Tag: Mary Mancini

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Politics Politics Feature

Partisanship vs. Solidarity?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Democrats to Revive

Mary Mancini of Nashville, who in late January won reelection as Tennessee Democratic Party chair at a meeting of the state party’s executive committee, has, as one of her first priorities, launched an effort to recreate the defunct Shelby County Democratic Party.

Mancini has contacted 13 local Democrats and asked them to serve as an ad hoc committee for the purpose of reforming the Shelby County party. Members of this core group will next agree amongst themselves on a date for an organizational meeting, either late this month or sometime in March.

A series of subsequent public meetings will then be scheduled to allow input from prospective new Democratic Party members, and out of those subsequent meetings a new party machinery will be formed.

When the process is completed at some point down the line, presumably in the spring or early summer, the Shelby County Democratic Party, complete with new officers to be elected during the course of those several public meetings, will be a reality again for the first time since August, when Mancini, backed by the state party committee, formally decertified the local party.

That dramatic act of decertification occurred after a lengthy period of local party dissension (“many years of dysfunction” was Mancini’s phrase) and, in particular, during the course of a pitched battle between Shelby County party members over the issue of what to do about party funds allegedly unaccounted for during the tenure of former local chairman Bryan Carson.

At issue also were several fines incurred by the Shelby County party, both during and after the flap over Carson, for incomplete and late financial disclosures to the state Election Registry.

Some of the local Democrats named by Mancini to the ad hoc committee that will attempt to recreate the Shelby County party are David Cocke, Dave Cambron, George Monger, Van Turner, Jeannie Johnson, Jolie-Grace Wareham, Corey Strong, and Deborah Reed.

The local reorganization effort occurs at a time of numerous local demonstrations of resistance to the national administration headed by Republican Donald Trump and calls for a local party organization to function as an opposition force.

• Nowhere was that spirit of resistance more evident than during a weekend “town meeting” held at East High School by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who, coincidentally, has just been named to the House Ethics Committee as one of five Democratic members by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who made the announcement on Tuesday.

Over the course of a grueling three hours on Saturday, Cohen, assisted by Memphis lawyer Brian Faughnan from the Tennessee chapter of the ACLU and Chris Coleman from the Tennessee Justice Center, responded to questions from an audience of nearly 1,000 people.

The questions, on every political subject under the sun, mostly involved attendees’ negative responses to actions taken by the Trump administration and featured numerous concerns that Democrats, even out of power, might be able to mount an effective opposition.

Typical was one woman’s plea: “We are not fighting back! We need a grass roots growth like the Tea Party. We need a Democratic tea party now!”

Despite the size of the crowd (which necessitated a substantial police security force, just in case) and abundant expressions of anger, there was little internal dissent. Faughnan offered assurances that the ACLU was on the case in resisting both the Trump travel ban nationally and pending legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly to limit free expression. Similarly, Coleman provided details of available government services and detailed strategies for defending those services against Republican efforts to abolish or truncate them.

Cohen himself was indefatigable in dealing with specific audience concerns, dealing out wisecracks and dollops of advice and assuring the attendees, mostly Democrats or party sympathizers: “We are going to win in the future!”

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Politics Politics Feature

Dems on the Rebound

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

A group of 75 to 80 people showed up at the Steamfitters Union Hall Monday night for a session which was billed in advance as a “debriefing” with state Democratic Party chairman Mary Mancini — the first of several such affairs which Mancini intends to hold all across the state of Tennessee.

As the westernmost part of the state, Shelby County was as logical a starting point for such a mission as any. There were good reasons other than the strictly geographic for Mancini to start off her tour in Memphis, however. 

One reason is that Shelby County is one of three counties — Davidson (Nashville) and Haywood (Brownsville) were the other two — carried by the party’s presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election. For the record, those three counties, plus Hardeman (Bolivar), were the only counties in 2012 that went for President Obama, the party’s standard-bearer that year. 

Shelby County — on the strength, essentially, of its large African-American vote — is something of a bedrock constant for Democratic presidential candidates, though not necessarily anymore for statewide candidates. Or, for that matter, for countywide candidates, given that Republicans have been accustomed, for the last several countywide elections, to get electoral sweeps, or near-sweeps.

