Tag: Ron Ramsey

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Politics Politics Feature

On the Health-Care Front

Against all odds, backers of a renewed effort to secure legislative approval for Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal hoped to steer the Medicaid-expansion measure through committees in both the state Senate and state House this week.

And, even if the proposal is stopped short of the goal, as it was in an aborted February special session, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen and other members of the state’s congressional delegation have managed to obtain some measure of fiscal relief for the state’s beleaguered hospitals.

Cohen announced this week the passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, which, the congressman said in a press release, will “guarantee disproportionate share hospital (DSH) allotments totaling more than $530 million over the next 10 years to help the state’s hospitals and community health centers recoup expenses incurred caring for those who cannot afford to pay.”

As Cohen, who took the lead in securing the new funding, noted, Tennessee is the only state in the nation that, until passage of the act, was not in a position to receive annual DSH allotments automatically.

The reason for that has been that, when the administration of Governor Ned McWherter negotiated a waiver with the federal government to convert Tennessee’s Medicaid operation into what became TennCare, the DSH allotments were not included within the waiver. The oversight, based on an apparent overestimation of TennCare’s ability to cover all exigencies, may have kept the state from receiving as much as $450 million in DSH funding annually.

Attempts in recent years to remedy that situation have been blocked by a general atmosphere of fiscal austerity in Washington, and even the new arrangement, which secures a guaranteed amount of new federal DSH funding amounting to $53 million annually, provides but a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.4 billion that would be made available to the state’s hospitals for indigent health care through Insure Tennessee via the Affordable Care Act.

Haslam’s proposal was voted down 7-4 by a specially constituted state Senate Health and Welfare committee in the special session, but, Lazarus-like, it got up and moving again last week as Senate Joint Resolution 93, passing hurdles in the Senate Health and Welfare subcommittee and the regular Senate Health Committee.

SJR 93, co-sponsored by Senators Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville), Doug Overbey (R-Maryville), and Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville), was on the schedule to be considered this week by the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee. Meanwhile, over in the House, Rep. Larry Miller (D-Memphis) had put the House version of the measure, HJR 90 on notice in the Insurance and Banking Subcommittee. Opinion of lawmakers consulted by the Flyer is divided on the extent to which consideration of Insure Tennessee on the floor of either the Senate or the House will be determined by what happens in committee.

Some proponents of the proposal are wondering out loud if a bill passed last year requiring legislative approval of Medicaid expansion actually applies prohibitively to an executive action by the governor.

· In separate conventions held over the weekend, the Shelby County Democratic Party (SCDP) and the Shelby County Republican Party each elected a new chairperson. In both cases – a woman.

The Democrats went first, convening on Saturday at First Baptist Church on Broad, selecting first a 29-member executive committee, which in turn elected longtime party activist Randa Spears on the second ballot from a field of four aspirants.

Spears thereby became the first white female to head the local Democratic Party in its history.

Her ascension to party leadership, after 32 years in the gruntosphere, made perfect sense. It was a reward for faithful service — including a recent stint as campaign manager for Deidre Malone, the Democratic nominee in last year’s county mayor race. It was a nod to the longstanding prominence of women in party affairs (as in local social and civic life, generally). And it was a clear signal to Shelby County’s white population that the SCDP was not, as it has sometimes seemed in recent years, a monolithically black organization.

Asked about that last fact in the aftermath of her second-ballot win over runner-up Del Gill, Spears was discreet, diffident, and diplomatic: “I don’t know that that is important. I think it’s important that someone with my focus and experience and enthusiasm is chairman. And I think I’ve worked with almost everybody in this room, except for the new folks, on one campaign or another. So I look at this as all one group.”

Malone, who, in an exchange of roles this year, had been Spears’ campaign manager, addressed the point more freely: “I do think it’s important to have elected a white chair — and especially a white female. It makes a statement.”

Just as it might to elect a female mayor at some point, she was prodded? “Yes,” she nodded, in gratitude for the implied tribute to her pathfinding 2010 and 2014 mayoral campaigns.

For the fact is, American politics is all about constituent groups (or blocs, if you choose). The more different ones your party can address satisfactorily, the more broadly based — and successful — your party is likely to be.

All four candidates on Saturday’s ballot had something to say for themselves. Runner-up Del Gill could boast his four decades of party work, newcomer Jackie Jackson was a fresh breath, just a little too new to most committee members to win; and pre-convention favorite Reginald Milton, a well-respected county commissioner, was conspicuous in his efforts to unite disparate party factions.

Politics is also all about trade-offs, and Spears’ victory owed much (as did Milton’s defeat) to longtime party broker Sidney Chism, who, for whatever reason, tipped his support, and that of his still significant network, to her.

Gill, all things considered, was not that far behind Spears, at 11 to her 16 on the second ballot. And, Gill being Gill, it was unlikely that he was prepared to fall in line behind Spears. Encouraged by his original first-ballot-leading total of 11, he put up something of a fuss at meeting’s end about a procedural issue regarding the validity of the new committee’s voice vote to continue the party’s bylaws in lieu of a full review of them.

