling minor user data to advertisers.
“These platforms fail to disclose the addicting nature of their products, nor the harms associated with increased social media use. Instead, minor users receive endless tailored and toxic content. Further, increasing evidence suggests these platforms are aware of the negative mental health effects social media burdens its underage users with, but choose to continue these practices.”
The 2024 election season had its share of both suspense and drama.
That was certainly true of the quadrennial national election for president (arguably the most momentous one since the Civil War), which went down to the wire and frazzled millions of nerve endings before a winner could be discerned.
As all prognostications had it in advance, the presidential picture seemed headed for a resolution later than election night itself. Such opaqueness as lingered in the vote totals abruptly dissolved by the morning’s light, however. Shockingly, Donald J . Trump was back. With a vengeance.
At the center of the suspense had been the three so-called “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was presumed that a victory for Democrat Kamala Harris in all three of these habitually Democratic states would give her the presidency, but just barely. A victory for former GOP president Trump in any of them could drastically derail that prognosis. In the event, he appears to have won them all, as he did in 2016.
Kamala Harris (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)Donald J. Trump (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Nor was drama absent from the local side of the ballot. There is little prospect of the local results being challenged, as is always possible with the presidential numbers, but their effect may linger and, in some cases, simmer.
This is especially true of the series of referenda that Memphis voters were asked to pass judgment on. As of late Tuesday evening, election commission totals had all the referenda winning handily.
The most significant ones — the outcome of which was never much doubted — had set city against state and enraged the guardians of statehouse authority well in advance of the individual items receiving a single vote.
In brief, the offending referenda items of Ordinance 5908, asked city residents to approve (1) restoration of permits for the right to carry firearms, (2) a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the city, and (3) a “red flag” proviso empowering the local judiciary to confiscate the weapons of demonstrably risky individuals.
All of the items are “trigger laws,” to be activated only when and if state law should permit them.
Even so, the Republican Speaker of the state House of Representatives, Cameron Sexton, had made bold to threaten the city of Memphis with loss of state-shared revenues unless the offending referendum package — unanimously approved by the city council — was withdrawn from the ballot.
That was enough to make the Shelby County Election Commission blanch, but the council itself was not cowed and, led by Chairman JB Smiley Jr., sued to have the measures restored. Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson obliged.
As did Memphis voters, in their turn. All three questions of Referendum 5908 passed by gigantic majorities of 100,00 votes or more.
Other referenda passed on Tuesday would: strike down the city’s existing ban of runoffs in at-large elections (Referendum 5884), impose a two-year residency requirement for Memphis mayoral candidates (Referendum 5913), and authorize the city council to determine the salaries of the mayor, council members, the city chief administrative officer, and division directors (Referendum 5893).
All in all, it was a good night for the referenda, as well as for the council itself. And, arguably, for the citizens of Memphis.
Perhaps predictably, the form sheet also held for elective offices, with incumbents of both parties doing very well indeed.
Marsha Blackburn (Photo: United States Senate, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn held off a challenge statewide from Knoxville state Representative Gloria Johnson, her Democratic opponent, though in heavily Democratic Shelby County, Johnson was leading, 156,303 to 104,633.
Another Republican incumbent, 8th District Congressman David Kustoff led Democratic challenger Sarah Freeman by a 2 to 1 margin in Shelby County’s portion of the vote, 66,398 votes to 30,255.
Steve Cohen (Photo: U.S. House of Representatives, Public domain | Wikimedia Commons)
Meanwhile, 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen was overwhelming his perennial Republican opponent Charlotte Bergman even more dramatically with vote totals in the county of 162,299 to 47,634.
On the legislative scene, the much-ballyhooed District 97 state House race saw Republican incumbent John Gillespie edging out his Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth, 15,859 to 14,600.
John Gillespie (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
And, in another state House race where Democrats nursed upset hopes, in District 83, incumbent Republican Mark White held off Democrat Noah Nordstrom, 19,283 to 13,713.
Mark White (Photo: Courtesy tn.gov)
Most attention — locally, nationally, and even worldwide — remained on the showdown between Trump and Harris.
As late as the last weekend before this week’s final vote, the presidential race was being referred to as a dead heat, a virtual tie, a sense of things apparently corroborated by a string of polls in the so-called “battleground” states — the Rust Belt trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin; the Sun Belt states of Nevada and Arizona; and the competitive Southern states of Georgia and North Carolina.
A freakish outlier poll in the presumably red state of Iowa showing Harris with a last-minute edge over Trump in Iowa, though, was an indicator of possible unexpected volatility.
