From left, Majority Leader William Lamberth, Speaker Cameron Sexton, and Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison speak with reporters on February 22, 2024, about upcoming voucher legislation from the Tennessee House of Representatives. GOP leaders filed their bill on Monday. (Marta W. Aldrich / Chalkbeat)
Three school voucher proposals now before Tennessee lawmakers would create a new statewide program that eventually could open eligibility to all K-12 students, regardless of family income.
But the similarities end there.
The latest version, filed Monday by House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) has no testing requirements for students who accept public funding to attend private schools. Gov. Bill Lee’s version doesn’t either, but Senate leaders say that approach is a non-starter.
The House plan also would make it easier for middle-class families to access the program during its first year than under the two versions filed last week.
Proposals by the governor and the Senate would reserve the first 10,000 slots for families who are at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. But the House version would bump that to 400 percent of the poverty level, which equates to $124,800 for a family of four — a departure from Lee’s 2019 Education Savings Account law aimed at low-income families who attend low-performing schools in three urban areas.
The biggest difference, however, is in the House’s sweeping attempt to address a plethora of long-standing concerns by public school officials in a bill purportedly about school choice.
From complaints about overtesting of students to the cost of health care insurance for public school teachers, the 39-page proposal devotes far more pages to existing public school policies than new ones for vouchers.
Last week, House Speaker Cameron Sexton called the upcoming omnibus-style bill an “all-encompassing approach” that’s based on feedback from public school leaders during recent months.
“It’s not just about choice; it is about K-12 education,” Sexton said.
But Democratic leaders vowed that no members of their outnumbered party will support any of the voucher proposals, even if some include policies that they’ve fought for in the past.
“They’re trying to buy votes,” said Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville). “They’re just throwing in everything they can to try to get enough votes to pass this voucher scam.”
Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) who leads the Senate, said he’d “probably rather stick with the issues at hand” instead of expanding the bill’s scope beyond vouchers.
The legislation could be taken up Tuesday by a House subcommittee and Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee. But GOP leaders say it will be weeks before any votes are held.
Non-voucher proposals for public schools under the House bill include:
Reducing testing time and possibly pivoting from the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program to a different “statewide standardized assessment.”
Increasing the state’s coverage of the cost of medical insurance for teachers and staff from 45 percent to 60 percent.
Phasing out the Achievement School District, the state’s turnaround district for low-performing schools, on July 1, 2026.
Adding several pathways beyond those outlined in a 2021 literacy law for fourth graders to get promoted if they don’t score proficient on this year’s TCAP in English language arts.
Reducing the number of required evaluations for higher-performing teachers.
Extending to eight years the validity of practitioner and professional teacher licenses.
Allowing high school students to take career readiness assessments instead of retaking the ACT exam.
Increasing the funding weight for small school systems from 5 percent to 8 percent under the state’s new K-12 funding structure known as the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act.
Reducing the frequency of student screenings through the state’s learning intervention program known as RTI.
Much of the disagreement over universal vouchers centers on the voucher program’s cost and how much private schools should be held accountable for results if they accept taxpayer money.
All three pieces of legislation would offer 20,000 vouchers this fall. But the House legislation stipulates that the program would increase by 20 percent annually if funding is available, while Lee wants to open it up to any student in the second year.
The governor proposes to give each recipient $7,075 this fall, which would cover about 62 percent of the average $11,344 cost of attending a private school in Tennessee, according to Private School Review.
Legislative staff released a fiscal analysis Monday showing the governor’s program would cost $144 million next fiscal year, which Lee has included in his proposed budget; $346 million the following year for an estimated 47,000 participants; and then exceeding that amount in subsequent years when “the liability to the state could significantly grow.”
Fiscal agents said over 1.12 million students would eventually be eligible to participate, including 155,650 students currently attending nonpublic schools.
“Due to the universal nature of the program, it is assumed that students already attending private school will seek the additional funding through the EFS Program,” the analysts wrote.
The analysts also noted that none of the legislative proposals include a plan to help offset an anticipated decrease in local revenue for public schools as students pivot to private schools.
Gov Bill Lee speaks with voucher supporters at New Hope Christian Academy, a private school in Memphis, during a visit in December, to promote his Education Freedom Scholarship Act. House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who is supporting the governor’s proposal, also spoke. (Photo courtesy of State of Tennessee)
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Gov. Bill Lee and Senate leaders unveiled dueling proposals Wednesday to bring universal school vouchers to Tennessee. House leaders are expected to release a third version later this week.
Testing accountability stands out as a key difference in multiple amendments filed as part of a Republican campaign to eventually give all Tennessee families the option to use public money to pay for private schools for their children. The Senate plan also calls for open enrollment across public school systems.
Lee’s seven-page plan does not require participating students to take annual tests to measure whether his Education Freedom Scholarship Act leads to better academic outcomes. The governor has said that parental choice provides ultimate accountability.
The Senate’s 17-page proposal requires recipients in grades 3-11 to take some type of norm-referenced tests approved by the state Board of Education, which could include state tests that public school students take under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP.
Assessments must include a third-grade test in English language arts and an eighth-grade test in math; the grades are considered benchmark years for learning those skills. Eleventh-grade recipients would also have to take the ACT, SAT, or a similar exam to assess their readiness for continuing their education after high school.
“The testing component is critical,” Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol) told Chalkbeat. “We have a responsibility to share with Tennesseans how this is working.”
The developments show divisions at the state Capitol, despite a GOP supermajority, about key details of the biggest education proposal of Lee’s tenure, even before legislative debate begins in public. Lundberg’s committee is scheduled to take up the issue next week.
The governor wants to start with up to 20,000 students statewide this fall and eventually open up the program so any K-12 student can use a $7,075 annual voucher, regardless of family income. His earlier Education Savings Account law, which squeaked through the legislature with a historic and controversial House vote in 2019, targeted students from low-income families in low-performing schools in Memphis and Nashville but remains under-enrolled, even with the addition of Hamilton County last fall.
Cost is expected to be a major hurdle for Lee’s voucher expansion plan in a state that prides itself on being fiscally conservative.
Tennessee government has a nearly $378 million budget shortfall through the first six months of its current fiscal year, according to a revenue report released last week.
Even so, Lee’s proposed $52.6 billion spending plan for the next fiscal year includes $144 million annually for vouchers and $200 million to grow state parks and natural areas, all while slashing corporate business property taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Over the weekend, Rep. Bryan Richey (R-Maryville), told a local town hall that, although he supports statewide vouchers, he expects to vote against this year’s proposal over budget concerns and the lack of accountability provisions.
The Daily Times reported that Richey compared the upcoming legislative process to baking a cake as he urged his constituents to engage early with lawmakers while the proposals are in committees.
