Tag: Mary Mancini

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Settle the Carson Matter!” …

Mr. Kustoff, if you can singlehandedly end Obamacare, stop illegal immigration, and destroy radical Islamists, there’s no reason to wait until Election Day. Please, sir, put on your cape, and fix all our problems immediately. Having done so, you will no doubt win by acclamation. 

Boris

Seeing the party’s inability to audit its own books, we are left to ponder a couple of possible reasons: 1. The party is incapable of performing an audit due to an utter lack of accountability for the funds, not just from the former chairman, but everyone involved (i.e., no one submitted receipts even for legitimate expenses), or 2. The party is unwilling to perform an audit due to general penny-ante corruption, not just of the former chairman, but throughout the organization.

And the actions of the state party chairman, rather than being a harsh reprimand, seem more like the actions of someone desperate to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Jeff

It’s foxes guarding the hen house. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m not optimistic that Bryan Carson will satisfy the entire $6,000 debt.

Regarding David Kustoff’s campaign ads: I’ve noticed that they don’t display any of the arrogance, condescension, and general snarkiness that he exhibits on shows like Informed Sources. Maybe he has turned over a new leaf.

Okay. That was pretty sarcastic.

Jenna

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Shelby County Democratic Party Fracas for Dummies

CREDIT: JB

If it’s July, the Shelby County Democratic Party must be live and well and getting ready for next month’s primary voting, right? 
JB

Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Michael Pope (left) with Germantown Democratic Club president Dave Cambron at a party fundraiser on Thursday

Well, not necessarily. Not for the first time, there seem to be two local Democratic Party organizations in Shelby County, or at least two wholly disparate factions — one loyal to the current chairman, Sheriff’s Department Lt Michael Pope and to state party chair Marty Mancini; and another, possibly constituting a majority, up in arms against Pope and Mancini over the issue of a legal settlement involving former local party chairman Bryan Carson.

Carson, the son of longtime state party secretary Gale Jones Carson, was forced by the local party executive committee to resign his chairmanship in February 2015 after the Shelby County party had missed a state Election Registry filing-disclosure deadline and after an informal committee audit determined that party funds amounting to as much as $10,000 could not be accounted for, then or later. The party then proposed a settlement whereby Carson might repay the local party a lesser sum of $6,000 in installments of $100 a month. The offer was rejected in a letter by Carson’s attorney, Robert Spence, but may have been agreed to in some form later on, a matter key to the current disagreement.

[NOTE: It now appears that a letter made available to the Flyer in which Spence is seen to be explicitly rejecting a proposal may actually have been in response to a later proposal from a committee source demanding a much larger repayment amount from Bryan Carson of $26,336.00, with a $5,257.20 down payment and a monthly note of $585.24. This would be a reference to a matter referred to in the next paragraph.]

Meanwhile, the party missed another financial-disclosure deadline early this year, and, in April, Carson’s elected successor as party chair, Randa Spears, and the party vice chair, Deidre Malone, resigned their positions, pleading a need to focus more on their livelihoods. One known catalyst, however, was the still pending Carson affair, in which the two departing officers had supported the $6000 payoff. Meanwhile, an ad hoc party committee conducted a second audit, maintaining that, by means of a second, unauthorized bank account, Carson had managed to misappropriate another $15,000-plus. Adding that sum to the original raw number of $10,000 nudged the amount of unaccounted-for funds over the $25,000 mark, and a majority of the executive committee voted in early June to seek Carson’s prosecution for embezzlement.

Meanwhile, Pope, who, ironically, was elected the new chairman in the same meeting as the vote to prosecute, was in contact with state party chair Mancini, who, along with Pope and a minority faction of the local party, favored getting past the Bryan matter so as to move on to electoral matters in this election year. Late last week, Mancini, regarding the Carson affair as “already settled,” wrote a letter to Shelby County executive committee members, claiming that state party bylaws gave her “supervisory and organizational” authority over local party matters and giving the local party a de facto ultimatum of July 1 to endorse the $6,000 repayment proposal or risk losing the local party charter. (Interestingly, some local party members, willing and anxious to start again from scratch, have actually called for a voluntary surrender of the charter!)