That the presidential race had even gotten so measurably close was a reflection of a political standoff in which halves of the nation had seemingly cleaved against each other in a variety of different and sometimes paradoxical ways.
This was not the same old story of Democrats versus Republicans. Both of those coalitions had undergone profound changes over the years. No longer was the “working class” (ditto, the “middle class”) to be grouped in a single body. Upward mobility had revised people’s notions of class, then stalled in such a way as to confuse them further. Generational change was rampant, and ethnicity was no longer a dependable metric for determining political attitude. Disagreement over social matters like gender identity and abortion policy had sundered the old divides.
The center could not hold. It was not only, a la Yeats, that the falcon could not hear the falconer. Social media and impatient ways had created multitudinous new sources professing to be the latter.
The nation’s two-party political system had atrophied to the point that, seemingly, neither was able to generate a dependable bench of A-list players. Donald J. Trump, the Republicans’ once and would-be future president, had come from the worlds of seat-of-the-pants commerce and TV showbiz to reign over a hodgepodge of time-servers, has-beens, and sycophants in his party, and Democratic incumbent president Joe Biden, a survivor of his party’s dwindling corps of traditionalists, headed up the Democrats.
That’s how things were at the end of the early-year primaries, and there were no few voices wondering aloud: Was that all there was, this uninspiring rematch of moldy oldies?
To give Biden his due, he had done his best to wreak from overriding political inertia some promising legislation, especially in the rebuilding of the country’s decaying infrastructure. To give Trump his due, he had recovered from a stupefying series of misdeeds, including, arguably, an aborted coup against the political system, to regain his political stature.
When the two met on a late-June debate stage on the eve of the two party conventions, the 81-year-old Biden, who had fared well in the earlier presentation of his State of the Union address, crumbled so visibly and profoundly that to many, probably most, observers, the presidential race seemed over then and there, especially when the 78-year-old Trump would go on to defiantly survive a serious assassination attempt two days before the opening of the GOP political convention in July.
But desperation in the Democrats’ ranks had meanwhile generated a determination to replace the compromised Biden at the head of the party ticket. Enough pressure developed that the incumbent finally, if reluctantly, had to yield, and realistically, given the lateness of the hour, the most feasible outcome proved to be that of elevating Vice President Kamala Harris, the erstwhile California senator and former prosecutor, in Biden’s stead at the Democratic convention in August.
Once the matchup between Trump and Harris got established, it quickly settled into an even-steven situation, a kind of free-floating draw in which the two sides always stayed within reach of each other.
From the Democratic point of view, this would seem something of a miracle. Nikki Haley had based her runner-up GOP presidential race on the conceit that a female could win the presidency, either herself or, with the aging Biden still a candidate, his vice president, Harris, still regarded at that point as a nonentity. It was Haley’s way of mocking the opposition.
Indeed, even in Democratic ranks, Harris was long seen to be something of a liability, a drag on the ticket. That this was due to the way she had been used — or misused — by the incumbent president (in the ill-defined role of “border czar,” for example) became evident only when she was freed to become her own person.
On the stump in her own right, she proved to be a natural, with unsuspected reserves of charisma and an appeal that was fortified by her selection of the pleasantly homey governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, as her running mate. (Trump’s choice as potential veep, the edgy Ohio Senator JD Vance, was clearly head-smart and acceptable to Trump’s base among the MAGA faithful but kept bumping up against his own innate arrogance.)
The change in tone among the Democrats was almost instantly evident. It came to be symbolized in the concept of “joy” and in Harris’ slogan, “a new way forward.”
While coming across as a certifiable New Thing, she was also able, credibly, to posit herself as the defender of constitutional values against the alleged schemes by the usurper Trump to override them in the interests of personal power.
“We are the promise of America,” she would say, uniting her own purpose with those of her audience members.
Against this, against Harris, the ebullient rock-star presence on stage, Trump seemed buffaloed. In his fateful June debate duel with Biden, he had seemed vital, a hurricane of restless energy hurling scorn and unchecked charges at his befuddled opponent. Now it became more and more obvious that he, too, was a near octogenarian, with no new promise of his own to offer.
The shift in positions was fully demonstrated, post-conventions, in the follow-up debate with Harris when, matador-like, she had baited the bullish Trump with mockery of his rallies (which, in fact, were becoming more and more disorganized and less and less focused and empty of real content). His red-eyed response, that Haitian immigrants were eating the dogs and cats of Middle Americans in Ohio, was perfectly framed for the television audience by the split image of Harris’ gleeful wonderment at this out-of-nowhere non sequitur.
