Tag: Mike Stewart

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Public Money, Private Schools

In May — with help from legally questionable arm-twisting by disgraced and soon-to-be-deposed House Speaker (and general all-around sleazebag) Glen Casada — the Tennessee General Assembly passed an education voucher bill. It was not an easy birth. In fact, the House vote was deadlocked until Casada went into a back room and promised a Knoxville legislator his district would not be affected by the bill. That legislator then conveniently changed his vote.

And that’s how, after much wrangling and behind-the-scenes deal-making, a law was passed that allows 5,000 low-income families in Nashville and Memphis to apply for $7,300 vouchers to use toward purchasing tuition at private schools. “Low-income” is defined as making no more than $65,000 a year for a family of four.

Glen Casada

Does anyone else find it odd that the state’s GOP-controlled legislature thought so little of this bill that they limited its jurisdiction to Memphis and Nashville? I sure do. I mean, if it’s such a great idea, why wouldn’t these lawmakers want the voucher bill to apply to their own districts? The answer is, because they know vouchers would divert funds from their public school systems and tick off their constituents, who would rightly see it as giving public money to private for-profit and religious schools.

But when it comes to those of us living in the state’s largest two cities, the rubes who dominate the legislature are all too eager to bend us to their will, whether it’s outlawing living-wage legislation and minority hiring regulations — or, you know, taking down Confederate statues (which really pissed them off). Most likely, they thought, “Hey, let’s shove this bulls**t voucher thing down Memphis’ and Nashville’s throats and see what happens. That ought to irritate them liberals and uppity black folks.” And, of course, the voucher law has the sweet added benefit of padding the revenues of private schools — and pleasing their lobbyists.

This is a boondoggle. Giving people public taxpayer funds to pay for private schools is nothing more than an incentive to get them to pull their children out of public schools — at a time when weakening public education is the last thing we need to be doing.

And it gets worse. Private schools are under no obligation to accept any voucher student they don’t want. They can be selective. My guess is they’ll be more than happy to welcome $7,300 of our hard-earned money from, say, the family of a star running back and not so eager to welcome a troubled minority kid or a child with family problems or, horrors, a Muslim kid.

This bill is being backed hard by Governor Bill Lee, who’s now pushing to implement the voucher program for the 2020 school year, rather than waiting until 2021, when the law is supposed to take effect.

Chalkbeat.org, a nonprofit news organization that covers education, has reported extensively on Tennessee’s voucher bill. I highly recommend reading their coverage (and supporting their work). In a recent article, Representative Mike Stewart of Nashville was quoted as saying, “In places like Arizona, vouchers have been a rolling disaster marked by outright fraud and theft. We can expect the same thing to happen in Tennessee. … The whole point is to take millions of dollars away from public schools as soon as possible and then to dole them out to Governor Lee’s cronies, who have been pressing for vouchers since he got in office.”

If Lee’s proposed expedited schedule goes into effect, families in Memphis and Nashville would start getting the “education savings accounts” next summer. All this will engender lawsuits, of course. Attorneys for the affected school districts are expected to challenge the bill, primarily on the grounds that it unfairly singles out the Nashville and Memphis school systems. Immigrant rights groups are considering legal action because the law denies vouchers to children whose parents entered the country illegally, even if the children are citizens.

The state is also required by the voucher bill to “vet” private schools. What will that look like? Will the vetting involve looking into religious schools’ curriculums? Will our tax dollars go to support church-affiliated schools? Of course they will. Separation of church and state is so … old school.

And here’s my favorite part: If the state can’t find enough impoverished families to fill the 5,000 designated spots, higher-income families can apply, even if their kids were already set to go to private school.

Bottom line: The Republicans are running an experiment with the Memphis and Nashville school districts and using our money to do it. Our kids are the lab rats.

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Politics Politics Feature

Defining the Divide on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In the month and a half that the current version of the Shelby County Commission — the one in office as of the August 2nd county general election — has been meeting, it has become clear that serious division of opinion exists on the body, more or less along party lines.

But, so far, no open antagonism has manifested itself. That fact would distinguish this commission from its two immediate predecessors — the commission of 2010-2014, which saw animosities flare between members, and the one of 2014-2018, which saw open warfare between a bipartisan contingent on the commission and the county mayor’s office.