“Once the ingredients are in the batter and it’s all mixed up, we’re not going to be able to go in there and pull the egg back out or get the oil out,” he said.
Lee’s proposal did not look markedly different from draft legislation that was inadvertently filed in the Senate in late January due to a miscommunication, then pulled a short time later. Vouchers would be funded through a separate scholarship account, not the funding structure currently in place for public schools.
But the Senate version aligns funding with the state’s new public school formula known as Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement, or TISA. And it would allow students to enroll in any school system, even if they’re not zoned for it.
“We want open enrollment so you can transfer anywhere,” Lundberg said. “It’s not just for private schools. The funding follows the student.”
House leaders have been huddling for weeks with key stakeholders to get their feedback for an omnibus-style amendment that’s expected to come out on Thursday.
“I look forward to reading the House proposal, but there are obviously already major discrepancies,” said JC Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, who has been in some of those meetings.
“I really don’t see how these versions can be reconciled this year,” added Bowman, a voucher critic. “If they’re hell-bent on doing this, they need to at least take the time to get it right.”
But a statement from the governor’s office said the various proposals show “an encouraging amount of engagement in this process.”
“The governor has repeatedly emphasized that the Education Freedom Scholarship Act is a framework, built upon the foundation that parents should have choices when it comes to their child’s education, regardless of income or ZIP code,” the statement said.
The bills are sponsored by Senate and House majority leaders Jack Johnson of Franklin and William Lamberth of Portland. You can track the legislation through the General Assembly’s website.
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Gov. Bill Lee delivers his State of the State address Monday evening. Credit: State of Tennessee
Gov. Bill Lee renewed his call for private school vouchers for any student across Tennessee on Monday, and he also set aside $144 million in his proposed state budget to pay for the new program for up to 20,000 students in its first year.
For traditional public schools, the Republican governor asked the legislature to raise the annual base pay for teachers from $42,000 to $44,500, in keeping with his pledge last year to get the profession’s minimum salary to $50,000 by the 2027-28 school year. (Raising the base pay has a domino effect and increases the pay of more experienced teachers, too.)
Lee also wants to invest $200 million to grow state parks and natural areas while simultaneously cutting corporate taxes amid a downturn in state revenues. But he maintained that Tennessee has “a very strong economy” to pay for all the changes.
The governor outlined his list of wants Monday evening during his 2024 address before the General Assembly, which will take up Lee’s voucher proposal and the budget in the months ahead.
He opened his remarks by calling Tennessee a “model for economic prosperity” and reminding lawmakers that state revenues are still 40 percent higher than three years ago.
However, after years of being flush with cash, the state faces a $610 million budget shortfall this year, and many lawmakers are leery of approving a universal school voucher program that Lee wants to be available to any K-12 student in 2025-26. Currently, Tennessee offers vouchers to about 3,000 low-income families in three urban counties, but his Education Freedom Scholarship Act would open them up to families in all 95 counties, eventually with no family income restrictions.
“2024 is the year to make school choice a reality for every Tennessee family,” he said, drawing a standing ovation from many legislators — but not everyone in the GOP-controlled legislature — as well as frequent jeers from some spectators in the gallery.
“There are thousands of parents in this state who know their student would thrive in a different setting, but the financial barrier is simply too high,” Lee continued. “It’s time that we change that. It’s time that parents get to decide — and not the government — where their child goes to school and what they learn.”
Lee, a Williamson County businessman who graduated from public schools in Franklin, near Nashville, touted more than $1.8 billion in new investments in public education since he became governor in 2019.
“We can give parents choice and support public schools at the same time,” he said. “You’ll hear me say that over and over again. These two ideas are not in conflict.”
The governor also released his $52.6 billion state government spending plan to begin July 1. The total was down from Tennessee’s $62.5 billion budget for the current fiscal year because of flattening revenues and expiring federal funds appropriated during the pandemic.
He proposed $8 million to hire 114 more school-based behavioral health specialists amid record reports of students experiencing stress, depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges exacerbated by the pandemic.
Other recurring funding recommendations include $30 million to pay for summer learning programs; $3.2 million to expand access to advanced placement courses for high school students; and $2.5 million to pay for a universal reading screener as part of the state’s literacy initiative, all to offset federal funding that is drying up.
Lee is asking for $15 million in one time funding to help charter schools with facility costs.
The governor also announced that his administration will bring the legislature a bill designed to help parents oversee their child’s social media activity.
“It will require social media companies to get parental consent for minors to create their own accounts in Tennessee,” Lee said.
Such legislation would widen the state’s push against social media giants.
Last fall, Tennessee joined a coalition of states suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is accused of violating consumer protection laws and deceptively marketing its platforms to adolescents to the detriment of their mental health.
And some Tennessee school districts have joined a growing list of school systems nationwide that are suing major social media companies like TikTok and YouTube over a crisis in student mental health.
But in the wake of last year’s shooting at a private Nashville school — where three children, three staff members, and the shooter died — the governor offered no new initiatives aimed at improving school safety or decreasing gun violence, other than funding to hire 60 more state troopers.
Last year, after the March 27 tragedy, the legislature approved $140 million in grants to place an armed law enforcement officer in every Tennessee public school. But the legislature rebuffed the governor’s call for a law to help keep guns out of the hands of people deemed at risk of hurting themselves or others.
Remarks about Lee’s universal voucher plan, announced in November, drew quick responses from the leaders of the state’s two largest teacher organizations.
“The concept of universal vouchers would be costly to the state, and we urge the Tennessee General Assembly to move slowly,” said JC Bowman, executive director of the Professional Educators of Tennessee.
“In particular, we have concerns over the lack of income-eligibility requirements and accountability,” he continued. “Our state must avoid any program viewed as a tax subsidy for existing private school families or a tax bailout for struggling private schools.”
Tanya T. Coats, president of the Tennessee Education Association, said Lee’s plan shows that vouchers have never been about helping economically disadvantaged families, as the governor first characterized it in 2019.
“The goal has always been to privatize public education and use public dollars to fund private school education, which goes against our Tennessee values,” Coats said.
Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee enters the House chambers and greets Lt. Gov. Randy McNally for Lee’s sixth State of the State address. (Photo: John Partipilo)
Entering the second year of a second four-year term, Gov. Bill Lee is singing the same chorus he did when he started five years ago: A heavy dose of private-school vouchers is the solution for Tennessee.
In the annual State of the State speech, Lee presented a $52.6 billion spending plan the day after he committed to send Tennessee National Guardsmen to Texas to provide backup to federal personnel on patrol there.