The newly elected Spears politely but firmly disallowed the complaint and moved on to complete the day’s business. She did say later that she was willing to avail herself of the “wealth of experience” of Gill and whomever else. But it remained to be seen whether she can impose an effective measure of unity on a committee composed in large part of members potentially sympathetic to Gill’s dissident outlook.

A day later, on Sunday at the Bartlett Municipal Community Center, a throng of several hundred Republicans (including 400-odd delegates as such) witnessed what amounted to a re-assertion of the local GOP establishment’s control of the Shelby County Republican organization.

Though there was no dearth of competition — either for the party chairmanship, won by Mary Wagner over Arnold Weiner, or for the numerous other offices up for grabs — the Tea Party rebellion that flared up at the 2013 Republican conclave and in attempted power grabs at several local Republican clubs has been contained. There was no Tea Party slate as such, with adherents of that somewhat diversified, quasi-libertarian point of view to be found on both contending slates, Wagner’s and Weiner’s.

There was a message to be had, though, in the fact that the slate headed by Wagner, a relative newcomer to party politics whose last position was that of Young Republicans president, all but swept the slate led by Weiner, a longtime party veteran who had been, most recently, a party vice chair and immediate past president of the East Shelby Republican Club. And that “all but” is required mainly because Curt Cowan, the Wagner slate’s candidate for Primary Board position Number 5, was prevailed upon to drop out in favor of George Flinn, the wealthy radiologist/broadcast executive and sometime political candidate who still maintains a high profile in the local Republican Party.

The other 35 contested positions — for chairman, at-large steering committee members, district representatives, and primary board members — were won by the Wagner slate. The message, quite simply, is that there is a Republican mainstream, and it is back in full command.

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Politics Politics Feature

Government on Ice

So the bad weather came. Not as bad as was advertised, frankly, and not as bad as hit many other points in the nation, including parts of Tennessee to the east of us. Still, it was enough to halt, here as elsewhere, the momentum of politics and government for a couple of days.

“Parts of Tennessee to the east of us,” I said. Okay, Nashville, for instance. Tuesday was wiped off the calendar in state government, and at press time there seemed a real possibility that the General Assembly could have a de facto shutdown all week, even should the schedule of events (committee meetings and floor sessions) be formally reinstated.

East Tennessee proper, which supplies a generous share of human fodder for the legislature, was hardest hit by the storm and seemed destined to remain weather-bound. Conditions there were the primary cause of a state of emergency declared Monday evening by the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA). But power outages and road closures were abounding in Middle Tennessee counties like Davidson, Hickman, Humphreys, and Williamson, as well.

Some urgent things, of course, had already been put on ice by the General Assembly — the most notable of which was Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal for Medicaid expansion. That happened week before last, with the proposal’s rejection by a 7-4 vote in an ad hoc Senate committee meeting in special session.

Not to mince words, the proposal, which would have poured into state coffers some $1.5 billion annually — much of it destined for Tennessee hospitals struggling with the costs of uncompensated medical care for the uninsured (estimated to number at least 280,000 in the state) — was defeated because it could be linked to the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.”

Other arguments — that the federal government would eventually welsh on its commitment to fund the lion’s share of long-term funding or that Tennessee would be stuck in a “Hotel California” commitment it could never check out of — were demolished over and over by the governor or the attorney general or legislative supporters (including Democrats and Republicans), but they kept resurfacing — as a smoke-screen, backers of Insure Tennessee maintained.

Parenthesis: Late in that first week, state Representative Steve McManus (R-Cordova) expressed disappointment that many press reports up Nashville way had wrongly credited a fellow Shelby Countian, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) with authoring the “Hotel California” trope. McManus is correct. As the Flyer reported on its website on January 9th, McManus, a sometime thespian, was indeed the originator of that metaphor.

Kelsey had merely borrowed the phrase — along with predictions of a special-session “bloodletting” by state Representative Curry Todd (R-Collierville) — for his own numerous attacks on the governor’s Medicaid proposal. The senator from Germantown can lay claim to one original argument of his own, however — that, as he said during the fateful hearing by the ad hoc Senate Health and Welfare Committee, Insure Tennessee amounted to nothing more than a “bailout” for the state’s foolishly miscalculating hospitals.

Democrats in the House and Senate, more a remnant than a real force, have introduced legislation to renew consideration of Insure Tennessee in the regular session, now begun, but there seems little hope of that coming to pass. In his post-mortem with the press after the failure of the special session, Haslam said that he’d like to try again, but hinted it might not be possible until the election of a new president.

That same theme was noted directly last week by House Speaker Beth Harwell (R-Nashville), who declined to support Insure Tennessee in the special session and was quoted by The Commercial Appeal‘s Rick Locker as saying, “It might be that two years from now, we wake up with a Republican president, look at going after it again and coming back with a block grant. … Do I think we want to spend a lot of time during the regular session? Nah, I don’t think that.”

People wonder what presidents’ legacies will be. Barack Obama‘s might be that he was the first president who saw every proposal even remotely connected with him — good, bad, or indifferent — relentlessly stonewalled by his political opposition, not only at the congressional level but at the level of state government, as well.