There are numerous other complications, charges, and counter-charges, but the bottom line is that Pope has signed a statement authorizing the settlement, and Mancini has accepted it. What seems to have been a local party majority petitioned Pope for an emergency called meeting by the July 1 deadline to dispute the settlement, alleging that it had not been authorized by the committee. Citing party bylaws requiring what he said was a 15-day notice for a special called meeting, Pope rejected the idea of having one.

The committee will hold its next regular meeting on Juty 7, at which, it seems clear, the whole confusing affair will be the subject of a knock-down, drag-out. For the moment, everything is uncertain, including the legal status of the alleged settlement with Carson, conflicting claims over Mancini’s authority, and the question of who it is that actually runs — or will run — the Shelby County Democratic Party, which, as Mancini noted in her ultimatum letter of June 24, has experienced “many years of dysfunction.”

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Party Head to Local Dems: Settle the Carson Matter!

Mary Mancini

There are, as it turns out, more guaranteed circumstances than the two most often noted: death and taxes. Right up there with those two, in terms of inevitability, is the fact of discord in state and local Democratic Party ranks.

The latest instance of such is contained in a letter dispatched to members of the Shelby County Democratic executive committee from state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini. The letter deals with the long-festering case of former local party chairman Bryan Carson, who was forced to resign by the county committee in February of 2015.

The Mancini letter, in essence, mandates the terms of a resolution of the matter by the Shelby County party and provides a short deadline for doing so.

The executive committee’s action in early 2015 came after the county party had been fined by the state Election Registry for its failure to comply with financial reporting deadlines and after Carson had been unable to account for the disposition several thousand dollars in party funds. At issue also was the fact that the chairman had apparently switched bank accounts for the party funds without express authorization by the executive committee and had made several withdrawals from ATM machines without providing receipts.

The amount of the financial discrepancy has never been determined with exact accuracy, but a preliminary audit performed by committee members at the time of Carson’s resignation estimated the unaccounted-for amount to be at least $6,000. Another ad hoc investigating group on the committee has since arrived at a higher estimate for the missing funds, in the vicinity of $25,000, but there has never been absolute agreement on the committee on the validity of either sum.

Through his attorney, Robert Spence, Carson admitted no wrongdoing but offered to settle the dispute by compensating the local party for the $6,000 sum at the rate of $100 a month. There is disagreement as to whether the full committee was ever apprised of the offer, which in any case ceased to be active.

Compounding the confusion was the fact that Carson’s elected successor as chairman, Randa Spears, as well as the local party’s first vice chair, Deidre Malone, had both abruptly resigned their positions in April, each giving the press of other obligations as the reason for their departure. The Spears-led party had meanwhile missed another financial reporting deadline for this year and had been assessed a fresh $10,000 fine by the Election Registry.

At its regularly scheduled monthly meeting on Thursday, June 2, the executive committee elected a new chairman, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope, and acted on a motion by defeated chairmanship candidate Del Gill to prosecute Carson for embezzling the larger estimated sum. That motion passed, fairly handily, but there has been no formal action on the matter by the committee since.

All of that formed the background for the Mancini letter, dated Friday, June 24, to the Shelby County executive committee, care of chairman Pope.

Mancini’s letter begins with a citation of party bylaws and state codes that, she says, assign her “both a supervisory and organizational role over each of the county executive committees that operate throughout the state.” The letter follows with a cursory and none too indulgent recounting of the Shelby County’s ongoing problems (“many years of dysfunction,” as she puts it).

Mancini then comes to the nut of the matter, prescribing a settlement in accord with the dormant offer made to the party by Carson through his attorney:

“With a looming election that is shaping up to be of monumental importance for our state and our country, and for the health of your organization and executive committee, it is my responsibility to inform you that you must agree to the arrangement that Mr. Carson pay the amount of $6000 at $ 100 per month for 5 years and be released from any additional claims and that Chairman Pope must sign all the necessary paperwork to honor that agreement or you will no longer be in compliance with your charter issued by the Tennessee Democratic Party.”