Two key votes at the commission’s Monday meeting indicated the divides of this commission. One vote was to approve a vote of no confidence in the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Justice to terminate a Memorandum of Agreement with Shelby County providing continued DOJ oversight of problems with Juvenile Court.

Jackson Baker

As Democrat Tami Sawyer (right) speaks to a no-confidence resolution on end of DOJ oversight of Juvenile Court, Republican Brandon Morrison looks on disapprovingly.

Both a commission majority and County Mayor Lee Harris have publicly disapproved of the decision to end oversight, and on Monday the vote on the no-confidence resolution, co-sponsored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer and Commission Chair Van Turner, both Democrats, passed by a 7-4-1 vote, with the four opponents being four of the commission’s five Republicans — Brandon Morrison, Amber Mills, David Bradford, and Mark Billingsley — while the fifth GOP member, Mick Wright, abstained.

A second resolution, this one co-sponsored by Sawyer and Edmund Ford Jr., requested that the Memorandum of Understanding between four major law-enforcement branches — the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, the Memphis Police Department, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and the Shelby County District Attorney General — be amended “to include TBI’s investigation of critical injuries” resulting from law enforcement shootings.

The resolution’s essential point was to enlarge TBI oversight of such incidents. The vote was similar, another 7-4-1 vote, with Wright joining the dissenters this time and Bradford abstaining.

This basic divide, along party lines, is likely to continue, especially on issues of social significance.

• Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made a stop in Memphis on Saturday at the National Civil Rights Museum for an installment of the DNC’s “Seat at the Table” tour, designed to galvanize the involvement of African-American women in the party.

In his farewell message to attendees, Perez took note of one of the major issues on the November 6th ballot — the referendum for Memphis voters on repeal of Ranked Choice Voting, a method for determining winners, sans runoffs, in multi-candidate races in which no candidate has a majority.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on that issue,” said Perez, after giving a hat-tip to Steve Mulroy, the University of Memphis law professor and former county commissioner who has been a major proponent of RCV (aka Instant Runoff Voting), scheduled to be employed in the 2019 city election, unless repealed.

Perez suggested that “the Republicans” were “trying to take it away,” though in fact it was incumbents of the nonpartisan Memphis City Council who implanted the repeal referendum on the ballot.

“If I were living here, I’d vote no on that referendum, because you’ve already voted for it,” said Perez, who referred to a previous referendum, in 2008, when Memphis voters approved the process by a 70 percent majority. “It forces candidates to talk to everyone, instead of just that one base. It fosters civility because you can’t ignore 70 percent of the people.”

Perez went on: “Talk to them! What a radical concept. That’s why y’all voted for it, and that’s why they don’t want it.”

• Three weeks after Mike Stewart of Nashville, the Democrats’ caucus chairman in the Tennessee House of Representatives, came to Memphis to investigate Republican House candidate Scott McCormick, Stewart returned to reveal his findings.

What he’d been looking for was the absentee record from Shelby County Schools board meetings of McCormick, who is trying to unseat Democrat Dwayne Thompson, the upset winner in 2016 of the District 96 House seat.

Back on October 10th, Stewart and fellow Democrat Marjorie Pomeroy-Wallace spent an afternoon in the county Board of Education building waiting in vain for McCormick’s attendance records.

That was then. On Monday, Stewart and Wallace were back in front of the Board of Education building — but this time with a large standing chart showing, line by line, the apparent actual record of McCormick’s attendance on the board committees he has belonged to.

The chart purported to show that McCormick had missed “at least 72 of 94 committee meetings,” which translates into an absentee rate of 76 percent. “It is a record of chronic absenteeism,” said Stewart. “He consistently missed critical meetings on critical subjects.” Stewart gave as an example the issue of academic performance, which has been the focus of much concern in regard to Shelby County Schools.

“Of 25 meetings on academic performance, Scott McCormick attended just five. What can we expect when he gets into the legislature and nobody’s watching? He was AWOL and obviously should not be promoted to a new assignment. What are you going to do in Nashville when nobody’s supervising you?”