It was not long afterward that Harris’ progress was slowed somewhat, as much by a petulant media’s insistence that she submit to interviews as a sign of her seriousness as anything else. Dutifully, she did, and emerged with appropriate talking points — a middle-class tax cut, subsidies for small business and new housing starts, and legislation to suppress price-gouging. These would become highlights of the “to-do” list which she would juxtapose against what she characterized as the brooding Trump’s ever-multiplying enemies list.
It became a cliche of press coverage that the former president’s seething ire at an imagined “enemy from within” was displacing what his would-be handlers wanted him to discuss — a supposedly intractable inflation and the pell-mell overcoming of the nation’s borders by a horde of illegal invaders. Both menaces, as it happened, were in something of an abatement — the former by a plethora of relatively rosy economic indices, the latter by fairly resolute, if delayed, executive actions taken by the lame-duck president in the summer and fall.
What Trump’s audiences were getting on the stump instead was the overflow of his ever more naked id, a witches’ brew of resentment and machismo — insults against his adversaries, threats to use the machinery of government against them, and improvisations on themes ranging from Arnold Palmer’s junk size to nostalgia for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Partly, this was due to what Harris characterized as her opponent’s presumed “exhaustion,” but partly, too, it was Trump’s instinctive reliance on what had always been the source of his appeal, an exposure of pure personality, a willingness, for better or for worse, to let it all hang out, to be The Show, a cathartic vehicle for release of his followers’ emotions.
It was this penchant, after all, that had allowed him to sweep past a stage full of practical Republican politicians during the primary season of 2016 and, later that year, to surprise the calculating and overconfident Hillary Clinton at the polls.
GOP eminences — even those who, like Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, despised Trump, or, who, like senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, had been vilified by him, learned that they were no match for his carnival-like presence and resolved to use him for their own purposes, only in the end to be used by him instead for his.
It remained a fact that, for all his defects, real and imagined, Trump was able to sustain a plausible hope of regaining the office he had lost to Biden in the pandemic-inflected campaign year of 2020.
And, beyond the presidential race itself, Republicans still nursed hopes of holding onto their slim majority in the House of Representatives as well as of capturing the Senate outright. At stake were such matters as healthcare, climate change, and reproductive policy domestically, as well as of meeting the economic challenge of China and in the conduct of foreign policy in the Middle East and vis-a-vis Russia in its challenge to NATO in Europe.
Democrats Johnson, Huseth at High Point (Photos: Jackson Baker)
As was surely to be expected, the next-to-last weekend of the climactic 2024 election campaign was filled with feverish activity of various kinds — with early voting into its second week and candidates trying to get as many of their partisans as possible to the polls.
A case in point was a pair of events involving Gloria Johnson, the Knoxville Democrat who is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Johnson, the state representative who gained national attention last year as a member of the “Tennessee Three” proponents of gun-safety legislation, has raised some $7 million for her bid — almost all of it from in-state sources, she contended proudly.
While that is no match for the incumbent’s $17 million or so, it has been enough to buy Johnson a series of concise and well-produced TV spots pinpointing Blackburn’s alleged shortcomings. And it even gives her some of the kind of influence that politicians call coattails.
Opponents Nordstrom and White at Belly Acres
Johnson was in Shelby County on Saturday, sharing time with two other Democrats, District 83 state House candidate Noah Nordstrom (like Johnson a public schoolteacher) and District 97 House candidate Jesse Huseth.
The first event was a joint rally with Nordstrom and state Democratic chair Hendrell Remus just outside the perimeter of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist early-voting station. Next, Johnson met up with Huseth at High Point Grocery for some joint canvassing efforts, after which Huseth, who opposes GOP incumbent John Gillespie, set out on some door-to-door calls on residents in that western part of his district.
The most unusual pre-election event on Saturday didn’t involve Johnson, nor was it, in the strictest sense, a partisan event at all. It was a meet-and-greet at the Belly Acres restaurant in East Memphis involving both Nordstrom and his GOP adversary, incumbent Republican state Representative Mark White.
Not a debate between the two, mind you. A joint meet-and-greet, at which both candidates circulated among the members of a sizeable crowd, spending conversational time with the attendees and with each other.
The event was the brainchild of one Philip D. Hicks, impresario of something called the Independent Foundation for Political Effectiveness. Hicks says he hopes the Nordstrom-White encounter, his organization’s maiden effort, can serve as a precedent for other such joint candidate efforts to come — presumably in future election seasons.
Inasmuch as political competition is, by its nature, an adversarial process, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine such events becoming commonplace, but, all things considered, this first one went amazingly well.