A second reason is the fact that in January the state Democratic executive committee will meet in Nashville and elect a chair for the next two years, and it makes sense for Mancini, who intends to run for reelection, to touch base with Democrats in Shelby County, which is still the state’s largest county, population-wise.

This is especially the case inasmuch as wealthy businessman Bill Freeman, Mancini’s fellow Nashvillian and Tennessee’s most active donor to Democratic candidates and causes, made a conspicuous pre-election foray into Memphis in early November, during which he let it be known that he intended to run for governor in 2018. In the wake of the statewide election results, in which the Democrats lost one seat overall in the state House of Representatives and failed to gain in the state Senate, Freeman said point-blank that the party needed a new chair.

At this point, it remains to be seen whether there will be a Freeman-backed candidate for the chairmanship as such, but, given his gubernatorial ambitions and his known history as a generous source of party funds, Mancini is in no position to take Freeman lightly. That’s especially the case, since, as she acknowledged Monday night, the party had not possessed the $5 million or so this year that she estimated would have been necessary to provide full backing for all the candidates who ran in Tennessee under the party label. 

And a third reason why Memphis was a logical starting place for Mancini’s debriefing tour is the embarrassing one that there is at the moment no formal Shelby County Democratic Party, as such, the party organization here having been decertified by Mancini herself back in August, in the aftermath of a lengthy dispute between herself and an SCDP majority over the issue of whether and how to settle an ongoing financial scandal in the local party.

Jackson Baker

Allison Berger at Mancini debriefing

The local party had also, as Mancini pointed out at the time, endured “many years of dysfunction,” involving internecine warfare of various kinds, and there were any number of local party members who were more than ready to throw in the towel. 

In any case, there is a clear and present need for local Democrats to have an umbrella organization serving the entirety of Shelby County, and Monday night’s turnout was surely hearty enough to offer them some encouragement — especially since a goodly portion of the attendees seemed to be new faces, and several of those were willing to offer their own thoughts about how to develop a strong Democratic base in Shelby County.

Typical of these was Sean MacInnes, who introduced himself as a Christian Brothers University employee and suggested that there were numerous potential members of the Democratic base who were not being tapped and should be invited into active participation. 

Referring to statistics showing that 45 percent of the state’s electorate had not become involved in this year’s election, MacInnes said, “Those are the voters we should be reaching out to. We should be saying, ‘Why are you not involved in the political process? What is it that the Democratic Party should be should be doing for you and [to] represent you?'” He suggested more concerted party effort to reach potential party cadres on the internet.

And there was Alison Berger, an activist in efforts to curb gun violence, who said she discovered in her outreach efforts that it was the Democratic Party which seemed most to concur with her point of view and her goals. As a result, she said, she had become involved with “Pantsuit Nation” and other party-oriented organizations and causes. “Now, I’m a staunch Democrat,” she said, recommending that the party expand by seeking out alliances with single-issue groups like her own. On one key question, when the Shelby County Democratic Party might be able to reconstitute itself, Mancini pinpointed March as the normal time for local party reorganizations and the likely date for Shelby County as well.

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Politics Politics Feature

Winds of Change Roil Shelby County’s Post-election Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race will likely open up career opportunities for fellow Republicans — including some in the Memphis area.

One possible beneficiary is lawyer John Ryder, a longtime eminence in GOP affairs. Ryder has served as local Republican chairman, as a member of the Republican National Committee from Tennessee, and, currently, as general counsel to the RNC. After the census of 2010, Ryder headed up the Republican Party’s redistricting efforts nationwide, and the map he helped create has strongly reinforced the GOP’s hold on districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A partner at the Harris Shelton law firm of Memphis, Ryder was named Republican Lawyer of the Year in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., last month. That follows a year in which he served as a Trump delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland and was a key member of that conventions’ rules committee.

Considering that Ryder, as general counsel, has essentially been the right-hand man of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, and that Priebus has just been designated by Trump to be the new president’s chief of staff, the question arises: Is Ryder a prospect to succeed Priebus as head of the RNC?

