Tag: Shelby County Tennessee politics

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Scramble for Position

CREDIT: JB

**The Shelby County Republicans’ Master Meal (this year re-christened as “Reagan Day Master Meal) went off as usual at the Great Hall of 

David Lillard at GOP Master Meal

Germantown on Thursday night, but this year, the event, which featured state treasurer David Lillard as keynoter, was characterized by an unusual omission. Despite the presence, at the front of the mammoth hall, near the dais, of two life-sized cutouts, one of the Great Communicator and another of the current president, the event featured no mention — that’s zero mention — of Donald J. Trump, the POTUS. Well, there was one mention, technically, when Lee Mills, chairman of the Republican Party of Shelby County, informed the several hundred arriving celebrants they could, if they chose, be photographed with either of the two cutouts, After that, nada — not from Lillard not from two prior speakers, state Senator Brian Kelsey or state Representative Mark White.

Considering that the Master Meal is an annual party event rivaling the RPSC’s annual Lincoln Day banquet, usually held in February, that was downright unusual. Keynoter Lillard did brag of the fiscal achievements of “state government” (which is to say the Treasurer’s office, assisted by the GOP-dominated legislature) but did no boasting whatsoever of Trump, nor, for that matter, of Republican Governor Bill Haslam.

Outgoing County Mayor Mark Luttrell came in for some praise and was granted a curtain call for a farewell speech, but most of the rhetoric of the affair went toward praising the pedigrees and boosting the chances of the many local Republican office-holders and GOP candidates for reelection against challenges from what Kelsey acknowledged was a newly invigorated Democratic Party. Mayhap an omen in all this? Or merely an oversight?

Chris Thomas

As usual, Shelby County Republicans turned out in force for their annual Master Meal at Germantown’s Great Hall.

**The Tennessee Nurses Association, local members of which gathered in Memphis at Coletta’s Restaurant in Bartlett earlier Friday evening to hear updates from Crystal Walker of the UT College of Nursing and TNA executive director Tina Gerardi, has been trying hard to have sit-downs with each of the six major candidates for governor, hoping, among other things, to get endorsements for state-authorized Independent Practice for nurse practitioners. The TNA remains hopeful, despite being stiffed by the GOP’s Randy Boyd, Diane Black, and Beth Harwell, who have failed so far to arrange a rendezvous with TNA officials. The two Democratic candidates, Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh, have each indicated support for Independent Practice authority, however, and hopes were high at the Friday dinner for a positive encounter on Saturday with Republican candidate Bill Lee, who had responded eagerly to an invitation to meet with TNA members during his planned “Super Saturday” event on Saturday at his Shelby County headquarters on Poplar Avenue. Meanwhile, all the candidates have received copies of a TNA questionnaire, the results from which will at some point be publicized by the nurses’ organization.

Another guest of honor at the Tennessee Nurses Association bash on Thursday night was Sara Kyle, the District 30 state senator who, along with her Senate colleague Lee Harris (now a candidate for Shelby County Mayor), is on what can only be called a crusade to cast out yet another Shelby County senator, Reginald Tate of District 33, in favor of Democratic challenger Katrina Robinson. Tate’s sins are those of incessant collaboration with the Republican powers-that-be in Nashville, the fact of using important committee memberships — Education, Health & Welfare, Finance, Ways & Means, Judiciary — not for the aims and purposes of his constituents or party-mates but to advance Republican goals often regarded as antithetical to his District 33 base. In an effort to propitiate the ire of his fellow Democrats, Tate resigned his long-term affiliation with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the Koch-brothers-funded source of arch-Republican legislation, but allowed himself to be captured, on-mic, at a recent TV appearance as calling himself a “black Republican” and denouncing Democrats as “full of shit.”

Worst of all, Tate made no effort to oppose the legislative action to withdraw a previous $250,000 grant to Memphis for its 2019 bicentennial celebration as punishment for the city’s taking down Confederate statues in time for this year’s April 4th commemoration of Martin Luther King events, just as he had made no effort to oppose the Norris-Todd bill of 2011 that resulted in the sundering of a merged city/county school system and the creation of breakaway school districts in each of Shelby County’s suburban municipalities.
Jim McCarter

State Senator Sara Kyle with TNA members

  Ironically, Tate had scheduled his headquarters opening at 3556 Mendenhall for Saturday afternoon, at the same time that Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee was having a “Super Saturday” bash at his headquarters at 5576 Poplar.