It wasn’t the same kind of thing at all, but there were elements of such collegiality between potential election opponents at an earlier event, a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Appling Road during the previous week.
That event included Memphis City Council Chair JB Smiley as its featured speaker, and Smiley, who is reliably reported to be thinking of a race for Shelby County mayor in 2026, spent a fair amount of time comparing notes on public matters (e.g., MLGW, the future of the erstwhile Sheraton Hotel) with attendee J.W. Gibson, a businessman who has basically already declared for that office.
The Flyer recently highlighted several referenda for Memphis voters on the November 5th election ballot. This week, which will see the onset of early voting (October 16th through October 31st), we look at partisan contests in several key races.
Legislative Races
Noah Nordstrom, tall, stately, with long blonde hair he ties into a bun, says people tell him he looks like Trevor Lawrence, the ex-Clemson quarterback who now pilots the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL. “Either that or Thor,” Nordstrom says. “I’ll take either one.”
Images aside, Nordstrom is paradoxically mild-mannered and not macho at all, indeed somewhat diffident, as befits his day job as a public school teacher.
Noah Nordstrom (Photo: Jackson Baker)
What else he hopes to take is the title of state representative for Tennessee’s District 83, an enclave that straddles the southeastern rim of Shelby County and the western edge of Germantown. Challenger Nordstrom, a Democrat, has his work cut out for him. The seat has been held since 2010 by Republican Mark White, a fixture in the state GOP’s legislative supermajority in Nashville and the chair of the House Education Committee.
Education, as it happens, is also the central concern of Nordstrom, who teaches Spanish at Overton High School and is sounding the alarm about what he calls the “radical” ideas of the current legislative Republican supermajority. The specific moment that galvanized him into running came, he says, “when I realized that my state representative, Mark White, is pushing the voucher bill.”
That bill, a main priority of GOP Governor Bill Lee, is described by Nordstrom as “a proposal that would defund our public schools across the entire state of Tennessee.” A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but the premise of the proposed legislation is that substantial amounts of taxpayer money would be siphoned out of the general fund to provide tuition at private schools, which, arguably, are in direct competition with the long-established public school system.
“I live just over on the Memphis side [where] Memphis has set up against it completely,” said Nordstrom. Also, as he notes, “The leaders here in Germantown, the entire school board, and the mayor stood up and said, you know, we don’t want this. … Even the Republican-leaning communities don’t want it. And so I decided to throw my name in.”
Indeed, opposition to school vouchers is universal in Shelby County school circles, not only in the urbanized Memphis-Shelby County Schools, but in each of the six county municipalities — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — that won the right to establish their own public school districts during the school merger controversy of the county’s previous decade.
Opposition to vouchers is one of the key wedge issues, along with demands for gun safety, also linked to public schools, that Democrats — presumed to be a minority in District 83, as they certainly are in the state at large — hope can support a political comeback for the party.
“We can do better for our kids, and so that’s been one of the main issues,” Nordstrom said at the Future901-sponsored meeting, held in a Germantown household, where he recently spoke his views. “Obviously one of the other major ones is gun violence. It’s overwhelming to realize that you might not be able to save some of these kids. We see it every day, wondering whether they’re going to make it home safe.”
Gloria Johnson (Photo: Jackson Baker)
Unforgotten is the “good trouble” of spring 2023, when mass protests were held at the state Capitol following a lethal episode of gun violence at a Nashville school. In the aftermath, three Democratic House members, including Justin J. Pearson of Memphis and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, a candidate this year for the U.S. Senate, were held to accounts by the Republican majority for their passionate support of protesters’ demands for gun safety legislation.
Pearson was expelled by the vengeful majority, along with Justin Jones of Nashville, the third member of the “Tennessee Three.” Johnson survived expulsion by a single vote. All three were celebrated nationally for their stands, and Pearson and Jones were hastily returned to office in special elections.
Realistically, Democrats don’t envision any immediate regaining of the hegemony the party held for much of Tennessee’s history, but they do hope to achieve at some point a competitive status with the Republicans, who established their dominance in the statewide election years of 2010 and 2014 and have never looked back.
At the Future901 meeting in Germantown, there was a fair amount of partisan bear-baiting of Republicans, to be sure, but there were also expressions of concern regarding the increasing takeover of the GOP by MAGA ideology and a corresponding erosion, as attendees saw it, of commonsense shared values among Republican office-holders.