Stewart said the SCS office had not furnished him with written attendance records, but only with recordings, from which he and others had determined McCormick’s attendance record from listening to roll calls. “We had to listen laboriously to every one of them,” he said.

Asked for a reaction, McCormick said Stewart’s figures were misleading. “First of all, committee meetings on the school board aren’t like those in the legislature, which conform to a fixed, predictable schedule.” The School Board meetings were arranged around members’ convenience and availability according to ad hoc questionnaires, he said.

Moreover, said McCormick, “no action is taken at the committee meetings, nothing is voted on,” and any material developed in them is made available to board members in the monthly work sessions that precede by a week the board’s public business sessions. McCormick claimed an attendance rate of 22 out of 23 public business meetings at which votes were taken. And, he said, his attendance record at the evaluations committee, which he heads, was 100 percent.

McCormick said, in effect, that the focus on his attendance record was a red herring and that the main issue of the House race should be the matter of who best could benefit Shelby County in pushing for advances in education and economic development. He said that, as a member of the legislature’s majority party, he was better poised than Thompson to be effective in those regards.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Dems Promise Big Reveal on McCormick School Board Attendance

CREDIT: JB

JB

Stewart in SCS office earlier this month in an unsuccessful first effort to obtain McCormick’s attendance records

State House Democratic chair Mike Stewart of Nashville, who was frustrated by earlier attempts to obtain attendance records of Shelby County Schools board member Scott McCormick, a Republican House candidate,  has apparently obtained those records now and has scheduled a press conference to reveal them at 11:30 a.m Monday in front of the Shelby County Schools building at 160 South Hollywood.

Stewart, acting in support of McCormick’s opponent, District 96 state Representative Dwayne Thompson, has suggested that there is a pattern of negligence in McCormick’s “dismal attendance record” as an SCS board member that would inhibit his effectiveness as a legislator. He had previously made several attempts to obtain McCormick’s attendance records, including an in-person visit to the SCS offices earlier this month, where, he said, he was “stonewalled.”

On the occasion of that visit, Stewart and an aide waited, for hours, along with media, in the lobby of the SCS building to receive records that were first seemingly promised and later declared to be unavailable.

The press release announcing Stewart’s follow-up press conference on Monday had this to say: “ Now we know why they took so long to turn the public records over. “

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Politics Politics Feature

Blackburn, Dean, Lee, and Donald Trump All in Memphis Area

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The semi-lull in politics that had lasted from the mid-summer election of August 2nd until Labor Day is now unmistakably over, as the present week’s events well indicate.

On Monday night, Tennessee was favored with the presence of one Donald J. Trump, who turned up for one of his patented political rallies in Johnson City, in the far corner of northeastern Tennessee. Trump was on hand to bolster his own permanent campaign as well as the hopes of 8th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by incumbent Republican Bob Corker. On Tuesday night, he appeared at a rally in Southaven. (For a report on the president’s Southaven visit, go to memphisflyer.com.)

Jackson Baker

Trump in Johnson City

On Monday, the president, professing happiness at “being back in the great state of Tennessee with thousands of hard-working American patriots,” also made a point of ladling out grace notes to every other leading Republican in sight. His beneficiaries included Congressmen Phil Roe, John Duncan, Chuck Fleischmann, and Scott Desjarlais (“my favorite name in politics”), Congressional candidates Tim Burchett and Mark Green, Governor Bill Haslam, Lt. Governor Randy McNally, and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee.

Trump took time to brag on a new trade arrangement with Mexico and Canada, designated by the letters USMCA, an anagram that, unlike the predecessor association of NAFTA, cannot be said as a word. Though the new trade pact is considered somewhat more advantageous to American milk producers and automakers than was NAFTA, its primary advantage, as Trump sees it, may be that it’s one more replacement for a now-discarded creation of his Democratic predecessors.

The president also defended his current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and disparaged several Judiciary Committee Democrats who oppose Kavanaugh — notably Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Dianne Feinstein of California.

But Trump reserved most of his criticism for Phil Bredesen, the former Tennessee governor who is Blackburn’s Democratic opponent for the Senate seat. The election of Bredesen, he said, could mean the loss of Tennessee gun-owner’s Second Amendment rights, the escalation of taxes “beyond your wildest imagination, the likelihood of mass unemployment, and the takeover of medical care by the government.”