Ironically, perhaps, Mancini had in recent months been sounded out by disgruntled party members wondering if voluntary surrender of the local party’s charter might be a feasible option. She had always answered no to such inquiries.

The deadline for “signing the necessary paperwork and forwarding it to Mr. Carson’s attorney is Friday, July 1, 2016,” Mancini concludes.

Some party members are questioning Mancini’s authority to mandate an or-else solution of this sort, while others are ready to acknowledge that she has the right. In any case, there is no pending meeting of the executive committee until the regularly scheduled one of Thursday, July 7 and thus no opportunity for a committee vote before Mancini’s deadline.

Chairman Pope, however, has indicated he is prepared to accept Mancini’s mandate, but his authority to do so without a committee authorization is questionable. To say the least, confusion persists.

• Dynamic duo: During his first several congressional terms after being elected in 2006, 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen cemented an alliance with venerable Detroit congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan), who then served as House Judiciary Committee chairman and regarded the Memphis liberal, a committee member, as something of a protégé and journeyed to Memphis on Cohen’s behalf.

When the Republicans captured control of the House after the election of 2010, the Conyers-Cohen tandem was not heard from with the same intensity, but it still existed. This week, after the landmark Supreme Court decision striking down the severe restrictions on abortion clinics imposed by a Texas state law, Conyers and Cohen reasserted themselves as a duo.

In a joint press release, Conyers, in his capacity as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and Cohen, as ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on the Costitutional and Civil Justice, and Cohen, hailed the Court’s decision as a reaffirmation of “the fundamental cnstitgutional right of women to make their own decisdions about their health, their bodies, their families, and their lives.”

Said the two congressmen: “The Court correctly saw the Texas law for what it was, which was an attempt to severely restrict abortion rights and not one to protect women’s health” and that the Texas law “placed such substantial obstacles to a woman’s choice to have an abortion that its provisions were an “undue burden” on women’s constitutional right to choose….”

The Conyers-Cohen press release, one of several recently released by Cohen’s office, highlighted one of the incumbent congressman’s built-in advantages in generating media. Cohen has three opponents in the 2016 Democratic primary — Shelby County Commissioner Justin Ford, Larry Crim, and M. LaTroy Williams. Republican Wayne Alberson and independent Paul Cook will be on the November ballot.

• More fallout: The Court’s decision on the invalidated Texas statute, incidentally, will almost surely have repercussions in Tennessee, where the General Assembly in recent years had enacted laws with provisions almost identical to those in the Texas law, which basically required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and imposed rigid standards on abortion clinics resembling those for hospitals performing outpatient surgery.

Laws passed by the Tennessee legislature in 2012 and 2014 had made similar specifications, which have been challenged in the U.S. District Court in Nashville.

• Promises, promises: The fact that a freshman seat In the U.S. House of Representatives — to be one of 435 — is the equivalent of landing an entry-level job in the federal government, the continuation of which is entirely contingent on the good will (or passing whims) of voters back home, is often lost sight of in the heat of campaigning. Candidates want to suggest that they can, all by themselves, shift national policy, and who can blame them?

Along this line, it will be hard for any of his competitors to beat two claims made by 8th District Republican congressional candidate David Kustoff in a TV commercial that just hit the airwaves over the weekend. The ad proclaims, of course, that Kustoff, the former U.S. Attorney for Western Tennessee, has impeccable credentials as a conservative and will, for example, oppose Obamacare, but it makes two additional claims that are unprecedented in their magnitude.