John Gillespie (Photo: Jackson Baker)
White, Nordstrom’s opponent, and state Representative John Gillespie, the incumbent Republican in House District 97, were specifically cited as case studies of GOP moderates shedding their scruples, or at least trimming them at the edges, while going along to get along with the MAGA-minded majority.
As Nordstrom noted, “Now the gun lobby is so strong they say, ‘Don’t vote our way and we’ll find a candidate for the primary, and we’ll pick you out.’ And that’s part of the reason why Mark White has gotten so much more radical. You know, at one point he opposed getting rid of the permitting system for concealed carry. And last year, he voted to arm teachers, and that’s because he knows they” — members supported by the gun lobby — “are comfortable.”
Democratic activist Diane Cambron, an attendee, concurred: “That’s one of the reasons why [District 96 Democratic state Representative] Dwayne Thompson is not running for reelection. He didn’t run for reelection this time because, according to him, when he first got elected in 2016 there were some moderate Republicans with whom he could work, but every year, those moderate Republicans drop out, they don’t run, and they’re replaced by younger, more radical Republicans, and that is what our Republican legislature is becoming. Even though they have a majority, they’re getting more and more radical all the time. There are very few moderate Republicans left.”
It should be said that White, the criticism notwithstanding, is widely regarded as being able to work across party lines. And, as the old joke has it, White can cry all the way to the bank. As is the case with most incumbents, especially well-heeled establishment figures, his cash receipts dwarf those of opponent Nordstrom, a first-time candidate.
His Education Committee chairmanship is consistent with his background in that, before attaining some success with a party-favor business, he was an elementary school teacher and a principal. He co-founded something called the Global Children’s Educational Foundation, which provided financial assistance and educational opportunities to impoverished children in Panama. And he won the Tennessee Community Organizations’ Legislator of the Year award in 2016 and the Tennessee CASA Association’s Legislator of the Year award in 2012.
He is no slouch, no easy target.
All of which is to say that Noah Nordstrom and the Democrats will have their hands full in District 83. They remain hopeful, though, that they can build on the incremental success they began in 2016 — ironically the year of Donald J. Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton nationally. The victory in 2016 of the aforementioned Dwayne Thompson over incumbent Republican Steve McManus in District 96 was just as much of an upset locally. As then constituted, District 96 also straddled city and county lines and the accustomed bailiwicks of either party.
Jesse Huseth (Photo: Jackson Baker)
So does House District 97, where the case can be made that Democratic challenger Jesse Huseth might even be regarded as a favorite over incumbent Republican John Gillespie. The two opponents have raised approximately the same amount of money, each with cash on hand of just under $100,000, and, as currently configured, the district lines encompass a territory where Democrat Jason Martin, a distant second to incumbent GOP Governor Bill Lee virtually everywhere statewide, actually out-polled Lee. And the same can be said of Joe Biden in his presidential race against Trump.
The district’s current configuration remains one of the mysteries of Election Year 2024, since Gillespie, as a member of the GOP supermajority, had the opportunity to call the shots during the redistricting that followed census year 2020. And he decided to discard two Republican-dominated county precincts in return for two politically ambivalent ones further west in Memphis proper, presumably lowering his chances for reelection.
There has yet emerged no satisfactory explanation for Gillespie’s decision. One theory is that, as someone not regarded as slavishly partisan, he fretted over the prospect of being challenged in this year’s primary by a MAGA type in the formerly configured district. Another is that he was determined to prove that he could still win the more problematic district as a presumed Republican moderate — one who conspicuously deviated from GOP orthodoxy on the issue of guns, among other issues. Yet a third theory is that Gillespie simply wishes to represent the concerns of Memphis’ Poplar Corridor business community.
In any case, the District 97 race is regarded statewide as something of a coin-flip race — a test case of sorts regarding future partisan tendencies and the Democrats’ best chance of altering the current statistical ratio in the House, which stands at 75 Republicans and 24 Democrats.
The race could hinge on the two candidates’ contrasting positions on crime, which reflect an ongoing showdown between state and city. Huseth is a strong supporter of three referenda on the Memphis ballot that seek citizen support for “trigger” laws that would allow possible local reinstitution of gun permit requirements, the banning of assault rifle sales, and the imposition of “red flag” laws allowing judges to confiscate firearms from likely offenders. The Democratic candidate is an adherent as well of District Attorney General Steve Mulroy’s call for a new Memphis crime lab that would facilitate detection and prosecution of violent crime.
Gillespie has allied himself with state Senator Brent Taylor, a declared foe of Mulroy, in aggressive sponsorship of legislation strengthening anti-crime penalties and counteracting local options on matters of sentencing. Gillespie authored a bill striking down the Memphis City Council’s ban of “preemptive” traffic stops based on minor infractions.