Lee entered office in January 2019 with a plan to offer students public money to attend private schools, as well as to bolster charter schools, which are privately held but officially considered part of public school systems. The state also has boosted K-12 spending by about $3 billion in five years, $1.8 billion from the state level.
After a contentious vote that led to an FBI investigation, in addition to a protracted lawsuit, his education savings account plan took effect two years ago.
As he starts his sixth year in office amid flattening state revenue and a looming business tax break caused by “significant legal risk,” Lee is pushing a $141 million voucher plan for up to 20,000 students to go to private schools, this time without as many requirements to qualify financially. The details for his bill haven’t quite tumbled out completely, but he continued the sales pitch Monday night in the State of the State address.
Less than half of the crowd stood and cheered as Lee introduced his proposal, and people jeered from the balconies, even as the governor said he wants to avoid the “status quo.”
“There are thousands of parents in this state who know their student would thrive in a different setting, but the financial barrier is simply too high,” Lee said during his annual address Monday. “It’s time that we change that. It’s time that parents get to decide — and not the government — where their child goes to school and what they learn … 2024 is the year to make school choice a reality for every Tennessee family.”
In his pitch, the governor also maintains the argument that the state has put an “unprecedented focus” on public schools and he noted Monday the two ideas “are not in conflict.”
The state’s revenues are 46 percent higher than they were four years ago, increasing to $19 billion from about $11 billion. The state is weaning itself off the flow of federal funding that came down during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet Lee is pushing for a franchise tax rebate of $1.2 billion and $400 million reductions for the next few years after 80 companies balked at paying the property portion of the state’s franchise tax.
Even though some financial experts have said the state could fight big business efforts to reduce the tax, the Lee Administration and Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office recommended the refunds and reduction because of “significant legal risk.” Officials say no lawsuit is pending.
Democrats criticized the governor’s proposals, saying Tennesseans are being told they should support a “scam” to defund public schools and give large corporations another tax break. No sales tax holiday is scheduled for the coming fiscal year that starts July 1 after the state gave a three-month break from the grocery sales tax last fall.
They point out Lee contends Tennessee is among the nation’s leaders in low taxes and several other financial categories, yet the state is seeing rural hospitals close and money diverted that could go to public schools.
“We ain’t leading nothing when we’re leaving so many people behind.”
Sen. London Lamar (D-Memphis)
“We ain’t leading nothing when we’re leaving so many people behind,” said Senate Minority Caucus Chairman London Lamar of Memphis.
Lamar said the franchise tax break will cost the state $8.3 billion over a decade while the private-school voucher plan will take $800 million in its second year when it could become available to every student. She noted companies will be getting a “fat check” while hourly workers will receive no tax breaks.
Democrats point toward increases in gun violence amid softer gun laws and personal bankruptcies that forced working families to struggle while wealthy business owners receive treatment with kid gloves.
Besides his private-school voucher move, Gov. Lee is proposing legislation to stop the theft of musicians’ voices through AI, calling it the Elvis Act.
He also plans to introduce legislation dealing with the protection of young people from social media. The measure would enable parents to oversee their children’s use of the Internet by requiring new social media accounts.
In addition, Lee said he plans to make hundreds of rule changes and cut permitting regulations to streamline government but gave no details.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
Tennessee lawmakers are making things harder on the poor and easier on the rich, and those old-timey class frictions are heating up in the rifts.
Republicans blame technical glitches and piles of red tape they created as obstacles to get millions of dollars to help low-income families here. Meanwhile, they cut taxes for the business class last year, plan to cut even more this year, and hope to free up more of everyone’s tax dollars to help everyone — no matter how much money they have — pay for private schools.
Gun violence dominated debate and headlines around the Tennessee General Assembly in 2023. Many vow to keep the issue in front of lawmakers in 2024. But if a school shooting in Nashville during last year’s regular session and an entire special session on gun violence last summer won’t move GOP lawmakers to act, rays of hope on the issue seem faint.
It’s way too early to predict what issue(s) may dominate discussions at the State Capitol in the coming weeks. But money seems an early leader, especially as news came late last year that once-hot state revenues are cooling thanks in large part to those 2023 GOP tax cuts.
Money matters have not seen center stage in Tennessee for awhile. The state’s budget has been pushed up and up in recent years with nary a cut in sight. That’s partly due to the new-ish ability to collect online sales taxes and a major surge in revenues from those business taxes in the past. But that won’t likely be the case this year.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is expected to unveil his new budget for Tennessee on Monday, during the annual State of the State address. Projected revenues — how much money officials think we’ll have to spend in the next year — will likely flatten.
This could present some difficult decisions for lawmakers, especially some on the House side, who may have not yet dealt budget cuts. If cuts come, it will be especially interesting to see where the state’s GOP-dominated purse-string-holders will make them (especially since they made the cuts necessary). This could also likely flatten the state’s ability to fund any new initiatives. (Think of it like this, if you quit a job, you might not have the money to pay for your existing car and you damn sure can’t buy a new one.)
Budgets are more than numbers. Budgets are priorities. For a household, that could mean the difference in saving for college later or going on vacation now. For local governments, that could mean the difference in more police or better parks. With its tax cuts last year, the Tennessee GOP prioritized at least one thing: more long-term money in the bank for the state’s businesses.
Now, as money matters begin to creep into the state spotlight once again, some old, tense questions are rising. Who pays for the government? Who does the government work for? Who wins? Who struggles?
So many of these questions have root in Tennessee’s overarching economic development model. That is, basically, how do we organize our economy? How do we build it?
Republicans here love to tout Tennessee as one of the most “business-friendly” states in the union. But don’t just take their word for it. Yahoo! Finance put the state in its top 10 for business friendliness last year and MSNBC ranked it in the top 3, both using different methodologies.
Tennessee’s economy, like many other Southern states, works on the basic trickle-down theory that lower business taxes will attract more businesses, which will hire more people and create more wealth that will “trickle down” to the lower classes.
Except it doesn’t, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The high tide promised by this economic theory does not lift all boats, it said. For a more in-depth look at how this plays out in Tennessee and across the South, see below (Economic Policy Institute Report).
Here, we’ll look at some issues and opinions on money and class that might shape debates as the legislature heads back to Nashville.
The lowest 20 percent of earners in Tennessee spend 12.8 percent of their total annual household income on taxes. (Chart: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)
The poor and hungry
Back in 2019, The Beacon Center, a free market think tank in Nashville, discovered the Lee administration quietly sat on a stockpile of $730 million meant to help working poor families in Tennessee. For years, Tennessee got $190 million from the federal government to help these families get on their feet with monthly checks for childcare, transportation, and more.