“That would be a decision reached by the president-elect,” Ryder said Monday in a telephone conversation that took place as he drove to Nashville, where he teaches a course at Vanderbilt. “We’re going to see what happens. A lot of different paths are going to open up in the next few weeks, and I’m looking to where I can best be of service to the republic.”

Ryder emphasized that “nothing’s been discussed so far.” As for the possibility of his being offered other positions in the official GOP network that stands to be expanded in the new administration, Ryder said, “I’m not particularly looking for anything. I’m not particularly expecting anything.”

Elsewhere locally, Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, who served as Trump’s West Tennessee chairman, said he expected to have a say in whatever patronage positions might be available in his bailiwick.

Meanwhile, Tennessee Democrats may be looking to change direction in the wake of yet another election in which they failed to advance. Except for one upset win, that of Democrat Dwayne Thompson over GOP state Representative Steve McManus in state House District 96 (Cordova, Germantown), Democratic candidates lost all the legislative races in which they challenged Republicans. The net result was a loss of one seat in the House, which means that there will be 25 Democrats and 74 Republicans in the House come January; the state Senate remains at its current level: five Democrats and 28 Republicans. The Republican legislative super-majority holds tight.

And that’s not a satisfactory set of affairs for Bill Freeman, the wealthy Nashville businessman who is the chief Democratic donor in Tennessee and, as he made clear in a visit to Memphis earlier this month, has ambitions of running for governor in 2018.

Likening the party’s electoral showing to a dismal season in the NFL, Freeman told the Nashville Tennessean that, “we’ve got to look at every option, including a new chair.”

The current chair, Mary Mancini of Nashville, has no intention of giving up the job, however, and has said she will run for another two-year term. 

One of Freemen’s closest associates is former state party chairman Chip Forrester, who has served several chairmanship terms in different decades, who served Freeman as campaign manager in his unsuccessful race for Nashville mayor last year, and will probably head up a Freeman gubernatorial campaign in 2018 if there is one.

But there is no indication so far that Forrester is looking at another run at the party chairmanship, and Freeman is talking up Holly McCall, who early in the year declared for House District 65, then held by bad-boy Republican incumbent Jeremy Durham, an accused sexual predator. She eventually lost her bid for the seat to Sam Whitson, the Republican who ousted Durham in the GOP primary.

In a letter to members of the state Democratic executive committee emailed on Monday, Freeman put the kernel of his argument this way: 

“First and foremost, for all the effort that we focused on in Tennessee, we gained absolutely no ground in the state senate and had a net loss of one seat in the state house. Instead of moving the needle forward, we went backward. This is unacceptable. … We should have done better and done it more robustly. I believe we need new leadership to do so.”

Of Mancini, Freeman said, “She is a fine person and clearly committed to serving our party, but we have failed to grow as we all had hoped for during these past two years. … The poor results we have seen this past Tuesday show clearly that we need a change.”

Pointedly, Freeman made reference to “a critical statewide race for the United States Senate in 2018,” and said, “We must rebuild our party to have the infrastructure in place so that our Democrat nominees for governor and U.S. senator have the party machinery in place to succeed.”

Tennessee Democrats — and Mancini — did, however, have one legislative victory in the recent election that nobody saw coming except the participants in the winning campaign. As indicated, this was the upset win of Thompson, a genial human resources administrator and longtime Democratic activist, over state Representative McManus, a GOP legislative mainstay, in District 96.

Under the circumstances of the 2016 election cycle, which not only strengthened the GOP super-majority in Tennessee but put Donald Trump into the presidency and gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House, it is astonishing that Thompson should have won election to the state House from a suburban Shelby County district. It is doubly astonishing that he unseated an incumbent Republican to do so.

Not only was Thompson the only Democrat in Tennessee to unseat a Republican, he believes himself to be the only Democrat in the South to have done so.

Thompson’s victory over McManus, who had been serving as chairman of the state House banking and insurance committee, was by the total of 351 votes out of almost 28,000 cast, and that ultra-thin margin can be attributed to old-fashioned work ethic on the winner’s side and what has to be reckoned as complacency and over-confidence on the loser’s.         

McManus’ campaign war-chest totaled  $155,754.59 as of the third-quarter financial-disclosure deadline, dwarfing Thompson’s $5,088.20. Thompson later received an infusion of financial aid from the Tennessee Democratic Party: $1,500 in a direct outlay on top of a $13,100 in-kind contribution in the form of a “polling survey.”