Partisan races exist in several other legislative districts, where the incumbents are heavily favored. The contests are: Democratic incumbent Larry Miller vs. Republican Larry Hunter in House District 88; Democratic incumbent G.A. Hardaway vs. Republican Renarda Renee Clariett in District 93; Democratic incumbent Antonio Parkinson vs. the GOP’s Cecil Hale in District 98; and Republican incumbent Tom Leatherwood vs. Democrat William P. Mouzon in District 99.
U.S. Senate
Democrats have not come out ahead in a statewide race in Tennessee since then-Governor Phil Bredesen fairly handily won reelection in 2006. By the time Bredesen was next on the ballot, in a race for the U.S. Senate in 2018, he was defeated with equal ease by arch-conservative Republican state Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Nothing more clearly indicates the sea change in Tennessee partisan politics which occurred in the meantime, with the rapid shift of Tennessee from the status of a bellwether state to one in which Republican domination of state affairs had become a given.
Blackburn is up for reelection this year, and Democratic hopes are vested in the aforementioned Gloria Johnson, who won prominence as a member of the “Tennessee Three,” the Democratic House members who drew the ire of the Republican leadership for their assertive support of gun safety protesters in 2023.
Both Blackburn and Johnson have well-deserved reputations for intense partisanship, with Blackburn being a mainline supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, of strong action against illegal immigration, and of MAGA causes in general, and Johnson being equally vigorous in espousal of Democratic positions on such matters as reproductive freedom and climate change. She has clashed repeatedly with Republicans in the legislature and, after being gerrymandered out of one state House seat by the GOP supermajority, returned to the General Assembly as the representative of another.
Efforts by Democrats and others to arrange debates between the two candidates have so far foundered on a confident and financially well-endowed Blackburn’s reluctance to entertain them, but various polls have suggested that underdog Johnson, beneficiary of a recent fundraiser at the Annesdale Mansion in Memphis, may be within striking distance.
Congressional Races
Incumbent Democrat Steve Cohen is heavily favored against Charlotte Bergmann, a perennial Republican opponent of his in the Memphis-based 9th District, while Republican incumbent David Kustoff in the 8th District has a scrappy challenger in Sarah Freeman of Germantown, who hopes to revive a dormant Democratic base in the rural enclaves of that West Tennessee district.
Sarah Freeman (Photo: Jackson Baker)
The effect of the 2024 presidential race on any and all of these local races is somewhat harder than usual to estimate. Normally a heavy Democratic turnout in Memphis precincts for the presidential race inflates the totals of Democrats running in local districts. And that effect could be augmented by a larger turnout than usual among women voters who favor the Democratic position on behalf of abortion rights and who might be influenced by the fact of a woman, Kamala Harris, heading the Democratic ticket. But local Republican candidates, too, can expect a boost, from whatever turnout the Trump/MAGA base can command.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is pledging to block Senate business, mainly items dealing with White House initiatives. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
Blaming President Joe Biden for the 34-count felony conviction of former President Donald Trump, Sen. Marsha Blackburn is pledging to block Senate business, mainly items dealing with White House initiatives.
Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, joined seven other senators in signing a letter accusing the Biden White House of making a “mockery of the rule of law” and altering the nation’s politics in “un-American ways” by orchestrating the judicial proceeding.
Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony counts of breaking New York business laws in connection with a $130,000 “hush money” payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.“As a Senate Republican conference, we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart,” the letter says. It is also signed by Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida.
The senators promised not to allow increases in non-security funding or a spending bill that funds “partisan lawfare.” They also said they would block political and judicial appointments as well as attempts to expedite Democratic bills unrelated to the American people’s safety.
Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, who is running against Blackburn this year, said Monday the pledge is “beneath the dignity” of a U.S. senator.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
“No words …,” said Susan Adler Thorp in the All News Is Local Facebook group, referring to a huge headline typo in The Commercial Appeal.
“Hardaway: Small-ball lineup helped Tugers end skid,” it read, referring to the University of Memphis men’s basketball team.
Yep. Tugers.
Neverending Elvis
Posted at graceland.com
Graceland has a fun section on its blog that collects “Elvis sightings” in media or IRL. The image above, for example, was found in a first-grade English workbook.
Marsha, Marsha
Posted to X by Sen. Marsha Blackburn
U.S. Supreme Court justices weighed whether or not former President Donald Trump could appear on Colorado’s ballot last week. During the session, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn stood outside in bright pink, maybe hoping to catch Trump’s eye as he flipped channels.