So we wait two years. Right. That’s roughly $3 billion worth of waiting, and God only knows how many of the 280,000 uninsured Tennesseans could have health emergencies in the meantime.

Obama-bashing may work for GOP members in the legislature, but not for those Republicans with responsibility for actual governing in the affected localities of Tennessee. In two overwhelming votes, one in advance of the special legislative session, another afterward, the Shelby County Commission has endorsed Republican member Terry Roland‘s resolution calling for passage of Insure Tennessee.

Concern for imminent strain on the medical and financial resources of Region One Health (aka The Med) was cited by members of both parties. Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has been outspoken in his disappointment, forecasting in a series of appearances lately that the defeat of Insure Tennessee could lead to a 10 percent county property tax increase. On last week’s Behind the Headlines broadcast on WKNO-TV, Luttrell bit down hard on that bullet:

“The opposition framed it as being an extension of the president. Those Republicans that dared to kind of step out and support it in the General Assembly were vilified.”

It should be noted that not every measure introduced in the current legislative session has met with a cold shoulder. Nah. As one example, a bill (HB677/SB0783) introduced by state Representative James Van Huss (R-Jonesborough) and state Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt. Juliet), seems on its way to being fast-tracked. This bill would establish the Barrett Model 82A1 50-caliber semi-automatic rifle, manufactured in Murfreesboro, as Tennessee’s “official state firearm.” First things first.

• Another political situation which may have experienced a brief freeze since last week was the rush of candidate declarations for various city offices.

The announcement last Monday by commission chairman Justin Ford that he would seek the office of Memphis mayor further filled out a candidate roster that is ultimately expected to include a generous number of candidates besides those already declared, who include Councilman Jim Strickland, former county commission chairman James Harvey, former University of Memphis basketballer Detric Golden, and, of course, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton.

Councilman Harold Collins is considered a good bet to enter the mayoral field, and another likely possibility is Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams. Expect others before the Election Commission allows petitions to be formally pulled on April 17th. The election itself won’t happen until October 29th.

Other relevant dates: Filing deadline, July 17th. Withdrawal deadline, July 24th. Start of early voting, October 14th. Voter registration deadline, October 5th.

One of those still mulling over a city race and inclined, she says, to give the matter a good bit of time before deciding, is Kemba Ford, the daughter of former state Senator John Ford and an increasing presence in local civil and political affairs. Ford, who has run previous races for the city council and the state legislature, may be a candidate for the council’s District 7 position, but she’s involved at the moment with cousin Joe Ford Jr., a resident of Los Angeles, in an archival multimedia research project on Memphis politics during the civil rights era, focusing on the Ford family’s involvement.

Kemba Ford herself was a longtime resident of L.A., where she pursued an acting career until her father’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment as a result of the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting brought her back to Memphis to provide him with moral support. (Former Senator Ford, long since released, accompanied his daughter to the Tennessee Equality Project’s fund-raising Gumbo Contest at Bridges downtown weekend before last.)

The District 7 position was formerly occupied by Lee Harris, who vacated it after his election year to the state Senate, where he is now that body’s Democratic leader. The seat is currently held on an interim basis by Berlin Boyd, sure to be a candidate in October.

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Editorial Opinion

Haslam’s “Good Faith” Issue

As chronicled elsewhere, Governor Bill Haslam began this week of legislative special session in Nashville with the challenge of persuading reluctant members of his Republican Party to suspend their aversion

to what they call Obamacare and accept his home-grown version of Medicaid expansion called Insure Tennessee.

Prior discussions of the matter in the media have focused almost entirely on the mechanics of the plan or the political matters at stake or the financial incentives available to Tennessee (and its hard-pressed hospitals) should the General Assembly opt to give its statutorily necessary approval to the proposal. Those financial stakes are large indeed, amounting to somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion annually. But the political obstacles are large, as well: GOP talking points against Obamacare (the vernacular name for the Affordable Care Act) are so well established that the governor’s arguments for Insure Tennessee had to be couched in terms that drew the broadest possible distinctions between his Tennessee variant and the federal act.

Accordingly, Haslam made much of marketplace methodologies embedded in Insure Tennessee — including an alternative plan-within-the-plan for vouchers to pay for private insurance, as well as requirements for co-pays and modest premiums for those new insurees opting for coverage under TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid). And the governor catered to home-state Republican sensitivities by adding an anecdote to his prepared speech involving his past entreaties to President Obama, along with those of other Republican governors, to allow Medicare funding to be dispensed to the states via block grants for the states to dispense as they wished.

But much of the governor’s speech was taken up, too, with appeals to the legislators’ hearts as well as to their heads. Opponents of Insure Tennessee have been shedding crocodile tears at the plan’s provision for discontinuing Insure Tennessee after two years if either the federal government or the Tennessee Hospital Association default on promised funding. That would drop thousands of new insurees from coverage, the critics say. To this, Haslam offered the common-sense rebuttal that two years of coverage are significantly better than no health-care coverage at all.