Though the word “Democrat” does not appear on the senator’s signage at his new headquarters, neither does the word “Republican.” Tate did, in fact, have some identifiable Democrats at the opening, and, when he was asked about the public disaffection from him of fellow Senate Democrats Kyle and Lee Harris, he handed out a flyer listing various benefits to Shelby County which he said were results of his Senate tenure, and he suggested that the coolness to his candidacy of various Democrats owed more to their envy of his achievements (alternatively, of his legislative committee assignments) than to any partisan apostasy on his part.

JB

Reginald Tate (2nd from right) with friends atSaturday headquarters opening. Flanking are County Commissioner Willie Brooks and Young Democrat Alvin Crook, with former City Clerk Thomas Long nearby.

**As for the aforementioned gubernatorial candidate Lee, he had several members of the TNA at his “Super Saturday” affair (which was to have included some door-to-door campaigning in nearby locations, that had to be postponed, pending a break in some sudden rain showers).

Neither his questionnaire nor those of his gubernatorial opponents have as yet been received and tabulated by the TNA, but candidate Lee made a point of acknowledging his support for one of the key wish-list items wanted by the nurses’ association, legislation enabling independent practicing authority for nurse practitioners. One of his auditors on Saturday was TNA stalwart Connie McCarter, who pronounced herself pleased.
Another candidate for governor, U.S. Representative Diane Black, has invited members of the association to meet with her during the course of a CPAC event at FedExForum on Monday.

JB

Gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee with friends at Lee’s ‘Super Saturday’ event.

**Even as most local political attention is fixed on the races to be decided in the state and federal primaries and county general election August 2nd, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland made a major move to ready his reelection campaign for the city election of 2019. Strickland, who has been steadily been holding campaign fund-raisers, scheduled his most recent one for Tuesday of this week at the Beale Street Museum and Studio of the late Ernest Withers, the late revered photographic chronicler of the Civil Rights Revolution.

The crowded affair, at a minimum of $150 a head, drew a Who’s Who of influential black businessman and civil eminences, and suggested good tidings in 2019 for Strickland, whose 20915 upset victory over then Mayor A C Wharton, involved the draining away of significant African-American votes from Wharton. In his remarks to the group, Strickland did not fail to note that he had put himself on the line in the successful effort to buck state resistance in the removal of Confederate memorials downtown, that he had geometrically increased the amount of city contracts with black-owned businesses, and that he had addressed black voters’ concerns in numerous other ways.

It remains uncertain who Strickland’s opponents will be in 2919, though a former mayor, Willie Herenton, has proclaimed a wish to run, and Mike Williams, head of the Memphis Police Union, a fourth-place finisher in 2015, has already basically declared. Both are African-American. Strickland’s aim is clearly to stay a step ahead, and holding on to his impressive share of the black base is a key part of his strategy. JB

No, Elvis and BB, as famously pictured by Ernest Withers, are not quite life-size, but even if they were, they’d have had to defer, size-wise, to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who held a successful fund-raiser in the Withers Museum and Studio on Thursday night.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Reacts to Border Crisis

CREDIT: Courtesy of the @PhiBredesen for Senate campaign

Jackson Baker

Bredesen at Bioworks Foundation

This week was destined to see large and distinct choices, forks in the road for the politically minded.

Be this a blue-wave year or not, the Shelby County Republican Party still has to be considered the county’s dominant political unit, on the strength of its success in the last several election results. And what is arguably the lynchpin organization of the SCRP, the East Shelby Republican Club, scheduled its annual Reagan Day Master Meal for Thursday night at the Great Hall of Germantown, with state treasurer David Lillard as the featured speaker.

The occasion is one of two during the year (the other being the GOP’s February Lincoln Day Dinner) that generally brings out the Republican brass, who will sing such praises as they can for the Trump administration.

• Former Governor Phil Bredesen, a conservative at heart, might be considered an unlikely avatar of the aforementioned Democratic blue wave, but that he is, as the party’s standard-bearer for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by the GOP’s Bob Corker. Bredesen was in town for a Monday night fund-raiser, which followed up on an earlier meeting Monday with representatives of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation about the effect of Trump’s tariffs on entrepreneurial initiatives being midwifed into being by the foundation.

“Too early to tell,” was Bredesen’s finding about the fledgling medical enterprises under discussion, though he told reporters afterward that the president’s tariff policy would give a hard hit to the state’s agriculture and possibly its automobile industry — as well as to Tennessee whiskey, which Bredesen described as one of the state’s major exports and one wide open to other countries’ retaliations.

As Bredesen said, “You can’t hurt Elvis, and you can’t hurt Dolly, but you can definitely hurt Jack Daniels.” Bredesen had harsh words for the president’s hard-line policy on immigration. “Child abuse,” he called it.