Instead of finding ways to getting all of the money to needy families, Lee just did not. The initial discovery of the funds in 2019 led some on social media to decry Lee’s money management. Others saw GOP disdain for the poor.
“This is why [I march for universal basic income] today, because of villainous shit-holes like the governor of Tennessee who is hoarding $732 M in TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] money instead of spending it on reducing poverty,” reads a tweet from the time from Scott Santens, founder of the Income to Support All Foundation.
By 2021, the fund ballooned to nearly $800 million. Thanks to Beacon, a plan is now in place to spend that money down.
However, Lee’s plan puts a hurdle between those needy families and the money. Rather than go directly to families in need, the funds will in large part go to organizations or health departments that will give them temporary aid.
Lee administration officials said it has found a home for $717 million of the TANF reserve. But state Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) wants more in the hands of actual needy families. Introduced last week, her bill would increase TANF payments to cover rising inflation costs each year.
Meanwhile, thousands of families in Tennessee have less literal food on the table thanks to Lee administration computer problems. Last summer the Tennessee Department of Human Services (TDHS) updated some computer software. A glitch in the system resulted in a backlog of benefits for 35,000 recipients of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), sometimes called food stamps.
TDHS Commissioner Clarence Carter said his team hopes to have the backlog cleared by March. He also said he’s not dragging his feet, telling state lawmakers last week that his team has “an almost desperate sense of urgency to get this right.” Tennessee Lookout editor Holly McCall pointed out this “kicker” from their story on the matter: “DHS officials noted that the staff brought in to help are keenly aware of the importance of the work: some department staff rely on food stamps themselves.”
Who pays?
Tennessee has the third-most regressive tax system in the country, according to the seventh annual “Who Pays?” report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). Regressive taxes are those paid equally by all, no matter how much money they make. These, of course, hit lower-income taxpayers the hardest.
In Tennessee, this means the lowest 20 percent of earners (those making less than $21,000 each year) spend 12.8 percent of their total annual household income on taxes. The top 1 percent (those making over $661,600 each year) spend just 3.8 percent of their total income on taxes here. The poorest pay more than three times as much as the wealthy.
“States such as Florida, Tennessee, and Texas are often described as ‘low tax’ due to their lack of personal income taxes,” reads the report. “While this characterization holds true for high-income families, these states levy some of the nation’s highest tax rates on the poor.”
State Senator London Lamar (Photo: Dawn Majors | US capitol)
A tale of two tax cuts
State Sen. London Lamar (D-Memphis) can go back to 2011 and rattle off a list of GOP-sponsored policies “that have truly benefited the wealthy and big corporations.” The repeal of the millionaire estate tax. The repeal of the luxury gift tax. A repeal of income tax on stocks and bonds. A reduction of the jet fuel tax. Corporate exemptions to the sales tax. Exemptions for corporate income taxes.
“Our tax policy is incentivizing businesses for keeping people poor,” Lamar said. “I say that because since 2011 and when the Republicans got in office, the main tax reform and benefits have truly benefited the wealthy and big corporations.
“So, the question is, where are the priorities for those citizens who are working the hardest to contribute to our economy?”
Well, the GOP cut taxes for working-class families just last year. Well, kinda sorta. And it wasn’t much. And it wasn’t forever. But …
Remember that odd, three-month cut on the state’s grocery tax last year? It was a $273 million part of the $400 million Tennessee Works Tax Act, “the largest single tax cut in Tennessee history.” It cut the 4 percent tax for everyone from August to October. Then, the tax went straight back onto receipts.
It was a head-scratcher to many and seemed a solution to a problem that didn’t exist (except, y’know, that Tennessee is one of only 13 states that still tax groceries). Why? Where did this cut come from? Even folks on Reddit couldn’t pin the motivation on some coarse design to win votes because there was no upcoming election.
But it was the remaining cuts in the Tax Act that smarted some working-class taxpayers. While they got a one-time deal that put about $100 in their pockets, the state’s business class got a permanent tax cut worth about $127 million that would put thousands of dollars in their bank accounts each and every year.
The Tax Act seemed to prove Lamar’s notion. Meaningful, permanent cuts for those with means; shallow, temporary cuts for everyone else. (Though, legislation has been filed for this year’s session to permanently cut Tennessee’s grocery tax.)
This might all come into sharper focus later, especially if revenues continue to fall. Because it’s lost revenues from those business tax cuts knocking multi-million-dollar holes in the state budget.
So, should lawmakers indeed need to make cuts to programs it offers Tennessee’s taxpayers, it won’t be because the majority of them got a brief respite from grocery taxes.
Chart: Economic Policy Institute
#VoucherScam
Capitol-watchers have said Lee’s controversial plan to expand his school voucher program could be the biggest fight in Nashville this year. Lee eventually wants to expand the program to every student for any kind of school — public, private, charter, or home.
But the program would allow the vouchers, worth about $7,075 per student each year, for all students, with no income requirements. This means wealthy parents — who now pay taxes for public schools and tuition at private schools — could divert funds from the public school system.
The fight over the legislation may prove to be another class battle that could heat up in Nashville this year. For proof, dig around X for #LeesVoucherScam.
“The voucher scam takes tax dollars from our neighborhood public schools to pay for the private school education of the wealthy,” tweeted Teri Mai, a Democratic candidate running for a House seat in Middle Tennessee. “Simply put, the school voucher scam defunds public schools by funneling your tax dollars to private and religious schools.”
Economic Policy Institute Report
Southern politicians tout the region’s “business-friendly” economic development policies, but a new study finds those policies are rooted in racism and have failed most people who live here.
The October study is from Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank focused on “the needs of low-and-middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.” The study looks at job growth, wages, poverty, and state GDP. The data, EPI said, “show a grim reality.”
The group characterized the Southern economic development model as one with “low wages, low taxes, few regulations on businesses, few labor protections, a weak safety net, and vicious opposition to unions.”
The state of Tennessee basically agrees with this and shouts it in all caps (literally) on its website under the “business climate” section.
“We believe in high expectations, low debt, and a pro-business regulatory environment,” reads the page from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. “Tennessee is proud to be a right-to-work state [also noting Tennessee’s low union participation] with no personal income tax. Our state and local tax burdens are among the lowest in the country, and our state budget operates with a healthy surplus, rather than a deficit.”
The EPI study said this does not work for everyone.
“While this economic model has garnered vast amounts of riches for the wealthiest people across the region, it is leaving most Southerners with low wages, underfunded public services, a weak safety net in times of economic downturns, deep racial divisions, and high rates of poverty,” said report author Chandra Childers, a senior policy and economic analyst for EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network.
Here are a few key takeaways from the report:
• Job growth across the South has failed to keep up with population growth. The share of prime-age workers (ages 25–54) who have a job is lower than the national average in most Southern states.