And he offered his listeners a real-world anecdote about a Tennessean whose stroke, resulting from his inability to afford health insurance, had “landed him in the hospital, followed by rehabilitation” and taken him out of the workforce. “He was a hard-working Tennessean who wasn’t able to get the care he needed on the front end and that has real consequences for him and his family. Having a stroke wasn’t only devastating to him and his family, it could have been prevented, and not preventing it is costly to all of us.”

The governor then, having argued facts and savings and marketplace models, laid the matter to rest on the bedrock issues of values and good will: “I think this is also an issue about who we are. My faith doesn’t allow me to walk on the other side of the road and ignore a need that can be met — particularly in this case, when the need is Tennesseans who have life-threatening situations without access to health care.”

Indeed. It’s a matter of good faith and we agree with the Governor: That’s the nub of the issue.

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Politics Politics Feature

Sentiment Divided on “Insure Tennessee”

NASHVILLE — Like his 11-minute re-inauguration speech delivered two weeks ago, Governor Bill Haslam’s 15-minute opening address Monday night to this week’s special session on Insure Tennessee, his Medicaid expansion plan, was brief and to the point and couched in accommodationist rhetoric.

The previous speech had no particular mission in mind other than to hint at a more assertive second term: “[W]e haven’t had nearly high enough expectations of ourselves. In many ways, we’ve settled and haven’t lived up to our full potential. So one thing I can guarantee you that we are not going to do in the next four years is coast to the finish line.” But Monday night’s address was designed to spell out a key resolve that could be crucial to the success or failure of that race to the finish line.

The good news, from the governor’s point of view, was the prolonged standing ovation he received upon entering the chamber Monday night — a sign of the general good will that the General Assembly, on both sides of the political aisle, continues to extend to Haslam.

The bad news, from Haslam’s point of view, was that, by general agreement, he still has — in the words of state Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin), who has been a prominent opponent of  the governor’s plan — “his work cut out for him.” Said Casada about House prospects: “He needs 50 out of 99, and right now he doesn’t have it.”

That outlook was echoed by state Representative Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), the Democrats’ House leader and a firm supporter of Insure Tennessee. Fitzhugh said, “He answered the questions. The main questions my friends on the Republican side have had. … The Republican caucus needs to show they have a concern for ‘the least of these’.'” The plan had “no downside,” said Fitzhugh, but, “I think he’s got a lot of work to do.”

State Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a foe, not just of the governor’s plan but of Medicaid expansion in general, said he thought opposition to Insure Tennessee was “mounting, the more we hear about it.”

Referencing a point Haslam had extemporized into his prepared remarks, to the effect that Republican governors had persistently expressed a wish to President Obama that Medicaid funding be presented to the states in the form of block grants, and that Insure Tennessee came close to that goal, Kelsey said, “My takeaway is this: The governor and I agree that we’d love to have a block grant in Tennessee, but that’s not what the president is offering.”

There were, however, signs that a bipartisan support coalition of Insure Tennessee from Republicans and Democrats (a distinct minority in the legislature that Haslam, however, had made a point of courting) might be possible.

In the immediate aftermath of the governor’s speech, state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat, and state Rep. Mark White, a Republican who represents East Memphis and the suburbs, agreed that Haslam had made enough distinctions between Insure Tennessee and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to coax reluctant GOP members to support the plan.

White himself had been one of those GOP members who’d been biding his time but now expressed support.”I think that was important for him to distance himself from the president,” White said. “He also gave a personal side. It’s not all politics. … The more you weigh it on our measuring scale, it weighs out that we need to do something.”

Two Democrats differed on the role of their party in the debate over Insure Tennessee. State Senator Lee Harris, the former city council member who was elected by Senate Democrats (5 members out of 33) to be minority leader, said, “It’s not about the Democrats. It’s not newsworthy what the Democrats are doing. That’s irrelevant. It’s about the Republicans. They have control of both chambers. If you’ve got control, you’ve got responsibility.”

State Representative G.A. Hardaway, another Memphis Democrat, begged to differ. Of the 26 Democrats in the 99-member House of Representatives, Hardaway said, “We hold the key in the House.”

• In his Monday night address opening the week of special session, the governor — Haslam being Haslam, a man of soft persuasion rather than faustian and bombast — artfully pitched an appeal that was simultaneously above partisan politics and designed to address what have been the main sticking points among GOP legislators.

The governor dutifully paid lip service to Republican talking points, loosing his own shots at what he consistently called Obamacare but taking pains to distinguish his own plan from the superstructure of the Affordable Care Act.

Haslam gave an explanation for why, in 2013, he had rejected the opportunity to expand Medicaid (TennCare in Tennessee) — an expansion that would have allowed the state to avail itself of about $1.5 billion annually, money which the state’s hospitals, charged with caring for indigent patients, contended they desperately needed.

He hadn’t accepted expansion then, the governor said, because “expanding a broken program doesn’t make sense. … But I also didn’t think that flat-out saying no to accepting federal dollars that Tennesseans are paying for — that are going to other states, and that could cover more Tennesseans who truly need our help — I didn’t think that made much sense either.”