In the checklist of promises with which the commercial concludes, one learns that Kustoff will (drumroll) “end illegal immigration” and (thunder and lightning) “destroy radical Islamic terrorism.” Not to vote to do these things, mind you, but — well, just to do them.
Er…wow! •

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee Democrat and Republican Parties Both Facing Change

CREDIT: Nancy Chase

Even as the nation’s two major political parties, on the eve of their quadrennial confrontation, each struggle on a national scale with the task of redefinition, so do the same two parties in Tennessee.

In the nation at large, Democrats are still (technically) in the act of choosing between two would-be exemplars — one, Hillary Clinton, a seasoned and well-known figure touting the values of diversity and equal opportunity; the other, Bernie Sanders, a self-defined Democratic socialist focusing on the need for a “political revolution” to moderate the economic inequalities of a system rigged to benefit the wealthy.

Here and there, the differences between those two candidates (who, it should be said, have much in common) is seen clearly. In that sense, the Democrats are lucky. The Republicans have, in the course of primary races that were both numerous and confusing, found their choice ready-made — in Donald J. Trump, a wildly successful Manhattan real estate billionaire and a man whose views and attitudes toward most policy matters are, for better or for worse, vague and ever-fluctuating, clearly subordinate to the dictates of an undeniably unique personality.

The two state parties have, both within the last week, just concluded their annual banquets in Tennessee, events which are meant to define them to their respective constituencies. Paradoxically, each of the Tennessee parties veered in a rhetorical direction counter to that of the national parties they represent.

The Democrats held their annual Jackson Day Dinner in Nashville, Saturday before last, and their keynoter, the well-known consultant James Carville, made no mystery about who was likely to emerge from the ongoing Clinton-Sanders contest.

Nancy Chase

Carville at Nashville

Recounting for the party faithful at the state capital’s impressive new Music City Center a public encounter he had just had with a GOP opposite number of sorts, Karl Rove, Carville related how he teased Rove with the statement, “I believe the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party has the experience, the temperament, and the judgment to be president of the United States from Day One” (clearly a description of former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Clinton) and followed that up with a challenge: “Karl, tell us about the Republican nominee.” In Carville’s telling, anyhow, Rove could not respond in kind, but merely sputtered out the familiar attack phrases which Republicans habitually aim at candidate Clinton — FBI investigation, emails, Benghazi, etc.

The Republicans had gotten themselves “stuck” with Trump, a political anomaly, as a direct consequence of their having misled their basic constituency for a generation, Carville said, mentioning such notions as that President Obama was born in Kenya, that the planet Earth dated back only 5,000 years, that there was no such thing as global warming, that there had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that giving millionaires tax cuts would balance the budget.

“When people rise up and start believing all this nuttiness, why are you surprised? Let them believe whatever they want to. And anything Trump says, they believe it because they’ve been conditioned to believe it.”

Carville proclaimed that “our diversity is our strength.” He expressed pride that “my party nominated the first African-American candidate for president and will nominate the first woman.” He followed that with another dig at the GOP: “And no, you don’t get credit for Sarah Palin. Sorry.”

Carville’s de facto celebration of Clinton, his party’s still unchosen but likely nominee, contrasted with the Tennessee Republicans’ mum’s-the-word approach, at their annual Statesman’s Dinner at the selfsame Music City Center, this past Friday, toward Trump, a candidate whose nomination is virtually signed, sealed, and delivered already.  

Tellingly, in view of Carville’s apotheosis of Clinton, the Republicans’ choice of a keynoter was another woman, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an unmistakably conservative office-holder but one who, in her own way, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, also stands for diversity, and who, in the past year, has made headlines by a) removing the Confederate flag from its former place of honor at her state Capitol building, and b) refusing, so far, to endorse Trump.

And, though he was the elephant in that room as in the nation’s media, Trump was roundly ignored in the evening’s rhetoric. The late U.S. Senator Fred Thompson was honored with due praise, as were the two living GOP Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, as was Governor Bill Haslam and the retiring Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, and as were numerous exemplars of the party’s legislative super-majority and command of the state’s congressional delegation.

Though he surely had support here and there in the room, Trump remained at best an X factor, an unknown on the other side of whom, chronologically, were such future-tense bench hopes as Haley.