• Workers in Southern states tend to have lower earnings. Median earnings in nine Southern states are among the lowest in the nation, even after adjusting for lower cost of living in the South.
• Poverty rates are above the national average in most Southern states. Louisiana and Mississippi have the highest poverty rates in the nation, with nearly one in five residents living in poverty.
• Child poverty is highest in the South compared to any other region. At 20.9 percent, child poverty rates in the South are 3.7 percentage points higher than the region with the next-highest child poverty rate — the Midwest (17.2 percent).
• Southern states are among the lowest-GDP states. Nine of the 15 states with the lowest per-worker GDP are in the South.
The racist remnant of the Southern economic development model, according to EPI, is that business owners in the South continue to rely on “large pools of cheap labor,” particularly Black and brown people. The study points back to slavery in the South when Black people were not paid at all and then to Pullman porters who were “forced to rely on tips” after slavery ended. Now, incarcerated individuals can be required to work with no pay at all, the study said.
“The racist roots of this model have been obscured and have been replaced by a more acceptable ‘pro-business’ narrative,” reads the study. “The pro-business narrative suggests that low wages, low taxes, anti-union policies, a weak safety net, and limited regulation on businesses creates a rising tide that ‘lifts all boats.’”
Tennessee policies fit into this model, the study said, as the state has no minimum wage, no income tax, a high sales-tax burden for all residents, no expanded Medicaid program, a low per-worker GDP, and more.
Poverty is higher in Tennessee than in other parts of the country. This is especially true for people of color and particularly women of color, according to the data. The highest rates of poverty across the South are experienced by Black women. One in five lives in poverty, but it’s not due to an unwillingness to work, the study says. Black women have a higher employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio than women from any other racial or ethnic group in the South.
“One reason Black women’s poverty rates remain high in the South — despite a relatively high EPOP — is that they are disproportionately employed in jobs consistent with the occupations they were largely limited to during and after the end of slavery: care work, cleaning, and food production, including agricultural and animal slaughter work,” reads the study. “Because this work is largely done by Black, brown, and immigrant workers, consistent with the Southern economic development model, these jobs pay very low wages.”
Wages are lower in Tennessee than in other parts of the country, and again it’s especially true for people of color and particularly women of color, according to the report.
“On average, Black women in the South are paid $35,884 at the median and Hispanic women just $30,984, compared with $58,008 for white men,” reads the report.
If the Tennessee economic model is working like politicians claim, where does the money go? The study says it goes to the wealthiest Tennesseans. The top 20 percent richest Tennesseans share more than half (51 percent) of the state’s total income. The top 5 percent share 23 percent of the state’s aggregate income. The bottom 20 percent share just 3.4 percent.
“Many Southerners may believe their politician’s arguments that the Southern economic development model will deliver good, well-paying jobs,” reads the report. “However, the data presented here show clearly and emphatically that this model has failed those living in Southern states.”
The last week of January is National School Choice Week, a week dedicated to advocating for policies that promote education freedom for families, allowing parents to choose the education best suited for their children. However, the spotlight on support for school choice should extend beyond one week, especially being that it is one of the few nonpartisan issues that is popular throughout the country — and not just with Republican primary voters, but also among 71 percent of all voters, across all demographics and the general electorate.
Tennessee is one of 13 states with an education savings account program, which allows lower-income families to receive approximately $7,000 per year in private school tuition assistance. Growing up in a zip code where poverty ran rampant, I was able to qualify for an education savings account, an opportunity that changed my life path completely.
Joi Taylor (Photo: Priscilla Foreman)
My mom and my grandmother were the matriarchs of the family, and my school choice journey began with them. They were the biggest advocates for my siblings and me, always looking for opportunities to help us get ahead and seeking resources to break down the barriers we faced in accessing a quality education.
Instead of being relegated to the schools that we were zoned for, school choice allowed me to attend New Hope Christian Academy, opening my world up to new possibilities through an exceptional education I would not have otherwise received. New Hope cultivated in me a commitment to hard work and servant leadership, and inspirited the notion that my biggest hopes and dreams could become a reality.
For middle and high school, I continued my journey at independent schools and attended Evangelical Christian School, where I learned academic discipline and outside-of-the-box thinking. Advanced classes and extracurricular activities prepared me for college, challenging my worldview and thought process constantly.
After graduating from Evangelical Christian School, I attended University of Memphis where I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in social work. While achieving something like this is attributed to many different factors, the undeniable reality is that the foundation laid by my private schools was instrumental in my success. I currently work for City Leadership, one of the top nonprofit consulting firms in the city of Memphis, and originally made the connection through my school choice journey.
It would have been impossible for me to realize my full potential without the opportunities and support system that school choice afforded me. I aspire to see more students who are just like me, overcoming their circumstances to rewrite their future. I truly believe that every family deserves the chance to choose their child’s education and have access to any school in their community, no matter their background.
In 2023, 20 states said “yes” to expanding school choice. These states either currently implement or are trying to implement policies that allow students to have a variety of choices when it comes to their education, whether that be traditional public schools, private schools, charter schools, or homeschooling. While this evolution of school choice across the country is remarkable, there are still millions of students stuck in school systems based on their family’s income or zip code that don’t fit their unique learning needs.
School choice is essential for the current and future generations of Tennessee, and our lawmakers should support education freedom here and for students across America through the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), a federal tax credit scholarship bill that would help up to 2 million students access a school or education service of their parents’ choice.
The ECCA would fund scholarships with private donations, not federal money, and donors would receive a federal tax credit. Students could use scholarships for tuition, tutoring to address learning loss, special needs services, education technology, and more. The bill would triple the number of students benefiting from private school choice programs, and it would complement the programs already in effect in 31 states, while creating new opportunities in 19 states that lack the option of school choice. The legislation has more than 100 House co-sponsors and more than two dozen Senate co-sponsors.
My story is proof that there lies power in opportunity, and school choice can give you a chance to blaze a path for generations to come. Education is not “one-size-fits-all” and families deserve the opportunity to choose where their children will learn the best. I urge lawmakers to support school choice by supporting the ECCA so that every child has the opportunity to achieve academic success, despite their background.
Joi Taylor is Choose901 alumni director at City Leadership in Memphis and a graduate of the Tennessee Educational Savings Account Program. She was also recognized in the Memphis Flyer’s 20<30 class of 2020.
The timetable of the Tennessee General Assembly once sprawled a bit, with a session ending sometime in May, generally. But now and then, one would get into June and even, within the memory of many legislators still serving, go on later than that.