In October, Thompson’s total expenditures of $13,817 were almost equal to McManus’, and the Democratic challenger targeted his campaign money well, spending some of it on some modest internet advertising that pointed out, among other things, the fact that he had a military record.

McManus’ confidence may also have stemmed from the fact that he had easily dispatched Thompson in their first match-up, in 2014, with 62 percent of the vote to Thompson’s 38 percent.

Thompson was determined to prove that District 96 was a swing district, composed of a working-class/middle-class mix that was susceptible to a Democratic appeal. He boasts that he and his campaign team knocked on a total of 12,000 doors in the course of the campaign, focusing on issues ranging from Cordova’s traffic problems to skepticism about charter schools and the need for reviving Governor Bill Haslam‘s dormant Insure Tennessee program for Medicaid expansion, which, he emphasized to voters, had been blocked in McManus’ committee in the special legislative session of 2015.

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Opinion Viewpoint

How the Two-Party System Went Off the Rails in Shelby County

On Saturday morning, a line of local Republican Party members stationed themselves on the northwest corner of the intersection of Poplar and Kirby Parkway, waving Trump/Pence signs and those of local GOP candidates. When passing motorists honked or shouted encouragement to them, they reciprocated with cheers of their own.

Most of the sign-bearers were recognizable as activist members of the Shelby County Republican Party, and, as one of them commented to a bystander, “We’re the only political party in Shelby County!” This was a reference to the fact that the demonstrators’ counterpart, the Shelby County Democratic Party, had been dissolved in August — technically, “decertified” — by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini, presumably with the approval or acquiescence of the party’s state committee.

Mary Mancini

Mancini’s action had come after months of members of the official Shelby County Democratic party squabbling over what to do about the matter of funds unaccounted for during the tenure of a former local chairman, Bryan Carson, who had resigned under pressure the previous year. Some wanted to prosecute, others wanted to settle, and, when Mancini attempted to mandate a settlement from Nashville, a majority of the local party members rebelled against both her and newly elected Shelby County party chair Michael Pope, who had independently signed off on a settlement.

Mancini’s decertification action would follow in short order, but it would be unfair to regard it as solely a response to the Bryan Carson affair. As Mancini had noted in an earlier warning statement, the Shelby County Democratic Party had undergone “many years of dysfunction.”

The SCDP’s disorder had many origins: the ferment arising from demographic shifts in the party’s base; a loss of funding as deep-pocketed donors either passed away or turned toward independence or Republicanism; a running dispute over whether the party should adopt an open-door or closed-door policy toward newcomers with mixed or uncertain political credentials; the disabling residue of past scandals like the Tennessee Waltz; and — ironically, under the  circumstances — a reduction in party influence and morale stemming from the weakening of Democratic strength in the state at large.

Finally, the local party was riven by too many ego trips and pedantic arguments over procedure.

So much for the SCDP as such. It should be said, though, that in the 2016 election year, various other groups did their best to sustain the burden of political activism — among them, the Germantown Democratic Club, the Young Democrats, and the Democratic Women of Shelby County; civic organizations and politically oriented churches in the inner city; Democratic-leaning environmentalists and pro-choice advocates.

Meanwhile, the Shelby County Republican Party endured — and could boast at its several regional club meetings and various annual banquets an impressive roll call of elected public officials. But, as Saturday’s line-up at Poplar and Kirby indicated, its center of gravity had moved eastward over the years, reflecting suburban sprawl and white flight. Like the national version of the GOP, the local party had goals of broadening its ethnic and social base and had made some gains in that regard among African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, though these were essentially modest and incremental.

And, while the Trump phenomenon of 2016 may have redirected some alienated members of the white working and middle classes toward the GOP — again, as in the nation at large — the signals of xenophobia, misogyny, and personal erraticism emanating at regular intervals from the party’s presidential nominee seem clearly to have put off an indeterminate number of the professional classes and soccer moms who have made up so much of the Republican ecosystem in recent years.

