Ron Ramsey – Page 4 – Memphis Flyer

Here they go again. This is the week scheduled for the Tennessee General Assembly’s consideration of several school bills relating to Memphis and Shelby County. Once again, we will see if the elected representatives of constituencies far away from the concerns of Shelby Countians will make another attempt to dictate our educational future. Galvanized into action by Senate majority leader Mark Morris (R-Collierville) and other Shelby County suburban legislators, the Assembly’s GOP majority has loyally complied each of the last two years — in 2011 passing Norris-Todd, the kicker of which was to enable suburban school districts to begin forming in August of this year, and following up with a pair of bills in 2012 designed to expedite that process.

Federal judge Hardy Mays struck down last year’s key bill, inasmuch as it, like the others, opened up the municipal-school-district process for Shelby County only and not statewide (those supportive Republican legislators from elsewhere may have been loyal, but they didn’t stop being self-interested — or mindful of their own constituents’ views). Given that the other two bills would seem to be vulnerable to the same judicial reasoning, whatever gets passed this year would seemingly need to apply everywhere. They are written that way, more or less, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll be a hard sell with the 2013 version of the General Assembly.

Whether or not, it’s time once again for Memphis to endure the legislative equivalent of a grade school time-out, to be told what it needs to do — or permit to be done — to satisfy the steely masterminds of the central state government in Nashville. It’s gotten to the point that when the Shelby County Commission took up the issue of expanding the Unified School Board from 7 to 13, suburban Republican commissioner Terry Roland, focusing on the unresolved issue of municipal school districts, opined that he would prefer to bypass any action by the commission and “call Nashville” to get something done to his liking.

Other members of the commission pointed out the obvious: that, where the legitimacy of school-related bills is concerned, it’s Hardy Mays who’ll be the judge of all that, not Mark Norris or Ron Ramsey, the increasingly imperial (but undeniably shrewd) head of the Senate, or any other legislator from wheresoever. Doing a reduction on that, geographically speaking, the judgment will come from Memphis, not Nashville.

And it’s not just schools where the urge exists to dictate in Nashville (and to slavishly follow in the Memphis suburbs). The General Assembly has in recent years passed bill after bill taking away the power of local jurisdictions to regulate their own affairs, and, alas, Governor Bill Haslam has shrugged and signed them into law (demurring so far only in the case of a 2012 bill curtailing the rights of Vanderbilt, in his own backyard).

Most recently, the notorious Glen Casada, a GOP House member from suburban Nashville, has begun to push through a bill restricting the right of localities to pass legislation affecting wage issues — like wage-theft ordinances that have been, or were about to be, considered by the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

Call Nashville indeed, and tell the folks up there to stop treading on us.

The naysayers seem to have had their way with Governor Bill Haslam, who announced on Monday that his administration would not attempt to establish a state-run health exchange to administer the

Affordable Care Act in Tennessee.

The governor had been supposed beforehand, on the basis of his professed confidence in TennCare’s experience in health-care matters, to favor creating a state exchange instead of leaving it to the federal government to set up its own. And the state’s insurance agencies had made it clear that they, too, preferred such a solution, which would allow them to keep on dealing with familiar faces and procedures. Moreover, taking a hands-on approach to administering the act would clearly have given the state an opportunity to tailor-make a system to Tennessee’s specific needs and hold down costs.

But the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers, in and out of the General Assembly, are still blindly raging against what they call “Obamacare” as amounting to a federal takeover of health care and have consistently made it clear they want as little as possible to do with it. Never mind that last summer’s Supreme Court decision in favor of the act, followed up by President Obama’s election victory, made implementation of the act inevitable, and, in those circumstances, a state’s declining to fashion its own managerial agency ensures a maximum amount of federal control and minimizes the prospect of the state’s ability to impose cost-control measures.

The foes of the Affordable Care Act, who mounted a noisy demonstration against it in Nashville just this past weekend, seemed not to understand that the act would be coming to Tennessee one way or another — and a state government default on managerial responsibility would be the very thing that would ensure the much-dreaded “federal takeover.”

The bottom line, though, was that a state-run exchange would have had to be approved by the legislature, and Haslam clearly lacked any enthusiasm for the kind of wrangle that would have entailed. So he made what he insisted was not a political but a “business” decision — a business decision that may end up costing the state more money.

Haslam is the chief executive of Tennessee, and leadership is both his privilege and his duty. He was elected to provide it, and, much as we’d like to give the governor the benefit of the doubt about his choice in the Affordable Care matter, we can’t shake the feeling that he has forfeited an opportunity.

There is one more health-related issue for him to decide on: whether to expand TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid) some 38 percent beyond the currently recognized poverty line, a course of action originally mandated by the Affordable Care Act but one which the Supreme Court has rendered optional. To do so would invite something of a cornucopia in federal funding, though it would decrease percentage-wise at some point in the future.

We suspect there’s profit for the state in that course and hope the governor will agree.