Though she did not refer to the fact, keynoter Haley was the avowed target, outside the arena, of protesters, garbed in Confederate gray and waving rebel battle flags to demonstrate their outrage at her apostasy. The Republican brass inside surely had to be pleased by this semiotic hint that — on this matter, anyhow — they were on the right side of history.

Whatever its fate in the nation at large (“We’re looking at a 162-year-old political party literally cracking up right in front of us,” Carville said), the GOP seems destined to remain the ruling force in Tennessee for some time to come, though the Democrats had scored a coup of sorts by giving one of their major honors, the Anne Dallas Dudley Political Courage Award, to a couple who had distinguished themselves by fighting hard on behalf of Insure Tennessee, a Medicaid expansion plan proposed by Republican Governor Haslam but so far rejected by his party mates in the General Assembly.

For all their different directions — the Tennessee GOP still hewing to its historic distrust of social programs and ameliorist government in general, their Democratic counterparts continuing to see themselves as tribunes of the powerless — there are points of contact in the political middle. If the GOP members of the Tennessee General Assembly should, post-presidential-election, see fit finally to humor Haslam on the health-care matter, it will be through the medium of a task force appointed by Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell, whose power moves will doubtless fill some of the vacuum left by Ramsey’s departure.

Harwell, who is rumored to have gubernatorial ambitions, may, in fact, become the face of the Tennessee Republican Party in much the way that Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini (whose GOP opposite number is Ryan Haynes, a male genotype) has become that of her party.

The Tennessee GOP boasts a fair number of women in office, although, truth is, it is miles behind the Tennessee Democratic Party in forms of diversity having to do with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Still, there is a political middle, and, with any luck at all, it may get filled up at some point in the respective reconstructions just now beginning to occur in the two major political parties. 

There are signs of changes in both, locally as well as nationally. The GOP’s dominant business-minded faction is under challenge from the very uprooted populists it has seduced away from the Democrats, while the Clinton/Sanders yin-yang will play out for years — a difficult wrangle but, in the end, a necessary one.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Tear Down the Shelby County Democratic Party and Start Over

What separates the current version of the Shelby County Democratic Party (SCDP) into camps is that we have no clue what we stand for. You have the old-guard white liberals who fought against the county-primary idea in the ’80s, and there are the people who came into power with Mayor Willie Herenton in the ’90s who want to hire their folks over the old folks.

Willie Herenton

Say you are in the middle of a countywide campaign, and you are attempting to ask a friend or neighbor to vote for a Democratic candidate for one of the county offices. You get into the spiel before you are stopped and told this: “Look, I vote Democratic in the legislative and executive races, but I have a spouse/child/sibling/parent/friend who works in that office, and if the Democrat is elected, they lose their job, and they really need it. I just can’t go there with you.”

What on earth can you say to that?

Let’s look at another major problem we have: Because of the way legislative districts are drawn, there are rarely competitive races in the general elections any more. Look at this year. Outside of District 96, where Democrat Dwayne Thompson will be challenging Republican incumbent Steve McManus, what seat has the possibility of changing hands in November? None.

The races are all in the primaries, which hurts because Democrats do not turn out in the primaries, thinking that the only races that matter are in November. Because our countywide races are in August, we start out at a disadvantage. Not only that, but our incumbent legislators, who are trying to turn out their voters but not those of their primary opponent, aren’t really much help. Frankly, they don’t turn out their folks in November any more, because they have already been reelected at that point.

So what does all this have to do with the SCDP? With no real strong figure in charge, the party’s executive committee is filled with the people who are looking to make money off the party on one side, and, on the other, the Old Guard who want to elect Democrats but are outvoted and overrun by those who obsess over procedural matters.

Because we have no power in Nashville and no power in the Shelby County administrative building (where there are a couple of Democratic commissioners willing to sell out the party at a moment’s notice) and because — as all who can read a newspaper know — we apparently cannot keep financial accounts, who in their right mind would give the SCDP one red cent?