The GOP rank and file would seem to be maintaining their loyalty, and the statewide Republican ascendancy is in no danger of immediate overthrow, though new rivalries in its infrastructure and scandals of its own — the Jeremy Durham affair in the General Assembly being a case in point — bode for possible difficulty in the future, especially if, at a time when lifestyle issues seem as dominant as traditional economic ones,  millennials in the state’s major cities, left-leaning in the main, begin to assert their strength more actively.

The bottom line: Isolated evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, neither major party has the coherence of yore. Both have gone off the rails to some degree, and the 2016 election could determine which one gets back on track.

Senior editor Jackson Baker is the Flyer‘s political columnist.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby Democrats Make Do on GOTV

CREDIT: JB

Both local political parties held semi-official TV viewing parties for Monday night’s first presidential debate between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The GOP group convened at Tony’s Trophy Room in Collierville, and the Democrats met at the Trolley Stop Market in the Edge district.

The Democrats have been acting  under the handicap of having no official local party organization, inasmuch as the long-troubled Shelby County Democratic Party was formally decertified recently by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville. But they seem to be compensating for that fact reasonably well, operating under the auspices of other ad hoc party groups in mounting a get-out-the-vote operation for the November 8th election.

Two events boosting Clinton’s presidential campaign were held in the run-up to the debate. On Saturday, there was a rally in conjunction with the opening of Hillary-for-President headquarters on Poplar. Ninth District congressman Steve Cohen was the keynote speaker for the affair, and he dutifully paid tribute to both candidate Clinton and President Obama, while roasting Republican contender Trump, whom he saw, among other things, as being in a working relationship with Russia, “a foreign nation that is one of our most powerful enemies, or the antithesis of what America is about.”

Cohen was a speaker also at another pro-Clinton event on Sunday night. This was organized by state Representative Raumesh Akbari (D-District 91) and billed as an “African-American Rally for Hillary Clinton.” 

Held at Christ Missionary Baptist Church on South Parkway, the event drew a decent-sized crowd and was addressed by a number of local notables, including — besides Cohen and Akbari — state Representatives Joe Towns, Larry Miller, and Johnnie Turner; state Democratic Party secretary Gale Jones Carson; Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey; city council members Martavius Jones and Janis Fullilove; Pastor J. Lawrence Turner of the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church; and Young Democrat president Alvin Crook. Moderating the event was TaJuan Stout Mitchell.

JB

Commissioner Walter Bailey was one of several speakers at Sunday night rally.

In addition to party-oriented GOTV appeals, the affair was notable for the extent to which the speakers drew connections between the pending outcome of the current presidential campaign and safeguarding the legacy of the civil rights movement. “It is imperative that we vote, not just for our future, but to honor our past,” said Rev. Turner while chronicling African-American heroes from Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer to President Obama. 

“Just as many of us rose before dawn in 2008 to make history by electing the first African-American president, we, too, must rise in 2016 to make sure that his legacy lives on,” Turner said. He scoffed at Trump’s attempts at moralistic criticism of the Clintons. “He himself had five children by three different women. If he was African-American, they wouldn’t even sell him a ticket to let him tour the White House!”

Fullilove recalled teaching at Southwest Community College in 2008 and requiring her students to go vote or risk losing a letter grade on the semester. She also contended that in 1968, when she was an 18-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School and participated in a march after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, she was shot at by a Memphis police officer, with the bullet passing through the knotted pony-tail of her hairdo. [See also “Janis Fullilove: Shot at and Downed by a Memphis Policeman in 1968?”

In his remarks, Cohen repeated some of his prior criticisms of Trump as self-serving rather than public-spirited, and, in warning of future consequences if Trump should be elected, the Congressman spent considerable time on the issue of the current inheritance tax, which, he said, Republicans call the “death tax” and seek to eliminate, though it affects only a tiny portion of the electorate, whose assets run well into the millions.

• The Shelby County Commission, whose members in recent months have been involved in an on-again, off-again power struggle with the administration of County Mayor Mark Luttrell, have returned to that theme with a passion.

In heated discussions during last week’s meeting of the commission’s general government committee and this Monday’s regular public meeting, various commissioners alternately tangled with and bargained with county CAO Harvey Kennedy regarding two proposed ordinances that would essentially increase commission control over the county mayor’s hiring and firing authority.