Accordingly, he said, he decided to provide his own example of how a governmental health-care plan should work, spending the time since that decision in 2013 to devise what he told the assembled legislators is a two-year pilot program that has incorporated free-market principles, both through an optional voucher component for use with private insurance plans and through requiring co-pays and modest premiums — “skin in the game” — of those new insurees who chose to go through TennCare.

Haslam pointed out that Insure Tennessee would add no new costs to the state budget, since the Tennessee Hospital Association (THA) had guaranteed to pay any additional costs incurred once the federal government, after two years, dropped its own subsidy from 100 to 90 percent.

If either the federal government or the THA proved unable to follow through as promised, or if the state in two years’ time decided Insure Tennessee wasn’t a good fit, the state had been assured by court decisions and the state attorney general’s advice that it could discontinue the plan.

(Pointedly, the governor, in giving the address, dropped this line from his prepared remarks: “I understand the concern, but I think it’s worthy of mention that the United States of America has never missed a scheduled Medicaid payment.”)

As for the professed concern of Insure Tennessee skeptics regarding the pain of having to discontinue coverage for new insurees after two years, Haslam said, “If you gave your loved one an option: You can have health coverage now to address your very real need and with that the possibility that you might lose it in the future, or you could never have it, which would you choose? If you think about your loved one, I bet the answer is simple.”

Ultimately, said Haslam, the state simply had an obligation to the unfortunate and the indigent, one based in commonly held spiritual precepts. “My faith doesn’t allow me to walk on the other side of the road and ignore a need that can be met — particularly in this case, when the need is Tennesseans who have life-threatening situations without access to health care.”

• Back in Memphis, pent-up controversy was also moving toward some overdue discussion. On Wednesday’s committee agenda of the Shelby County Commission is a call for open discussion of the future of the Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE), which guides industrial and business expansion and awards economic incentives toward that end.

Republican member Steve Basar, chair of the commission’s economic development committee and the commission’s ex officio member of the 11-member EDGE board, placed the discussion item. Basar said he heard “rumblings” of discontent about EDGE on the commission, including possible calls for the board’s abolition, and, as an EDGE supporter, wanted to address it.

Much of the discontent was an adverse reaction to the EDGE board’s recent decisions on PILOTs (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes), but Basar said only minor modifications were needed.

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Editorial Opinion

Support Insure Tennessee

No one can say that we were lax in urging Governor Bill Haslam to find some way to come to terms with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Tennessee, with its large lower-income population and a financially threatened hospital network, needs to take advantage of the billion or so federal dollars that come annually with Medicaid expansion.

Had the Governor made his peace early on with the ACA (or Obamacare, as Republicans prefer to call it), he might have been able to get his plan across in quick order and relatively uncomplicated fashion. He chose to procrastinate, however, possibly to keep the restive Tea Party component in the Republican-dominated legislature at bay. He proclaimed the existence of something called “The Tennessee Plan,” which, he said, was in the process of creation and which, when complete, would form the basis of a waiver request with the Department of Health and Human Services.

We would later learn that there was — at that time — no such plan, not even much of a skeleton for it. And meanwhile the GOP majority, goaded on by determined ultra-conservative foes of Medicaid expansion (and perhaps even of Medicaid itself) like Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey, took advantage of the delay to pass legislation that requires approval by both houses of the General Assembly for any state involvement whatsoever with the ACA.

Haslam, it seemed, had put himself — and the state, especially its working poor and its medical providers — in a box from which there was no escape.

Well, who is to say that the age of miracles has passed? The governor, at length, did come up with a plan called “Tennessee Promise,” with a two-track modus operandi that would allow participants either to accept vouchers for use with private insurors or to come within TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid) with an obligation to make modest co-pays and premium payments. It seemed a genuine compromise between the ideology of the marketplace and governmental intervention to meet an obvious social need.

And Haslam’s plan possesses a “fail-safe” provision that allows for automatic discontinuation of the state’s program in case of default by either the federal government, which promises to provide 90 percent of funding after the first two (fully paid) years or the Tennessee Hospital Association, which has pledged to take care of the remaining 10 percent.

This last provision should have invalidated the oft-expressed doubts by critics of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee that the state would veer into ultimate insolvency by committing itself to the federal funding, but it hasn’t. The critics have merely shifted ground a bit, crying rhetorical crocodile tears and claiming that either the feds or the Hospital Association or both will weasel out in two years’ time and leave the impoverished masses once again without coverage.

To call this claim “disingenuous” is to give it too much credit. The population on which this bogus concern is lavished is without coverage now. Even in the critics’ implausible scenario, something now is far better than nothing, ever.

All sophistries aside, Haslam’s plan is entitled to full and bipartisan support in the February 2nd special session. We urge its passage, the sooner the better.

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Politics Politics Feature

It Was What It Was

The year 2014 began with a call for unity from several of the political principals of Memphis and Shelby County — remarkable circumstances given that just ahead was another one of those knock-down, drawn-out election brawls that characterize a big-ballot election year.

Speaking at an annual prayer breakfast on January 1st, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen called for an end to bipartisan bickering in Congress and touted the achievements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (aka Obamacare). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell asked for civility in county government, and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, amid a good deal of wrangling over city pension reform, among other matters, said something similar and declared, “I’m through with whose fault it is!”