That may end up being the mildest epithet bestowed this week on President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy toward immigrants seeking asylum. A massive demonstration protesting that policy and its results, notably the separation of parents from their children and the scattering of both to various detention camps in the country, took place Sunday at Lindenwood Christian Church, under the auspices of MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope).

Jackson Baker

candidate John Boatner and family at border action rally

Yet another demonstration took place Monday evening at Shady Grove Presbyterian Church under the auspices of the activist group Indivisible Memphis and the non-profit Showing Up for Racial Justice. Both assemblies numbered in the several hundreds and, at both, plans were launched for aiding the afflicted asylum-seekers and countering the border policy.

Yet a third such gathering, a “Families Belong Together Memphis Action Rally,” hosted by Latino Memphis and Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition [TIRRC], will convene on Saturday, June 30th, at 10 a.m. at Gaisman Park.

Political candidates, mainly Democrats, were observed at the first two rallies, and doubtless will be at the third, but ordinary citizens, expressing extremes of both outrage and compassion, are the main players in this drama, a continuing one that could well transform the ongoing course of the year and trump politics as usual.

And yes, that pun was very much intentional.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Big Week for Shelby County Politics Features Joe Biden

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

What a week! What a weekend! Local political junkies of every stripe had plenty of occasions to nourish their activism. In addition to several fund-raisers and meet-and-greets for specific candidates in this year’s elections, there were debates, forums, and other kinds of smorgasbords featuring several at once.

The highlight of local Democrats’ week was surely the appearance on Friday night of former Vice President Joe Biden, who brought his “American Promise Tour” to the Orpheum. Biden’s visit, a ticketed affair, was part revival and part book-tour stop (for Biden’s new volume, Promise Me, Dad: a Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, about his son Beau’s illness and ultimate death from brain cancer.)

With his regular-guy persona and tell-it-like-it-is style, Biden inarguably kindled the kind of political enthusiasm that Hillary Clinton could have used in 2016 and that Biden seems eager to deploy in 2020 against Donald J. Trump.

Not that Biden talked up a race; in fact, he got one of his most animated reactions when he complained about the unnamed Washington scribe who suggested that his book was a calculated bid for sympathy prior to a presidential run. The crowd’s murmur of outrage morphed into delighted laughter when Biden muttered something about administering a personal corrective to “the sonofabitch.”

Biden’s appeal is based partly on that kind of plain talk and partly, too, on his ability to revivify a kind of unpretentious patriotism that is either left unsaid these days or is more often obscured by the gaslight of insincere platitudes.

When host Terri Lee Freeman of the National Civil Rights Museum asked Biden what he had meant by writing that he was nostalgic for the American future, the author of that seemingly oxymoronic sentiment furrowed his brow as if wondering himself what he had meant by the line. But what followed was a wonderfully developed disquisition on the process of regaining the forefathers’ democratic dream of a just and honest realm that resolved the paradox perfectly.

On Saturday morning, Republicans turned out en masse for the opening of the party’s 2018 campaign headquarters in the Trinity Commons shopping center. Shelby County party chair Lee Mills introduced GOP candidates in the forthcoming county general election and federal and state primaries on August 2nd.
Partisans of both political parties got close-up looks at the rival candidates for Shelby County mayor and Tennessee governor when Republican mayoral candidate David Lenoir and Democratic candidate Lee Harris squared away on Wednesday at the Kiwanis Club. And four candidates for governor appeared on Thursday at a forum on legal issues before members of the Tennessee Bar Association.
At the mayoral event, moderated by WREG-TV anchor Stephanie Scurlock at the University Club, Lenoir put forth his standard goals of “great jobs, great schools, and safe streets” while boasting his achievements in managing Shelby county’s financial assets as trustee for the last eight years. Harris said he intended to focus on the themes of poverty, injustice, and residual segregation, and recounted occasions when he took the lead in resolving difficult issues as a city councilman and as state Senate Democratic leader.

Participating in the bar association event at The Peabody were Democrats Karl Dean and Craig Fitzhugh, as well as Republicans Beth Harwell and Randy Boyd. The candidates were interviewed sequentially by Commercial Appeal editor Mark Russell on such issues as criminal justice reform, judicial redistricting, and the desirability of changes in school-zone drug laws.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Milestones

CREDIT: JB

JB

Luttrell addressing Rotarians

On Tuesday, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell delivered what amounted to a valedictory address to the Rotary Club of Memphis at Clayborn Temple. It was to be  his last address to that group as a Shelby County official, and the term-limited mayor loaded up his remarks with an outgoing incumbent’s customary litany of accomplishments — in his case: fiscal solvency, serious reductions in the county debt, economic development, and reduction of unemployment.