There was the time in 2001 when Jimmy Naifeh, the longtime speaker of the state House of Representatives and a no-nonsense legislative boss if there ever was one, stepped down from his perch on the House dais, stood for a moment in the well, and took a few steps into the main central aisle of the chamber, as if he meant to do something hands-on.
Photographs by Jackson Baker
Rep. G.A. Hardaway and other Civil Justice subcommittee members that state law overrides a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The look on Naifeh’s face was somewhere between wrathful and pleading, as he intoned loudly, “It’s July, folks!”
Indeed it was. Those were the years, from the late 1990s into the early years of the current century, when state government, grappling with looming financial shortages of all kinds, and struggling in particular with the costs of the ever-expanding rolls of TennCare, was looking desperately for ways to raise money.
The impasse had gotten to the point that Republican Governor Don Sundquist, a dependable fiscal conservative during his years as a Reaganite Congressman, broke with his own personal history and his party’s traditional philosophical base and proposed something as daring as a state income tax. One result of that was a mass protest, whetted by radio talk-show hosts, that culminated, on the night of July 12, 2001, in an unruly mob invasion of the state Capitol and its grounds.
Dianne Baker of Millington was one of several spokespersons for Shelby County’s suburbs who gave the county’s legislative delegation an earful last week.
Windows got broken, the heavy locked doors of the state Senate chamber, where a compromise income-tax package was being negotiated, were pounded on, and whatever deal had been about to happen there was aborted.
There would not be a fiscal solution of any kind until the next year, a time when several parks were closed and various state services had begun to be shut down. Forgoing the national holiday, the two legislative chambers met on July 4th and agreed to a patchwork revenue package based on hiking the state sales tax to its current rate.
The same year, a Democratic governor, former health-care entrepreneur, and ex-Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, was elected. He would prove as atypical to his party’s image as Sundquist had been to his. Launching an austerity regime, Bredesen slashed the TennCare rolls and imposed across-the-board departmental budget cuts of 8 percent.
get some pressure from the press.
And thus did one era make way for another.
The next 15 years in state government would see a progressive slide away from governmental activism toward various kinds of retrenchment. The temper of the state’s voters shifted, and both Naifeh and the state Senate’s venerable Democratic Speaker John Wilder would eventually have to surrender control of their chambers to Republicans — though the new House Speaker, Beth Harwell, a Nashvillian, would be somewhat more mellow in her conservatism than Ron Ramsey of Kingsport, who displaced Wilder in the Senate.
The populism of the left yielded year by year to the populism of the right. The famous argument over guns versus butter would be decided in favor of guns. Literally so, as the NRA and the home-grown Tennessee Firearms Association began having their way with legislators, and it became harder and harder to find public places that were off limits to lethal weaponry. Bars, parks, parking lots, schools — all yielded in turn to legislation backed by the gun lobby.
Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville wait their turn.
Attitudes toward education shifted, as well. Where once the focus of public education had been on the teaching incentives of Governor Lamar Alexander or the fiscal largesse and curricular pump-priming of Governor Ned McWherter’s Basic Education Plan (BEP), now it was channeled through various formulas that were deconstructive of the traditional public-school concept and smacked of privatization at their core.
At the insistence of Ramsey, who saw the Tennessee Education Association as a political adversary, teachers’ bargaining rights were legislated out of existence. And even the more moderate Republican governor, oil-company scion Bill Haslam, gave the go-ahead to a veritable plethora of concepts — charter schools, takeover districts administered by the state, online “districts” run by profit-seekers from out of state, and standardized testing as an apparent end in itself — that unraveled the whole notion of what public schools had been.
Having basically slain the idea of an income tax, progressive or otherwise, the new Republican legislative majority (a super-majority in both chambers after 2014, assured of majority votes without need of — or concern for — Democratic votes) took steps to make sure it stayed dead, authorizing a state referendum on a constitutional ban of a state income tax authored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown).
Three legislative veterans from Shelby County, all former state representatives, were among those who turned up last week at a reunion for General Assembly members at the Ellington Agricultural Center in Nashville. From l to r: Ed Haley, now city manager of Millington; Chris Turner, now a General Sessions Criminal Court judge; and Dan Byrd, now vice chairman and COO of the Bank of Bartlett. Haley was a Republican; Turner and Byrd served as Democrats.
As was the case with Republicanism in the nation as a whole, the state’s new GOP establishment was a strange yokedom of fiscal and social conservatives, whereby the advocates of, say, tort reform limiting awards in personal-damage litigation made common cause with the opponents of abortion and gay rights. And vice versa.
There was a nether end of the reigning coalition, too. With the stripped-down Democratic caucus depending heavily on minority members, racial and otherwise, there was a certain kind of reactionary sentiment to be found on the other side — embodied, arguably, in the GOP insistence for photo-ID voting and, without doubt, in the “discovery” by two Republican legislators of a potential jihadist foot-bath in the Capitol that turned out to be a mop sink.
And who could forget the immortal legislative contributions of former Republican state Senator Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville), a one-man cornucopia of bizarre and mean-spirited legislation — a bill calling for death certificates for aborted fetuses, his “Don’t-say-Gay” bill forbidding mention of homosexuality in elementary school, another measure requiring school personnel to out gay students to their parents, a bill to deny welfare payments to parents of poorly performing students, his charge of racism when he, a white, was denied membership in the Legislative Black Caucus, etc.
here testifying against the “natural marriage” bill before the House Civil Justice Subcommittee, has stayed busy on the civil liberties front.
Those bills did not pass, but, as much as the gun zealotry of the last several legislative sessions, the goofy stuff from the now departed Campfield (he was defeated in the 2014 GOP primary by the infinitely more dignified Richard Briggs) became a metaphor of sorts for what was arguably an unserious period in Tennessee legislative history — one that rewarded selfish and peripheral concerns at the expense of fundamental structural needs.
(Campfield’s bills may have gone by the wayside, but the legislature did, after all, vote in all solemnity to enshrine the Barrett .50 caliber as the Official State Rifle; and it failed by a trice to designate the Bible as the Official State Book.)
Things may be changing.
Against all odds, Nashville seems to be getting serious. And, ironically, a signal of that potential transformation came last week through the aegis of a major participant in the events of July 12, 2001, that pivotal moment when a mob action deflected an effort toward a long-term reform.
One of those actively involved that night in working out the compromise that might have yielded a workable income-tax measure was a Republican state Senator from Chattanooga named David Fowler. After leaving the legislature in 2006, Fowler donated $20,000 to an organization called the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT). The former state senator and lawyer ultimately became the chief spokesperson for FACT, which advocates social conservatism and attention to fundamentalist Christian concerns in public policy.