The Bredesen campaign later issued a point-by-point refutation of these charges, along with the following summary: “From Day 1, Governor Bredesen has been clear — he is not running against Donald Trump. He is running for a Senate seat to represent the people of Tennessee. As he said in Chattanooga this evening — if Tennesseans are looking for someone to continue the D.C. gridlock and shouting, he’s not their candidate. Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has gotten very good at this after 16 years in Washington. If what Tennesseans are looking for is someone who will get things done, then Phil Bredesen is applying for the job.”

That statement, consistent with the general run of Bredesen’s TV commercials, which stress his political independence and demonstrated ability to work across the political aisle, both complements and somewhat contrasts with the former governor’s action last week in announcing that, if elected, he would not support current Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York for reelection to the Senate leadership post.    

Bredesen took that position during a debate at Cumberland University in Lebanon, and it came off then as a concession — needless, some Democrats worried — to his Republican opponent’s frequent attempts to tie him to the national Congressional leadership of Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

Jackson Baker

Mike Stewart in Germantown

• Meanwhile, there’s more politics in the offing locally. As I write this, there is to be a Tuesday night debate at the University of Memphis between the aforementioned Lee and his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean. Dean is scheduled to stick around for a meet-and-greet Wednesday night at Railgarten, and Senate candidate Blackburn was advertised for a GOP luncheon at Owen Brennan’s, also on Wednesday.

Local Democrats have been getting help from elsewhere, too. State Representative Mike Stewart was in Shelby County the weekend before last, speaking at a picnic of the Germantown Democratic Club and bringing aid and comfort — some of it rhetorical and devoted to the macro level of politics.

Said Stewart: “We have got to take this country back — neighborhood by neighborhood, councilmanic district by councilmanic district, statehouse district by statehouse district.” 

Stewart scourged “this very radical Congress that would not compromise” and a national Republican regime that, he said, “stymied at every turn” progressive efforts.

He made the case that several local House districts now belonging to Republicans were in range to be captured. “These districts are changing,” he said. “We can turn these districts blue. These suburban districts are where the fight is at.”

On hand for the event was a prime exhibit of Stewart’s thesis: State Representative Dwayne Thompson of House District 96. Thompson upset then incumbent state Representative Steve McManus two years ago in the district, which includes parts of Cordova, southeast Memphis, and Germantown, and which, as Stewart had indicated, had indeed undergone significant demographic change.

Thompson had worked the district with all due diligence back in 2016, knocking on what he estimated to be “thousands of doors,” and his effort certainly was the largest reason for his victory. But another major component was the significant financial aid that the state party shifted his way, by way of targeting the district.

In 2018, the state Democratic Party is once again involved as an active principal in the legislative races of Shelby County, and Stewart’s very presence was a clear symbol of that. This year the state party seems to have identified two more districts capable of turnover — District 97, in the Bartlett-Eads-Lakeland area, now represented by the GOP’s Jim Coley; and District 83, in the East Memphis-Germantown overlap, now represented by Republican Mark White.  

The Democrats running for those seats — Allan Creasy in District 97 and Danielle Schonbaum in district 83 — have reportedly been pinpointed for accelerated financial aid from the state party’s coffers, as has the reelection effort of Thompson, who is opposed by Republican Scott McCormick in District 96.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Rep. Durham Expelled from State House by 70-2 Vote

Durham in the dock of the House on Tuesday

The first of two important objectives of this week’s special session of the General Assembly was achieved in Nashville on Tuesday — the formal expulsion from the legislature of 
accused sexual predator Jeremy Durham.

Technically, the action against Durham, achieved by a 70-2 House vote in favor of expulsion, was an add-on to the special session, which had been called by Governor Bill Haslam to amend a new state law that had raised permissible alcohol-level units from youthful drivers and threatened thereby to cause a loss of $62 million in federal funding.

But the Durham matter dominated public attention and was acted on first.

Durham, a Republican from suburban Franklin, had represented House District 65 but had already been overwhelmingly defeated in the August 4 primary election by political newcomer Sam Whitson after widespread publicity about improper behavior toward women working in Legislative Plaza, culminating in a state Attorney General’s report alleging 22 known cases.

