Tag: Michael Pope

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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.”

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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! •

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Del Gill Wins One (No, Not the Chairmanship)

CREDIT: JB

After what threatened to be an interminable early segment, in which a dozen or so procedural motions from self-appointed Democratic Party scold Del Gill were introduced, duly hashed out, and rejected, the Shelby County Democratic Party got down to business at its regular June meeting Thursday night at the recently refurbished IBEW meeting hall and elected a new chairman. Sheriff’s Department Lt. Michael Pope.

Pope, a former party vice chair who had been serving as acting chairman after the resignation two months ago of then chair Randa Spears, was handily elected to lead the party by a
JB

New SCDP chairman Michael Pope

 margin of 17 to 4 over executive committee member Gill, whose chairmanship bid went the way of all his previous motions and who would lose a subsequent vote for vice chair as well.

In his brief remarks to the party’s executive committee before its members took their vote, Pope had appealed for party unity and an end to internal strife, but the moment of relative concord achieved by his victory dissolved somewhat in the aftermath. That was when Gill offered a new motion calling for the committee to go on record as favoring the prosecution of former chairman Bryan Carson for the alleged embezzlement of upwards of $25,000 from party coffers.

Carson had been forced to resign his chairmanship in February 2015 after an ad hoc internal audit of the party’s books showed an unresolved deficit of several thousand dollars that the chairman was not able to explain. He was also under fire for failing to arrange timely financial reports to the state Registry of Election Finance.

In subsequent months, during the chairmanship of Spears, Carson’s elected successor, the matter of unaccounted-for funds continued to be an unresolved point of contention on the party executive committee. There ensued negotiations of various kinds, both public and private, in an effort to achieve a solution acceptable both to Carson and to all factions of the committee.

At one point, a proposal to allow Carson to repay a reduced sum of $6,000 in modest monthly installments, coupled with a contention of no intentional misconduct, was submitted by Cardon through his attorney, Robert Spence. There is disagreement as to whether the full committee was apprised of the offer, which in any case ceased to be active.

Meanwhile, a new ad hoc committee appointed by then chairman Spears had performed a second audit, showing the funds unaccounted for to be in excess of 25,000 and suggesting a variety of potential responses from the committee.

That was the background of things when, in the wake of the chairmanship vote Thursday night, Gill offered his motion calling for Carson to be prosecuted. There was debate back and forth, with various other members calling for delays or for more restrained actions, but, when vote time came, 14 committee members stood up for the motion to prosecute, including several who rarely or never vote on Gill’s side of an issue. That was enough to make a clear majority.

The gravity of the decision was undercut briefly by a semi-comic moment when Gill appeared about to protest something or other regarding the outcome, as he has done numerous times over the years after losing a vote and had done so repeatedly on Thursday night. Amid various catcalls to Gill of “Shut up!” or “You won,” committee member Rick Maynard uttered the line of the night, “Take yes for an answer!”

It remains to be seen whether and how the committee will follow through on the implications of Thursday night’s vote to prosecute, but it had finally taken a decisive action of sorts and perhaps can shortly shift to what new chairman Pope proposed as the party’s main duty of the year — to elect Democrats in the various election races of 2016.