This issue has been exacerbated in recent weeks by further negative publicity about unexplained financial shortages under a previous party administration and with the resignation of SCDP chair Randa Spears, who left due to an increased workload at her day job.

Yes, in seven of those years (1997-2003 and 2014), I sat on the executive committee, and I have to take partial responsibility for what has occurred. The fact remains that, with no money coming in or any real reason for there to be any money coming in, the local party, in a county with the largest Democratic voting bloc in the state, finds itself completely irrelevant.

This is why I respectfully request that the Tennessee Democratic Party and its very able current chair, Mary Mancini, put this body out of its (and our) misery and pull its charter. We really have to destroy the Party in order to save it. Get a group of good Democratic lawyers, along with solid Democrats, young and old, who have campaign experience, to rewrite the bylaws in order to drive out the leeches of the party and, for stability’s sake, to have the same number of Executive Committee members season after season.

And let’s give them time to do it. For heaven’s sakes, the Party nominee for president will carry Shelby and four other counties regardless if there is a SCDP structure in place. Same with the legislators, same with the Congresspeople.

Every second we wait is a second that we fail to have a real Democratic Party structure in the largest Democratic Party in the South outside Atlanta (Florida never counts), and we cannot truly hope to reestablish Democratic strength in Tennessee until this happens.

Steve Steffens is a longtime Democratic activist and proprietor of the well-read blog leftwingcracker.blogspot.com, where a lengthier version of this essay first appeared.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Break in the Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Calling to Account

All of a sudden, we’re getting into Rip Van Winkle territory. But the familiar universe doesn’t require a full 20 years, any longer, to be unrecognizable. Last year at this time, we here in Memphis knew that Nathan Bedford

Forrest was developing into a persona non grata — at least with a major part of our population. The name “Forrest Park” had already given way to the unoffending and somewhat antiseptic moniker, “Health Sciences Park.” But, a year ago, nobody was threatening to move the Confederate general’s statue or transfer his grave back to Elmwood Cemetery. Now both goals are established parts of the political agenda.

And it wasn’t long ago that we were reading articles celebrating the positive moral influence of comedian Bill Cosby on minority youth, and touting his then forthcoming revival tour as a wholesome experience for family audiences. Now, the man is in utter disgrace as an alleged serial rapist, unable to show himself in public for fear of derision — or encountering another process server.

And, hey, you local Democrats who look forward to buzzing up to Nashville for the next ceremonial Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, be aware that by the time you get there, the names are likely to have been changed to reflect society’s suddenly unforgiving attitudes. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, is lately fallen from favor, due to his status as a slave-owner. And Andrew Jackson? He’s lucky that it was Alexander Hamilton, and not himself, that was recently bumped off his spot on a currency note. Not only was Jackson a slave-owner, he was guilty of massacres of native Americans in Florida and of “ethnically cleansing” that territory for the sake of white folks wanting to move in. Democratic parties in Connecticut, Missouri, and Georgia have already purged the two names from the title spot for their annual banquets. And Tennessee state Democratic chair Mary Mancini has just sent out an email to party cadres informing them, via an official missive titled “The Legacy of Andrew Jackson,” that the Tennessean whose Hermitage mansion is still a much-visited tourist site may be about to lose his lease as a state hero.

Here’s Mancini’s clincher: “In 2015, we may very well decide to name our annual event after someone who better exemplifies who we are today. We may not. But either way, let’s not shy away from the conversation.”

Forrest, Jefferson, Jackson, and Dr. Huxtable! All gone from the icon list. Who’s next? George Washington?

The bottom line is that, in an age when social media have opened up everybody’s closets for inspection, nobody gets away with anything. Not even historical figures. We don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But it’s a thing, and we’d better get used to it.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Democrats, Others Urge New Special Session on Insure Tennessee

CREDIT: JB

JB

L to r, participants at Thursday’s press conference were Harris, Miller, Parkinson, Coffield, Kyle, Stewart, Coffield, and Roberson.