One ordinance would establish time limits on the administration’s ability to employ interim employees; the other would in effect give the commission veto power over the administration’s ability to discharge any member of the county legal staff. Both are works in progress and are discussed in this week’s Flyer Viewpoint (p. 13) by Commissioner Van Turner, a co-author of the ordinances.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Politics Wrap Up

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At press time on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) was scheduled to make one more effort, via a unanimous-consent request on the floor of the Senate, to get a vote on the confirmation of Ed Stanton III of Memphis as U.S. District Judge. 

Stanton, now serving as U.S. Attorney for Tennessee’s Western District, was nominated by President Obama in May 2015 to succeed Judge Samuel H. “Hardy” Mays.

Sponsored by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis, a Democrat, and heartily endorsed by Tennessee’s two Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, Stanton was expected to be a shoo-in for Senate confirmation long ago, but the same partisan gridlock that has prevented Senate action on Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland has held up action on Stanton and other judicial nominees.

• The two major political parties have both now established local headquarters for the stretch drive of the presidential race. 

The Republicans went first, opening up a combination HQ for 8th District congressional nominee David Kustoff and the coordinated GOP campaign at 1755 Kirby Parkway on August 31st. The Democrats will open theirs, at 2600 Poplar, with an open house this Saturday. 

At the GOP headquarters opening, Kustoff spoke first, then Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, as West Tennessee chairman for Donald Trump. Next up was Lee Mills, interim Shelby GOP chair (he replaced Mary Wagner, who had been nominated for a judgeship). He began recognizing Republican gentry in the room.

When Mills got to David Lenoir, the Shelby trustee who’s certain to oppose Roland for county mayor in 2018, he fumbled with Lenoir’s job title, then somewhat apologetically said, “David, I always want to call you tax collector.” Roland then shouted out delightedly, “I do, too!”

• Given the overwhelmingly Republican nature of voting in the 8th District in recent years, Kustoff’s chances of prevailing are better than good, but for the record, Rickey Hopson of Somerville is the Democratic nominee. Hopson is making the rounds, having spoken at last month’s meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club, one of several local Democratic clubs taking up the slack for the Shelby County Democratic Party, decertified by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini several weeks ago.

Another Democratic underdog challenging the odds is Dwayne Thompson, the party’s candidate for the state House District 96 seat (Cordova, Germantown) now held by the GOP’s Steve McManus. A fund-raiser is scheduled for Thompson next Wednesday, September 28th, at Coletta’s Restaurant on Highway 64.

Memphis lawyer John Ryder, who currently serves as RNC general counsel and who supervised both parties’ rules changes and the RNC’s redistricting strategy after the census of 2010, has been named Republican Lawyer of the Year by the Republican National Lawyers Association and will be honored at a Washington banquet of the RNLA at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington on Tuesday, September 27th. “Special guests” will include Senator Corker and RNC chairman Reince Priebus.

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Politics Politics Feature

Getting Out the Vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Two Political Milestones in Shelby County

So it’s come to this: There is, as pointed out this week by state Young Democrat president London Lamar, only one “chartered Democratic organization in this county,” and it isn’t the Shelby County Democratic Party, a body which was officially “decertified” last Friday by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini. It is, in fact, the Shelby County Young Democrats, led by Lamar’s colleague Alvin Crook.

Surprisingly, given the fact that the SCDP was a hotbed of internal dispute, there was very little remorse at its passing. It would seem that Mancini’s action was widely regarded by all sides as something of a mercy killing.

Meanwhile, Lamar and Crook promise that the Shelby County YDs will  pursue “initiatives” and, in effect, act in the stead of the now defunct “state SCDP,” pending its reconstitution.

That reconstitution will take some doing, in that the party organization, as such, has been so locked into pointless disputation for some time as to have been of little consequence in influencing political results in Shelby County — at least to any positive end. 

In elections for local countywide office, only two Democrats — Assessor Cheyenne Johnson and General Sessions Clerk Ed Stanton Jr. — have been able to gain office and be re-elected in recent years. To rescue an often-abused phrase, their cases are the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule. Both Johnson and Stanton are county-government veterans with demonstrable records of competence and with support across partisan lines. Their success at the polls would seem to clearly debunk the claim made by losing Democratic nominees in every county election in this century that the defeats of party candidates must be due to some infamy or illegality perpetrated by the county’s Republican Party or by the admittedly error-prone Election Commission, with its current preponderance of three Republican members to two Democratic ones.