Surely no one is surprised that few of these hopes were fully realized in the course of 2014.

Not that some concrete things didn’t get done. The nervy national website Wonkette crowned Tennessee state Representative Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) “S***muffin of the Year,” and, lo and behold, the voters of Knox County would come to a similar conclusion down the line, voting out the incumbent madcap whose most famous bills had come to be known, fairly or otherwise, as “Don’t Say Gay” and “Starve the Children.”

State Senator Brian Kelsey had mixed results, losing again on a renewed effort to force Governor Bill Haslam into a big-time school voucher program and in a quixotic attempt to strip Shelby County of two of its elected judges but getting his props from those — including a majority of Tennessee voters — who supported his constitutional amendment to abolish an income tax in Tennessee for all time.

All four constitutional amendments on the state ballot would pass — including one to strip away what had been some fairly ironclad protections of a woman’s right to an abortion and another to transform the selection and tenure procedures for state appellate judges. Another little-noticed amendment guaranteeing veterans the right to hold charity raffles also passed.

The battle over the key three amendments all reflected a growing concern that Republican-dominated state authority had begun to enlarge its control over local governments and individual citizens alike, not only in the nature of the constitutional amendments but in the legislature’s effort to override local authority in matters including firearms management, public school oversight, public wage policy, and the ability of localities to establish their own ethical mandates.

Shelby County Democrats, who had been swept by the GOP in 2010, had a spirited primary election, with most attention focusing on the mayor’s race between former County Commissioner Deidre Malone, incumbent Commissioner Steve Mulroy, and former school board member and New Olivet Baptist Church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

When votes were counted on May 6th, Malone emerged to become the head of a Democratic ticket that would challenge several well-established Republican incumbents. Democrats’ hopes were high at first, but two of their expected election-day stalwarts began to suffer self-destructive moments at an alarming rate.

The two were lawyer Joe Brown — the “Judge Joe Brown” of nationally syndicated TV fame; and County Commissioner Henri Brooks, a former legislator who had an abrasive way about her but who had recently won laurels as the watchdog on Juvenile Court who had forced the Department of Justice (DOJ) to mandate a series of reforms.

Both District Attorney General candidate Brown, through his celebrity and what was thought to be his ability to bankroll much of the Democratic ticket’s activity, and Juvenile court Clerk candidate Brooks, riding high on her DOJ desserts, were thought to be boons, but they rapidly became busts.

Brown, it turned out, had virtually no money to pass around, even for his own campaign efforts, and he got himself arrested for contempt in Juvenile Court. When, late in the campaign, he launched a series of lurid and seemingly unfounded attacks upon the private life of his opponent, Republican D.A. Amy Weirich, he was dead in the water.

Brooks engaged in successive misfires — browbeating a Hispanic witness before the commission; assaulting a woman she was competing with for a parking spot; and, finally, turning out not to have a legal residence within the commission district she represented.

The bottom line: Shelby County Democrats — underfunded, under-organized, and riven by internal rivalries — were overwhelmed once again on August 7th, with county Mayor Mark Luttrell, Weirich, and Sheriff Bill Oldham leading a Republican ticket that won everything except the office of county assessor, where conscientious Democratic incumbent Cheyenne Johnson held on against a little-known GOP challenger.

All things considered, the judicial races on August 7th went to the known and familiar, with almost all incumbents winning reelection on a lengthy ballot in which virtually every position in every court —General Sessions, Circuit, Criminal, Chancery, and Probate — was under challenge.

Meanwhile, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who had dispatched a series of Democratic Primary and general election challengers since his first election to Congress in 2006, faced what appeared in advance to be his most formidable primary foe yet in lawyer Ricky Wilkins. Cohen won again — though only by a 2-to-1 ratio, unlike the 4-to-1 victories he was used to.

The final elections of the year, including the referenda for the aforementioned package of constitutional amendments, would take place on November 4th.

But for the amendments, there was no suspense to speak of. Two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate — Gordon Ball and Terry Adams, both Knoxville lawyers — had run a spirited and close race in the primary, but winner Ball ran way behind Republican incumbent Senator Lamar Alexander, despite Alexander’s having barely eked out a primary win over unsung Tea Party favorite Joe Carr.

Haslam, the Republican gubernatorial incumbent, easily put away Charlie Brown, an unknown quantity from East Tennessee who had won the Democratic primary mainly on the strength of his comic-strip name.

Throughout the year, there had been persistent wrangles in City Hall between Wharton and members of the city council over dozens of matters — including pension and health-care changes, development proposals, and failures to communicate — with the result that influential councilmen like 2014 council Chairman Jim Stickland and Harold Collins were possible rivals to Wharton in a 2015 mayoral race that might draw in a generous handful of other serious candidates.

Toward year’s end, though, Wharton pulled off a series of coups — announcing new Target and IKEA facilities and appearing to finesse the pension and school-debt matters — that underscored his status as the candidate to beat.

In Nashville, Haslam seemed to have achieved the high ground, finally, with his espousal of a bona fide Medicaid-expansion plan, “Insure Tennessee,” and a determination to defend the Hall income tax and at least some version of educational standards. But battles over these matters and new attacks on legal abortion loomed.