And, to his credit, Luttrell spent some time on two problems still much in need of being addressed: a lack of economic diversification and the ongoing plague of opioid addiction in Shelby County. On the latter score, he and members of the Shelby County Commission have agreed on the need for litigation to recover on damages to the county’s population, but have been at loggerheads on a specific legal strategy.

But, the Mayor said, “we’re getting close” to agreement, and in this he was backed up by a frequent critic, Terry Roland, who was one of several county commissioners in attendance and confirmed to the crowd that “we’re closer than you think.” In neither case, however, were specifics mentioned.

• Back in 2010, one of the three serious Republican candidates for Tennessee governor was Ron Ramsey, the state senator from Blountville in the state’s northeast corner. Ramsey had already made his mark by becoming the first GOP speaker/lieutenant governor in history, succeeding longtime Democrat John Wilder.

Ramsey would finish third in the Republican primary in 2010, behind current Governor Bill Haslam and then Chattanooga Congressman Zach Wamp. Unexpectedly, he chose not to run for reelection to the General Assembly in 2016 and, despite forecasts of another gubernatorial bid this year, he’s not running for anything. So what is Ramsey doing now?

Well, he’s tied in with the Farrar and Bates firm in Nashville, which does a fair amount of lobbying work for municipalities and, in fact, numbers the city of Memphis among its clients. So, theoretically, Ramsey could be working his legislative contacts on Capitol Hill on behalf of the Bluff City at some point.

Latest word, though, is that  while Memphis is keeping the firm on retainer, Farrar and Bates has not as yet been asked to lobby any issues and have not registered on the city’s behalf.

• If two Middle Tennessee lawmakers have their way, litigants in Shelby County may begin facing longer waits to have their cases heard, starting next year. A new bill, SB2511/HB2679, co-sponsored by state Senator Bill Ketron (R-Murfreesboro) and state Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin), would denude the 30th Judicial District (Shelby County) of “one division of circuit court or chancery court” as part of a complicated process to provide two new courts in Middle Tennessee.

The rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul effect of the bill would also mandate a shift of one circuit or chancery court division from the 20th Judicial District (Nashville, Davidson County) to the 21st (Williamson). Simultaneously, the elimination of a court in Shelby County would make possible the creation of a new court in the 16th District (Rutherford, Cannon counties).

Casada, the Republican majority leader of the state House of Representatives, hails from one county that would benefit from the exchange (Williamson, a fast-growing suburban “doughnut” county adjoining Nashville), while Ketron’s home base is in another (Rutherford).

The last time legislation was introduced to diminish court representation in Shelby County was in the General Assembly session of 2014 when one of Shelby County’s own, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), introduced Senate bill 1484, which would have eliminated two Circuit Court divisions in Shelby County.

That bill was based on a study prepared by state Comptroller Justin Wilson, which was dispatched to members of the General Assembly, including Kelsey, who serves as chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee. Entitled “Tennessee Trial Courts Judicial Weighted Caseload Study,” the document suggested, based on population figures, that Shelby County was over-represented in the number of its courts.

The contention was stoutly resisted by members of the Shelby County legal community. Then Circuit Court Judge W.A. “Butch” Childers noted, among other things, Shelby County’s disproportionate number of medical malpractice litigations and “pro se” cases relating to the county’s higher incidence of poverty.

Then state Senator Jim Kyle, now a Chancery Judge himself, noted as well the swelling of Shelby County dockets resulting from cases involving commuting citizens from adjoining areas.

Eventually, that 2014 bill was withdrawn by Kelsey, and no doubt similar objections will be made by local lawyers and judges to the new legislation.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Matters of Tenure on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Walter Bailey

No suggestion at Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission could have been treated with more courtesy than the request by long-serving Democratic member Walter Bailey for an ordinance to amend the County Charter so as to eliminate all reference to term limits for county officials.

And no suggestion had so little chance of passage as Bailey’s ordinance, which, on the first of three readings, gained the votes of only three members — Bailey and fellow Democrats Justin Ford and Van Turner — on the 13-member body. 

The ordinance allows for a public referendum of county voters, and that provision allowed several members to abstain from voting on the premise that they would meanwhile consult their constituents, but this was largely a face-saving mechanism for Bailey and perhaps for themselves.

The fact is, as a number of commissioners say privately, and as David Reaves said out loud on Monday, most members of the current commission would not have been able to run successfully for their seats on the body if term limits had not been imposed.