Now president of FACT, Fowler lives in Nashville and is an accustomed presence on Capitol Hill. Last year he famously led a group of conservative pastors in a rally on behalf of a bill that would compel transgender students to use bathrooms designated for their birth genders. The issue was one of several these days, in Tennessee and many another states, which contrast the social traditions of a social or religious group with the economic realities of the state as a whole.
Mindful of this inherent conflict, Fowler hit it head on, acknowledging that passage of the bill might cause the state to lose important conventions and forfeit possible industrial relocations, but calling on the legislature to “put their principles and their conscience above matters of mere economics.”
But the matter, of course, was — and is — more complex than that. In the 21st century, the dichotomy cannot be reduced to one of money versus morality. Words like “principles” and “conscience” can also be adduced, and increasingly are so adduced, to support an evolving social belief in the human and legal rights of transgenders.
When push came to shove, that fact probably did as much or more to tip the balance in legislators’ minds against the “bathroom bill,” as did the admittedly intense lobbying against it by the state’s business interests. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Susan Lynn (R-Mt. Juliet) withdrew the measure.
But it returned in this session, sponsored by Representative Mark Pody (R-Lebanon) and Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mt.Juliet), two legislators lacking in the theatrical flair of a Campfield but equally prone to playing Horatio-at-the-Gate for causes which an increasing number of their legislative colleagues see as retrograde and wrong-headed.
And this year the bill failed even to get a motion out of the Senate Education Committee, a fact which both shocked and gratified Henry Seaton of the ACLU, who observed that “it seems like we are making progress” in raising legislators’ consciousness on the transgender issue.
And then there was what was called the “Natural Marriage” bill, also sponsored by the duo of Pody and Beavers. And there was Fowler in the House Civil Justice Subcommittee last week, making the best argument he could for a measure, reserving marriage in Tennessee to cases involving a man and a woman, that manifestly is in conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s watershed 2015 opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges cases declaring same-sex marriages legal everywhere in the United States.
Fowler’s argument — that, while the Supreme Court’s opinion compelled Tennessee to recognize same-sex marriages in other states, it did not invalidate the state’s own ability to define marriage within its own borders — was ingenious in a sense, but it also had the taint of the disingenuous. Memphis Democrat G.A. Hardaway called him on it, pointing out further that Fowler was a party to two separate lawsuits challenging the Supreme Court’s authority to deal with state marriage laws — a potential conflict of interest.
Like the lawsuits he was engaged in, Fowler’s testimony was seemingly based on the highly questionable thesis that the U.S. Supreme Court had no authority to override a state law on marriage — notwithstanding the obvious fact that the court had done just that.
In the end, the committee by unanimous agreement did what a legislative unit normally does for bills with no chances of passage. It punted, “rolling” the bill, in legislative vernacular — until a late point in the next session.
A clear pattern seemed to be developing in this session of the General Assembly. With, at most, a month left to go in the 2017 session, all attention was being focused, not on the kinds of tendentious and eccentric measures that had dominated so much of the legislature’s recent history but on indisputably serious matters relating to the root realities of the state itself — or to the counties and municipalities that comprise it.
The session’s chief gun bill, an “open carry” bill eliminating a need for permits to carry a concealed weapon, was disposed of summarily last week, in the same session of the House Civil Justice Subcommittee that shunted aside “natural marriage.”
That measure, HB 40, co-sponsored by Representative Micah Van Huss (R-Jonesborough) and Beavers (who seems almost Zelig-like in her attachment to fringe bills), was dismissed in the committee by voice vote.
As the General Assembly hits the stretch in the 2017 session, it will be focusing its major efforts on the centerpiece of Haslam’s agenda, an infrastructure program announced in his State of the State message of late January.
This governor is given to catchy titles for his major legislation. There was Tennessee Promise, his name for a scholarship program, paid for mainly by money diverted from the lottery-built Hope Scholarship fund, paying student expenses at the state’s community colleges. There was Tennessee Reconnect, a scholarship program for adults needing to finish lapsed degree efforts.
Most memorably, there was Insure Tennessee, Haslam’s name for a plan that, through a waiver granted by Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services, would have allowed Tennessee to partake of an estimated billion dollars or more of annual federal funding to expand TennCare, Tennessee’s version of Medicaid.
A partisan reaction by the GOP super-majority to a program it identified with “Obamacare” killed Insure Tennessee, but the newly serious legislature might give some version of the program a re-examination, especially since the Trump administration in Washington failed in its preliminary efforts to kill the ACA.
In any case, the Haslam infrastructure proposal, an ambitious and long overdue program of roadway rehabilitation billed in the State-of-the-State as the Improve Act, is still very much alive, though the governor’s original proposal for financing the plan’s $10 billion worth of improvements with a 7-percent increase in the state gas tax, coupled with decreases in a variety of other taxes, including the sales tax on groceries, has been modified once or twice and is subject to more changes. It is up for consideration in finance committees of both chambers this week.
Think of it: A General Assembly that once actually wasted time on the legality of eating roadkill is now clearly training attention on the condition of Tennessee’s roads.
One important modification to the Improve Act occurred in a Senate committee, with an amendment sponsored by state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville). Norris, who is eyeing a 2018 gubernatorial race (and who has billboards in Shelby County and elsewhere proclaiming him to be “Fighting Elder Abuse in Tennessee”), made sure to include in the bill several financial-relief provisions for Tennessee’s military veterans and its elderly population.
Even as the legislature’s Republican leadership is settling down to serious business, its once-dominant Democratic contingent, now become a shrunken minority (5 senators out of 33; 25 Democrats out of 99), is into a comeback of sorts, pointing out in a recent end-of-week press conference that Norris’ amendment has a distinct resemblance to provisions long championed by themselves. The Democrats, led by Representative Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley in the House and Memphian Lee Harris in the Senate, are also campaigning hard for a revival of some variant of Insure Tennessee.
Matters still to be resolved include two key ones of major importance to Memphis and Shelby County — a proposal for a “pilot program” of publicly funded private-school vouchers, restricted to the Shelby County Schools system and a possible revisiting of the de-annexation issue that has roiled relations between Memphis and its suburbs. (See Politics: “They’re Back!”.)
In any case, things have unmistakably taken a serious turn up Nashville way. Anybody who doubts that should ask former state Representatives Jeremy Durham of Franklin and Mark Lovell of Eads, both forced out of their legislative positions during the last year for allegations of sexual hanky-panky.
Heck, folks, hanky-panky used to be the General Assembly’s very stock-in-trade!