With what turned out to a providential act of timing — within an hour or two of Thursday’s latest Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act — a group composed of state Democrats and local advocates of Governor Bill Haslam’s proposal for Medicaid expansion under the Act made a pitch in Raleigh for a new special legislative session to reconsider that proposal, Insure Tennessee.

The primary spokesperson for the group was state Democratic chair Mary Mancini of Nashville, and for obvious reasons her focus was on Democratic support for Insure Tennessee and partisan Republican attempts to obstruct it in a February special session of the legislature this year, as well as during the regular session itself.

Expressing pleasure at the brand-new Supreme Court decision, Mancini said, “passing Insure Tennessee becomes even more important now.” She noted that the aborted plan would have provided affordable health-care coverage for 280,000 currently uninsured persons statewide and “68, 000 right here in Shelby County.”

Pointing out that Haslam, a Republican himself, had been unable to garner support for his plan from the members of his party, Mancini said she and her fellow Democrats had persistently called on the Governor “and the Republican leadership” to support another special session, “and they have refused.” She accused Republicans of “focusing on politics rather than providing what the majority of Tennesseans want.”

Alluding to revelations (not always welcomed by the legislators in question) that a significant number of Republican General Assembly members who acted to stonewall Insure Tennessee were beneficiaries of blue-ribbon health insurance plans provided by the state, Mancini asked, “And why are they more concerned with hiding access to their own affordable health-care plans they get than they are with helping other Tennesseans get the same access?”

Other members of the predominantly Democratic Party group of presenters made such other points as that as many as 220 Tennesseans might have died during the last year for lack of an affordable health-care plan and that other matters of importance included jobs and the survival of hospitals, many of which have been over-burdened with emergency-room care for indigent patients.

State Representative Larry Miller, sponsor of the House resolution for Insure Tennessee (one which, like the Senate version, was blocked before it could get to the floor), promised to “name names” of local legislators deserving special blame for obstructing Insure Tennessee, and he did so, mentioning state Senator Brian Kelsey and state Representative Steve McManus.

State Senator Sara Kyle was equally blunt. “Stop being selfish!” she said, as a message to those Republicans who had bottled up the Insure Tennessee resolution in committee. “It’s a moral issue,” she added.

State Senator Lee Harris, the Senate’s Democratic leader, who had made a well-received appearance the evening before at a meeting of the Germantown Democrats, where he had addressed similar themes, made an effort to move the issue beyond pure partisanship.

Pointing out that polls show a clear majority of Tennesseans favoring Insure Tennessee, regardless of their party, Harris said the appeal for a new special session should by rights be directed to “a very narrow audience” of resisters, “a very small group of leaders on the other side of the aisle and extremists who have dominated the debate.”

Harris absolved “rank and file Republicans,” reminding his hearers that the plan’s author, Governor Haslam, was also a Republican, and he added a hat-tip for John Roberts, the GOP-appointed Chief Justice who had voted with the majority on Thursday to uphold the ACA against a lawsuit, King v. Burwell, that challenged it on largely technical grounds.

Another effort to bridge the gap between Democrats and Republicans was made by Ed Roberson, the current director of Christ Community Health Centers, a onetime Democrat who has been a financial officer in several prominent Republican campaigns over the past couple of decades.

Identifying himself as a Republican, Roberson professed solidarity with the others on Insure Tennessee and called it “unacceptable” that Tennessee should rank 44th in the nation in health-care and that Memphis should have been called the “unhealthiest” city in the country in one nationwide survey.

Roberson’s participation provided at least a measure of ecumenism to Thursday’s press conference, as did his presence side-by-side with Ashley Coffield, local director of Planned Parenthood — an organization that has often been at odds with Roberson’s over their different attitudes toward legal abortion but which in many instances provides overlapping medical care.

Participants at the press conference were Mancini, Harris, Miller, Kyle Coffield, Robinson, state Rep Mike Stewart of Nashville, and state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, whose local Raleigh office provided the venue.