“The Left’s [sic] nearly decade-long witch hunt to take down Trump must end,” she tweeted.
Can Knoxville state Senator Gloria Johnson, she of last spring’s “Tennessee Three” and a heroine of sorts among Democrats, actually unseat the GOP’s Marsha Blackburn in the 2024 U.S. Senate race?
There is an illustrative case — that of James Mackler, a Nashville lawyer and former Iraq war helicopter pilot, who made bold to put himself forth as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2018 for the seat then held by the retiring moderate Republican Bob Corker.
Meanwhile, out of the Republican MAGA ranks, seeking the same seat, came the aforementioned arch-conservative Marsha Blackburn, then a congresswoman. The then still existent state Democratic establishment, two years into the Trump age, didn’t trust a novice Democrat like Mackler, no matter how promising, to take on Blackburn, so talked Tennessee’s recent Governor Phil Bredesen, an old-fashioned conservative Democrat, out of retirement to become their candidate.
Mackler dutifully withdrew, biding his time.
History records that both Bredesen and Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, the last two name Democrats to carry the party banner into battle, were both routed in 2018, Bredesen by Blackburn (who would end up a cover girl on The New York Times Magazine) and Dean by Bill Lee.
Mackler was still on the scene and considered it his time to take on the next Senate race in 2020, where he would be opposed by the GOP’s Bill Hagerty, a former ambassador and state economic development commissioner. What was left of the Democratic establishment, in something of its last go-round, thought Mackler was right and timely, also, and got behind him.
Alas! Mackler and the party establishment withheld their considerable fundraising receipts from a five-way Democratic primary, hoarding them for the forthcoming race against Hagerty, and never even got to the general election. Mackler was upset in the primary by one Marquita Bradshaw, an environmentalist from Memphis who had no ballyhoo whatsoever and had raised virtually no money.
What she did have was an emergent standing among Memphis Blacks as a progressive candidate (though a nonmember of the now-expiring party establishment).
What she had was enough to win 35.5 percent of the primary vote, outpolling poor Mackler, who had 23.8 percent. Between the primary and the general, Bradshaw upped her campaign kitty from $22,300 to $1.3 million (a major-party nomination is still worth something), but lost to Hagerty, once again polling 35 percent.
Jump to last week, when the Beacon Center, a conservative think tank, released the results of two Emerson College polls — one measuring incumbent Blackburn running for reelection against Gloria Johnson, another matching her against Bradshaw, regarding the Memphian, once again as a prospective Senate candidate.
Beacon had Blackburn running ahead of Johnson by 49 percent to 29 percent, with the balance undecided. Against Bradshaw, Blackburn’s margin was smaller, 48 percent to 36 percent.
What Beacon did not do was match the two Democrats against each other, testing what might happen in a primary encounter.
But, given the example of Mackler, the already actively campaigning Johnson might wonder, as do we. Might she suffer an unexpected defeat to Bradshaw, a la Mackler?
Word from the Democratic establishment (yes, it still exists, though barely) is that Johnson has digested the lesson of Mackler and will pour a generous amount of the substantial funds she has already raised for a primary contest.
That will take pace in August, and we shall see what we shall see.
Taking a moment to cut through the negativity and recognizing a great weekend in Memphis.
• [University of Memphis] football winning to a national ESPN audience
• Great weather for Cooper-Young Festival
• Brewfest
• Win by 901FC
(Bonus latest mayoral poll finally doesn’t have Willie in the lead.)
Porn blocked
Credit: Pornhub
Some Memphis-area Pornhub users reported their browsers were blocked from the site over the weekend. The site cut access to the entire state after Republican lawmakers required new, strict age verification protocols for pornography sites. The block seems to have bled over state lines in places.
Marsha, Marsha?
Posted to YouTube by Forbes Breaking News
Credit where it’s due. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) pushed hard on Federal Bureau of Prisons director Colette Peters last week to fix problems (like a leaky roof) at the federal prison in Memphis.
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, “Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss as special counsel because he knows Weiss will protect Hunter.”
Turns out she was one of 34 Republican senators that specifically requested Weiss for the job in September. Enough X users pointed out this dissonance that the platform marked her tweet with that special box that reads, “Readers added context they thought people might want to know.”
Corporate Memphis
Posted to YouTube by Cat Graffam
A new-ish design illustration trend, called “Corporate Memphis,” has emerged, and you’ve probably already seen it in Kroger TV ads.
YouTuber Cat Graffam explained the style to be “flat, digital illustrations with characters that have exaggerated proportions.” Graffam breaks the whole thing down in a video posted last week.