We shall see what we shall see.

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Editorial Opinion

Light in the Legislative Tunnel

Okay, so what happened to gridlock? In Washington, there was the passage of the so-called “Cromnibus” spending bill, which provides safe passage for $1 trillion in federal expenditures through 2015. No showdowns, no filibusters or cloture battles, no threats to shut down the government.

Granted, there are some objectionable provisions, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) inveighed valiantly (but in vain) against one of them — a proviso that seemingly opens the door for big financial institutions covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to resume the trading in derivatives swaps that contributed so much to the Big Crash of 2008-9.

But congressional Democrats didn’t want another shutdown battle and, for a change, neither did Republicans, who may, after their virtual sweep at the polls this year, simply want a chance to prove they can actually govern. There is still a gridlock of sorts. The word “cromnibus,” incidentally, is an amalgamation of “continuing resolution” and “omnibus.” The former term, often abbreviated as “CR,” denotes a decision to continue with the previous year’s spending and authorizations in lieu of an agreement. But only one aspect of this year’s omnibus bill had to be dealt with in that manner — funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which the GOP held up so as to leverage DHS funding next spring against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Still, the end-of-year spending bill hearkens back to what, in comparison to gridlock, were the good old days of bipartisan wheeling and dealing, mutual backscratching, and backroom deals. That’s what constitutes “progress” in our time.

And in Nashville … After two years in which the state’s new Republican super-majority successfully blocked acceptance of millions of dollars in annual funding for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the GOP’s acquiescent  but well-intentioned Governor Bill Haslam has somehow wriggled his twisted arm free and cut a deal with the feds! And even Ron Ramsey, the arch-conservative state Senate speaker and lieutenant governor who has more or less directed legislative policy during Haslam’s tenure, has professed himself open-minded about the plan that the governor is calling “Insure Tennessee.”

Never mind that Insure Tennessee may or may not be an ideal way of coping with the problem of uninsured Tennesseans or of applying the substantial federal subsidies that come with acceptance of this aspect of ACA. The plan’s complicated methodology has a Rube Goldberg-like look to it — one that will, we hope, get spelled out via debate during the special legislative session Haslam has called for in early January.

The point is that if the GOP’s legislative super-majority, which has granted itself veto power over any proposed version of Medicaid expansion, can be brought to accept Insure Tennessee, and, if the feds do follow through with a waiver for Haslam’s alternative, there are real benefits. Most importantly, TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, would get a badly needed infusion of operating funds, enough to help rescue Tennessee’s hospitals, so many of which are teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Make no mistake: Neither in Washington nor in Nashville is right-wing tunnel vision over with. In some ways it may be just beginning. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel — something worth groping toward, anyhow.

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Editorial Opinion

Consistency on Abortion in Tennessee

Two weeks ago in this space, we ruminated a bit on the sad irony that Tennesseans had overwhelmingly voted back on August 7th to keep pure politics out of the appellate court system, only to see their judgment thwarted in the

immediate aftermath of the election. The state’s Supreme Court — apparently including the three justices whose careers had just been saved from a GOP-sponsored partisan purge by a 2-to-1 statewide vote — concurred in what surely looked like a plain-and-simple political act: the election of an avowedly Republican state attorney  general, Herb Slatery, who had until then been serving as the lawyer for GOP Governor Bill Haslam.

Slatery’s predecessor, the now deposed Robert Cooper, had by virtually all accounts served with distinction. The main disqualifying factor for him apparently was that he had been appointed to office by a previous Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen. That fact had put him on the hit list of the state’s reigning legislative power, Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, whose PAC had bankrolled much of the capaign against retaining Justices Gary Wade, Connie Clark, and Sharon Lee, all of whom had earned Ramsey’s wrath because — you guessed it — they, too, had been appointed by Bredesen.

No doubt Slatery is both an honest man and a competent lawyer. We have no reason to think otherwise. Our concern about his appointment has to do with the political context of his selection. It seems reasonably clear that the High Court’s vote was a de facto courtesy nod to the Republican Party, which unmistakably is now the governing body of state government. So much for the principle of checks and balances, although no doubt the justices were acting somewhat in the name of consistency.

For what it’s worth, that idea is inherent in one of the major issues on the forthcoming November 4th state ballot — the statewide referendum on Constitutional Amendment 1, which would essentially repudiate a state Supreme Court decision from 2000 in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist. By a 4-to-1 vote, the court established guidelines in its ruling that extended protection for abortion rights beyond what even the U.S. Supreme Court had established. The proposed Amendment 1 would severely shrink that protection, apparently putting in jeopardy even, in the words of the amendment, “circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother.”

The weekly Tennessee Journal, as even-handed and judicious a publication as there is in Tennessee, examined that fact last week in the light of the recent judicial-retention election and summarized its findings under the head: “An affirmative vote on Amendment 1 would repudiate court.” As the Journal noted, Ramsey had stated explicitly that a success for his purge campaign “would send a strong message that we expect our judges to interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it.”