That report had followed year-end disclosures in the Nashville Tennessean of untoward activity by Durham, resulting in his forced resignation from a position as GOP legislative whip and later in his ousting from their party caucus by House Republicans, after the House’s minority Democrats and state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini had begun making Durham something of a negative cause célèbre.

In particular, Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell, under persistent challenge by the Democrats for alleged inaction, assumed an increasingly aggressive posture toward Durham and, after public circulation of the AG’s report, banished Durham from Legislative Plaza except during actual sessions, removed his office to an adjoining building, and prohibited any interactions of his with female staffers without third-person supervision.

Meanwhile, Governor Haslam, state Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, and other leading Republicans joined Harwell in calling for Durham to resign from the legislature.

Not even Durham’s defeat by Whitson quelled the furor, inasmuch as the defeated one-term representative still remained eligible for a modest annual state pension. That fact was the proximate reason for the expulsion action, which GOP state representative Susan Lynn of Mt. Juliet announced that she intended to introduce on the special session’s first day.

Somewhat unexpectedly on that first day, various Democratic House members, including Memphians G.A. Hardaway and Larry Miller, joined Republican Rick Womick in raising objections to the expulsion process, based on various procedural issues and a professed concern for due process.

From the Democrats’ point of view, that was a strategy designed to prolong discussion of the Durham matter — and the consequent embarrassment to Republicans, whom Democrats intended to charge with negligent oversight and early attempts to suppress awareness of Durham’s derelictions. The strategy was amended overnight, however, as public reaction to it seemed clearly averse.

On the second day, key Democrats like caucus chair Mike Stewart of Nashville joined with Republicans in making something of a prosecutorial attack on Durham, who made an effort, for at least the first hour of the Tuesday session, to defend himself, though without specifics and without offering credible reasons why he had failed to offer evidence in his own defense during the Attorney General’s investigation.

State Rep. Johnnie Turner of Memphis provided one of the signal moments of Tuesday’s session — and a turning point of sorts — when she eloquently contrasted the plight of Durham’s female victims with what had been abstract debate about legal niceties and the format of the expulsion process.

Though there were a fair number of absentees from the expulsion vote and several members abstained from voting, Durham in the end had only two votes against his expulsion — Republicans Courtney Rogers of Goodlettsville and Terri Lynn Weaver of Lancaster — and the 70 votes to expel him were four more than the two-thirds figure of 66 needed.

In apparent anticipation of the result, Durham had already departed the chamber and the Capitol building. His chapter of the special session was over — along, it would seem, with his public career.

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Memphis Gaydar News

Tennessee House Passes Anti-Marriage Equality Resolution

Susan Lynn

The Tennessee House of Representative has passed a resolution expressing disagreement with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision — the case that cleared the way for legal same-sex marriage across the country last summer.

The resolution, which was sponsored by Representative Susan Lynn (R-Mt. Juliet), passed in a 73-18 vote. It has no legal force, and Representative Mike Stewart (D-Nashville) called the resolution a waste of time. Representative Sherry Jones (D-Nashville) tried to tack on a resolution that would have required the state to pay any legal fees associated with lawsuits against local governments that refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but that amendment failed.

Here’s the Tennessee Equality Project response to the resolution’s passage (first published in the Nashville Scene):

TEP condemns House passage of HJR529 today on the House floor. Though it has no legal force, the resolution insults the LGBT community with yet another vote on something that should not be voted on, namely, basic rights. The resolution furthermore celebrates lawsuits against local governments in our state, which will take up the time of county clerks and the resources of taxpayers. Yet, the Legislature refused an amendment by Rep. Sherry Jones, which would have required the state to pay for legal costs associated with the lawsuits. Legislative attacks on Tennessee’s LGBT community have become desperate and bizarre.
Rep. Susan Lynn, R-Mt. Juliet—the resolution’s sponsor—said it supports strange lawsuits like the one from the Family Action Council claiming the state’s marriage law is invalid now because of Obergefell and seeking to force county clerks to stop giving marriage licenses to gay or straight couples.

On March 8th, the House Education Administration and Planning Subcommittee will consider an anti-transgender bill that bars public school students from using bathrooms or showers that correspond to their gender identities.