Interviewed by WATN-TV, Local 24, in Memphis on Thursday for a segment to be broadcast on Sunday, State Rep. John DeBerry (D-Memphis) predicted that the forthcoming House vote on school vouchers will be “close” because of exaggerated criticism from opponents, including many of his Democratic colleagues, forecasting ill consequences: “…apocalypse, the zombies are coming, everything is going to fall apart, and so forth.”
The long-serving DeBerry, a businessman and minister whose sprawling, ethnically mixed District 90 takes in much of Midtown, along with large expanses of North and South Memphis, has long endorsed the voucher concept, whereby public funds can be set aside in selected cases as tuition support at private educational institutions. That sets him apart from most other Democrats and African Americans in the legislature.
DeBerry characterized himself as an early advocate of a vouchers system: “Myself and a few others, we were talking about vouchers before it was cool.” He suggested that a vouchers approach to education was “just another tool in the toolbox, just another innovation” at a time when the state has been “involved in educational innovation for at least 10 years.”
As he put it, “We created this [public education] system, and we have a right to re-create it for today.” Downplaying the potential shock effect of vouchers on public school systems, DeBerry said, “The number of parents who would use vouchers has shrunk because of [the superfluity] of choices.”
The Memphis legislator argued that the main vouchers bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and defined so as to be a de facto pilot program in Memphis, is limited to 5000 students, eligible for stipends of no more than $7000 each. Acknowleding that such a sum would be insufficient to cover tuition at numerous private institutions, he noted that the bill stipulates that “private schools participating have to accept students at the amount of money allocated for the student.”
The program would depend on “parent initiative,” DeBerry said. “The state’s not going to put somebody in a school. The parent will.”
Over the course of time — and quite a lot recently — we have had much to say about the Tennessee General Assembly’s annual legislative value judgments (if that’s not too oxymoronic a term). More than once, we have
characterized them in cartoons as hillbillies (and that was if we were feeling kindly.)
That kind of rude jesting on our part had actually begun well before the state’s voting population began its pell-mell rush to the flag of Tea Party Republicanism. Since that happened, beginning with the election of 2008, more or less, and proceeding geometrically in that direction ever since, we have often been stupefied — uncertain as to how much further we could go with such ad hominem characterizations without being considered either too rabid or, worse, guilty of gross understatement.
We’re still a little buffaloed, frankly, as to how and why the Tennessee GOP was able to expand so far beyond its East Tennessee hinterland, where a relatively genteel and moderate version of Republicanism had flourished since the Civil War, as a result of the region’s hill-country pro-Unionism, and how and why the party’s philosophy had shifted so far rightward.
Our puzzlement was amplified by the fact that those original advances into Middle and West Tennessee (in the direction of what was then called a “two-party system”) were facilitated by Memphis’ own Lewis Donelson, a genteel presence whose protégés — office-holders like Howard Baker and Winfield Dunn and the early version of Lamar Alexander — were thoughtful additions to a thriving political debate that for some gave Tennessee the reputation of a bellwether state, one that could go back and forth between the two major parties in tune with shifts in the regional and national mood.
All that began careening to an end in 2008, more or less simultaneously with the election and then the administration of an African-American president. Or maybe that was just a coincidence. In any case, Tennessee is now, like the rest of the South, and in some ways more so, resolutely red, with only trace amounts of Democrats, mainly in Nashville and Memphis.
But we have come to praise the General Assembly, not to bury it. Granted, in the last session, there was yet another gratuitous firearms bill, which our well-intentioned but, er, gun-shy governor signed into law after pointing out concisely its more dangerous attributes. And there was the expected bill adding new anti-abortion restrictions to state law. Worst of all, there was the refusal to accept a badly needed Medicaid-expansion bill, largely because the word “Obamacare” was attached to it by opponents.
On the plus side, this Republican super-majority legislature refused for the third year in a row to devalue public education with a school-voucher bill, approved a halfway decent educational-standards measure, rejected a Bible-as-state-book bill that would have trashed the barrier between church and state, gave the concept of medical marijuana a fair hearing, and, arguably best of all, came within a single vote — that of an absent Democrat — of approving in-state tuition allowances for children of undocumented aliens, with a bill that is said to be sure of passage next year (see Viewpoint).
All things considered, this is progress. Maybe something like a normal political spectrum has reasserted itself within the confines of our one-party state. We are entitled to hope.
Our Republican governor, Bill Haslam, is a pleasant and no doubt well-meaning man, and, in some ways — on the issue of using public money for private school vouchers, for example — a genuinely moderating influence on his party’s excesses.
As an example: The governor has proposed a modestly funded pilot program involving some 5,000 low-income students in demonstrably failing schools. While that might be characterized by public-school advocates as the proverbial slippery slope, what other Republicans on Nashville’s Capitol Hill — notably Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey and Lietenant Governor Ron Ramsey — would prescribe amounts to the chasm itself, an open-ended voucher program whose stipends at some point could be made available to students from any family, regardless of income.
We cite this difference of opinion as evidence that the governor has a mind of his own and can, when he chooses, resist pressure from his rank and file. Unfortunately, there are issues on which this admirable quality seems to become, in the Nixonian phrase, inoperative.
A case in point is on the matter of whether to accept upward of $2 billion in federal funding under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) to expand the state’s Medicaid coverage (administered in Tennessee by TennCare). The state’s 165 hospitals, many of which are financially strained to the brink of having to shut down, are desperate for such expansion funding, 100 percent of which would be provided by the federal government for three years, after which a recipient state would be liable for only 10 percent of the annual sum.
This is not a “liberal” cause. The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, that bastion of economic conservatism, has urged the governor to accept the funding. GOP governors as far to the right as Jan Brewer in Arizona, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and John Kasich in Ohio have accepted the funding. Yet Haslam will not, continuing instead to dangle the prospect of something he calls “the Tennessee Plan,” an amorphous private-sector alternative that even a loyal GOP legislator like state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Memphis acknowledges is a “phantom.”
Though he surely knows better, having accepted his share of federal matching funds during two terms as mayor of Knoxville, Haslam declines to contradict those in the party — Kelsey, Ramsey, and Norris among them — who purport to believe that the feds will welsh on their 90 percent funding commitment to Medicaid once the initial three-year funding period is over. Never mind that the skeptics are unable to cite a single case of federal default on such a funding guarantee.
Beyond even the issue of health care itself, what is at stake in Tennessee’s Medicaid debate is the same premise that is at risk in Washington every time (which is annually) the congressional Tea Partiers would have us default on our national debt obligations — namely, the full faith and credit of the United States of America.
To undermine that bedrock, either fiscally or rhetorically, is a disservice to the very nation that our nay-saying legislators go through the daily ritual of pledging allegiance to. The governor, who really does know better, could at least cease giving them aid and comfort.
Photographs by Jackson Baker 