As a corollary, these retention results would surely seem to mean, in the interests of consistency, that the Constitution should not be rewritten in the mode of Amendment 1.

Let the public be clear-minded where the reprieved justices may not have been.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

TN Supreme Court Surrenders on Attorney General

It was just a little over a month ago that Tennesseans did themselves proud by decisively rejecting a campaign, led by Republican Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, to purge three state Supreme Court justices — Gary Wade, Connie Clark, and Sharon Lee — in a retention election.

Although Ramsey did his best to malign the three for this or that alleged defect, the real offense of these distinguished jurists was that they had been appointed to office by a former Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen. The state’s voters obviously discerned this purely partisan motive in the purge campaign and voted by a 2-to-1 margin to retain the justices, who won’t be vulnerable for another eight years. So far, so good.

Ramsey, in his campaign against the three justices, had charged, among other things, that — with state Attorney General Robert Cooper coming up for reappointment or replacement in the wake of the election — they would be unlikely to appoint a state attorney general who would enlist in the national GOP’s ongoing legal vendetta against the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”), as Cooper had declined to do. The justices, quite properly, dismissed the charge as irrelevant to their oath of office, which requires them to avoid prejudgments and to remain free of political motives (indeed, the fact that supporters, as well as foes, kept referring to them as “Democrats” was an improper stretch).

There was a political sequel of sorts to the retention election. The three newly retained Bredesen appointees, along with two others who had been appointed by GOP Governor Bill Haslam, now had the duty of deciding whether to reappoint Cooper or name a replacement. Justice Lee, who in the wake of the retention election was named chief justice by her colleagues, made a public statement offering reassurance that politics would not play a role in the appointment decision. Coincidentally or not, though, the eventual choice of the justices was Herbert Slatery, who served Haslam in the same role that Cooper had served Bredesen, that of chief legal adviser to the governor.

The appointment stuck in the craw of state Representative Craig Fitzhugh (R-Ripley), the Democrats’ leader in the state House, who praised Cooper for his achievements as AG and professed disappointment “that our Supreme Court has capitulated to Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey and the very special interest groups that tried to replace our justices just one short month ago.” Continued Fitzhugh: “While the people have shown they can be trusted to preserve the integrity of the courts, the Supreme Court justices have shown they are too susceptible to political pressure.”

Was Fitzhugh too harsh? Well, there was a reaction from the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a Washington-based lobby that describes itself as “the only national organization whose mission is electing Republicans to the Office of Attorney General.” Said RAGA in a press release: “We are very pleased by the appointment of Mr. Slatery,” adding, after some boilerplate praise for Slatery’s legal prowess: “The appointment of Herbert Slatery brings the total number of Republican AGs across the country to 25.”  

We hope we — and Fitzhugh — are wrong, but it’s beginning to look like the defenders of nonpartisan justice in Tennessee, having won a battle only last month, have run up the white flag of surrender this month.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Endorsement Gate

“Lamar was proven right.” That’s the tagline at the end of one of Senator Lamar Alexander’s political ads. It follows a clip of Alexander and President Obama arguing over the cost of the Affordable Care Act. Alexander says premiums will go up. The president says it’s “not true.” So who’s right?

The Congressional Budget Office report on the health-care law says that premiums have gone down under Obamacare for comparable health insurance to that available before the law was passed. However, when you factor in people who didn’t have health insurance and therefore were paying nothing prior to the law’s passage, then yes, their rates have gone up — from nothing to something. In states that have opted in to the federal plan, rates have gone down, and the number of people who now have health insurance has dramatically risen. In other states, not so much.

So Lamar wasn’t “proven right.” In fact, a Washington Post “Pinocchio Test” of the ad says, “Alexander mixes up so many apples and oranges here that the ad is a virtual fruit basket,” and gives Lamar “two Pinocchios.” Meaning the ad has a high bull caca quotient.

Meanwhile, Alexander’s primary opponent Joe Carr is running ads condemning Alexander for supporting Obamacare. Oy.

And then there are Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey’s well-funded attack ads on three Tennessee Supreme Court justices, ads that link them to supporting, yup, Obamacare. The Tennesse high court has never issued a ruling of any kind on the subject. It’s a lie so blatant and low-down I’m amazed Ramsey can look at himself in the mirror.

Obama and Obamacare have become the ultimate stinkbombs for GOP candidates. Want to smear your opponent? Accuse him of supporting the president and/or the Affordable Care Act. It’s the new “He wants to take away your guns.”

And let’s not forget the “endorsementgate” brouhaha, as Flyer writer Chris Davis dubbed it. Ninth District Democratic congressional candidates Steve Cohen and Ricky Wilkins have spent the past two weeks sniping at each other over who is endorsed by the ACSFME union. This week, the ante was raised when a rogue fake “ballot” emerged wrongly suggesting Wilkins was endorsed by President Obama. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, are actually seeking to be connected with the president.

I’m beyond weary of seeing and hearing this stuff. Thursday can’t come soon enough. No more signs, at least until October. No more duplicitous, hateful ads for a blissful couple of months.

I’m so confident that the entire electorate shares these sentiments, that I’m preparing a bumper sticker: “Bruce Was Proven Right.”