Well Done
Posted to X by Bartlett Police
Bartlett Police Department and Bartlett Fire Department rescued a missing child from a storm drain this past weekend and posted the drone footage to X. “Everyone loves a happy ending,” reads the post. We do, too.
Memphis Light, Gas, & Water just can’t get a break.
On Friday morning, crews had restored power to 131,000 of the 141,000 customers affected by Tuesday’s storm. Then, a Friday-morning storm cut power to an additional 16,000 customers. And the utility is eyeing a thunderstorm that could develop this afternoon.
Here’s how MLGW is handling the situation:
MLGW has a full complement of MLGW and contract crews working today through the weekend. There are 98 repair crews, 89 tree crews, 23 troubleshooters, and 34 damage assessment teams identifying damage and repairing the system. They are supported by hundreds of logistics, administrative, safety and system operations personnel.
Full restoration is expected Sunday night to customers who can take power.
Downtown Mobility Center
(Credit: Downtown Memphis Commission)
The Downtown Mobility Center is set to open for vehicle traffic on August 3rd.
The $42-million project at Beale Street and Main Street will have a 960-stall parking garage, an area for ride share pickup and drop-off, and space for bicycle storage, showers, lockers, and electric scooter stalls.
Help is (finally) on the way
Anna Traverse Fogle
Remember the ice storm? Not that one. The one from February…2022.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency just announced it will give the state of Tennessee $12.1 million for costs incurred by the Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) to deal with the situation. The state is expected to reimburse the utility for repairs to transmission lines and distribution facilities and the replacement of 119 wooden utility poles and 89 transformers.
After the storm, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen said he wrote to Governor Bill Lee asking that he formally request FEMA assistance. President Joe Biden granted a Major Disaster Declaration for the storm on March 11.
Help is (finally) on the way
(Credit: MLGW via Facebook)
Remember the wind storm? Not that one. The one from June 25th.
After the storm, Shellby County Mayor Lee Harris declared a local state of emergency. Harris said Friday he expects the Biden Administration to declare it a federal disaster. If so, (and if the pace of the ice storm funding is an indication) the county should expect to get reimbursed around Christmas next year.
To request a pick up, call the Shelby County Roads, Bridges, and Engineering Department at 901-222-7705.
Marsha Beefin’ With Biden
Senator Marsha Blackburn is, like, super mad at Joe Biden.
First off, she was super glad the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his decision to forgive a bunch of student loans. But then she got super mad that Biden sidestepped the decision with some executive maneuver to wipe out about $31 billion in debt to more than 800,000 people.
On that move, Blackburn tweeted:
Joe Biden is pushing back on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling by forgiving $39 billion of student loan debt.
This administration has no respect for our institutions.
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) July 14, 2023
Then, the White House tweeted back:
16,970 of Senator Blackburn’s constituents are eligible for automatic loan relief under this Administration’s fixes to the Income-Driven Repayment plan.https://t.co/UGIzHQf2bS
Blackburn hit back with the old socialism haymaker and then finished the thing with a sick pivot burn:
Tennesseans do not support socialism and do not want to pay for their neighbors debt.
What they do support is Biden coming clean about how he allegedly used his power as Vice President to help his family make millions. https://t.co/FeP3ve9nQk
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) July 21, 2023
Here’s one response to her tweet:
Classic far right politician response:
"If you support this program, 17,000 of your constituents will have a better life and be able to make ends meet"
"I refuse to support this! What we should talk about is the conspiracies we've been unable to prove for 3 years!"
The National Association for Gun Rights (with the unfortunate and probably-should-change-that acronym NAGR) called on Tennessee Republicans Thursday to oppose any gun control in a special session called by Lee next month.
Colorado-based NAGR claims “Lee and Republican lawmakers are working secretly behind the scenes to attempt to cut a deal on a gun control bill with the establishment gun lobby.” Which makes total sense if you think about it.
State Capitol (Credit: Tennessee State Government)
“Gun owners want to know, what are they hiding?” NAGR president Dudley Brown said in a statement. “We have seen this song and dance before. Republican politicians get so caught up with ‘doing something’ for political points, they completely sell out the Second Amendment and gun owners who voted for them.”
“We expect Tennessee Republicans to stand firm in their defense of the Second Amendment and vote to adjourn the special session upon its start in August. Gun owners will be well informed of any members that vote against gun rights during Lee’s special session on gun control,” concluded Brown.
NAGR claims it is the nation’s largest “no compromise” pro-gun organization, with 4.5 million members nationwide.