For whatever reason, in a county which, by the usual demographic and economic measures, should possess an overwhelming majority prone to voting Democratic, Republicans rule the roost instead. It is high time that local Democrats cease looking for the blame elsewhere and begin a long overdue reexamination of their own premises.

Under the circumstances, the plucky resolve of the county’s Young Democrats is a welcome first step.

Ann Morris

Speaking of pluck, the huge turnout this week at the visitation and funeral rites for Ann Ward Norton Morris, across various kinds of lines, political and otherwise, was in large part a testament to that quality in her life — as well as to the virtues of courage and perseverance, which Morris continued to demonstrate, even after a severely disabling stroke suffered in 1997 deprived her of most of the faculties which the rest of us take for granted. Remarkable also was the heroic care-giving service rendered unstintingly over that nearly 20-year period by her husband, former Sheriff and County Mayor Bill Morris, who regards that service, and not any office he gained, as the summit of his own life’s work. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

RIP for the Shelby County Democratic Party

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For what it’s worth — and that is a very open question — the Shelby County Democratic Party has ceased to exist, having been formally decertified last Friday by state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini of Nashville. 

Mancini’s letter of decertification, dispatched to the latest person to chair the SCDP, Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant Michael Pope, cited as the basis for her action “Article III Section 2(f) and Article VII Section 1(a)(3) of the Tennessee Democratic Party Bylaws,” which, she said, made it “the responsibility of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee to establish ‘the procedures and rules for organizing and functioning of County Democratic Executive Committees and maintaining close relationships with such committees’ and to develop and monitor a minimum set of requirements that must be observed by a state sanctioned certified County Democratic Party.”

That description left unaddressed two important components of the matter: 1) whether and to what extent the state committee took part in her decision; and 2) specific reasons for her action.

Those are arguably related issues, in that one of the known factors in forcing Mancini’s hand, and likely the precipitating one, has been the Shelby County party’s months-long impasse over what to do about the case of former local party chair Bryan Carson, who resigned last year after an audit turned up evidence of unexplained shortages in the party treasury.

Ever since, through the brief tenure of one successor to Carson as chair, Randa Spears, who also resigned, pleading a need to give full attention to her administrative job at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and into the election of Pope as her successor, the local party organization has been riven into two factions. 

One faction was willing to accept a compromise proposal, letting Carson effect partial repayment of the unaccounted-for funds at the level of $6,000, through monthly installment payments of $100. The other, contending that a second audit showed Carson’s liability to be at $25,000 or higher, sought prosecution of some sort and prevailed in a vote of the committee at its June meeting.

Nothing came of that vote, however. Meanwhile Mancini, expressing displeasure that the imbroglio was getting in the way of the party’s ability to focus on electing the party’s candidates this year, prevailed upon Pope to execute an agreement with Carson on behalf of the $6,000 compromise.

That led to a vote at the SCDP committee’s July meeting at which a tie vote failed to ratify the agreement, and to a vote at the committee’s August meeting, two weeks ago, renouncing Carson’s bona fides as a Democrat.

Carson continues to be a member of the state Democratic executive committee, however, a fact that his critics, and Mancini’s as well, find questionable under the circumstances.

In any case, Mancini could with some justice cite as additional reasons for her decertification what she termed (in something of an understatement) the SCDP’s “many years of dysfunction,” typified by nonstop personal feuds, many of them involving self-appointed party gadfly Del Gill, and the fact that, in both Carson’s tenure and Spears’, the SCDP failed to meet deadlines for financial disclosures to the state Election Registry, thereby incurring fines rivaling in size the amounts alleged to have gone missing under Carson.

In the meantime, Alvin Crook, president of the Shelby County Young Democrats, and London Lamar, president of the state YD organization, held a press conference on Monday, at which the YD officers promised, in Lamar’s words, to continue to “represent the views of the Democratic Party,” as the only remaining “chartered Democratic organization in this county.”