In arguing for the ordinance, Bailey noted for the record that members of Congress and the state legislature are not bound by term limits and that the imposition of them on the commission arbitrarily deprives the public of needed experience on the part of members. Bailey himself, a member of a distinguished political family that included his late brother, author/civil rights icon D’Army Bailey, is the longest-serving member of the commission and, as he put it last week in committee, where his ordinance was first vetted, maybe the longest-serving public official in the state. He won office first in 1971, has served as chairman twice, and has served continuously, with the exception of four years, from 2006 to 2010, when the charter’s then-new term-limit requirement caused him to step down temporarily.

He is now serving his second term since being returned to the commission in 2010 and faces another mandatory withdrawal from service. • More local backdrop for the 8th District congressional race: As indicated last week, a victory by Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell in the crowded Republican primary field would occasion some frenetic maneuvering on the part of the county commissioners, inasmuch as Luttrell would thereby vacate his county position, opening it up to a reappointment process.

Luttrell, if  victorious in the congressional race, would presumably resign his mayoralty sometime between the general election in November and his January swearing-in in Washington. Meanwhile, the commission would have selected a new chair in September, according to its normal schedule. And whoever is chair when Luttrell ceases to be mayor automatically becomes interim Shelby County mayor for a maximum of 45 days, after which the commission will select a new one by majority vote.

As Commissioner Mark Billingsley of Germantown reminded his colleagues with copies of a handout he distributed Monday, the county charter makes no provision for an election to fill a vacancy in the mayor’s office “until a successor is elected and qualified at the next countywide election allowed by the state election laws.” Hence, whoever is selected by the commission upon the completion of the interim mayor’s service will serve as a fully pledged county mayor until the county general election of 2018.

There is no doubt that current commission chairman Terry Roland, a Millington Republican, wants to be the next county mayor. His intentions of running for the position in 2018 have been clear for months, and, in case anyone should forget the fact, he announces it periodically during meetings of the commission. (Roland pointedly did so at last Wednesday’s committee sessions and did so again at Monday’s regular commission meeting.)

It now appears, however, that Roland sees no need to seek reappointment to a second consecutive term as commission chairman in September (as numerous commission chairs have done in the last several years, with former member Sidney Chism, a Democrat, having brought off the trick). Roland is content to allow things to take their natural course in September, with Democratic member Turner the favorite to become the next chairman.

But Roland is certain to be front and center as a candidate for appointment as mayor when the commission convenes, sometime early in 2017, to serve as a successor to Luttrell through the election of 2018. And word has it that he believes he already has most of the votes in hand to overcome other candidates, including possible opponent David Lenoir, the county trustee, who intends to run for the office in the regular 2018 election cycle. Another possible contender for the commission’s mayoralty selection would be GOP Commissioner Steve Basar, whom Roland bested for the chairmanship last year in a hastily called revote after Basar had held the position for roughly an hour.

All of this would be moot, of course, should someone other than Luttrell win the congressional race. There are five other Shelby County Republicans in the field — Basar; radiologist/broadcast executive George Flinn; state Senator Brian Kelsey; County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood; and former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff.

And Jackson businessman Brad Greer must be delighted at the prospect that so many Shelby Countians in the race, dividing up the local vote, creates the real mathematical possibility of his winning. (Something like that happened in the 7th District congressional race of 2002, when Kustoff, then city council member Brent Taylor, and then County Commissioner Mark Norris split the Shelby County vote, allowing for an easy victory by Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County, who still represents the 7th District.)

Outlook on Convention Delegates

Some 400 Democrats betook themselves to First Baptist Church Broad last Saturday to make themselves eligible for formal Shelby County conventions on Saturday, March 19th, that will select from this pool of eligible members the delegates to the Democratic National Convention at Philadelphia this summer.

Yes, there will be two conventions on March 19th — one to be held at First Baptist Broad that will determine the identity of the delegates and alternates who will go to Philadelphia to represent the 9th Congressional District; and another, to be held the same day in Jackson, that will determine who goes to the national convention to represent the 8th Congressional District, which takes in a generous hunk of eastern Shelby County.

At both locations, the delegates to be selected will conform to the pattern of the two districts’ voting in last week’s “Super Tuesday” presidential primary in Tennessee, with the lion’s share of delegates and alternates going to Hillary Clinton, who won the primary vote handily, and a handful going to Bernie Sanders. 

In the case of the 9th District, that would be six delegates and one alternate for Clinton, with one delegate apportioned to Sanders. In the case of the 8th, it’s four delegates for Clinton and one for Sanders. Insofar as the math permits, the delegates are apportioned, half and half, by gender.

For the record, Clinton beat Sanders statewide by a two-to-one ratio. The ratio in Shelby County, whose African-American demographic (generally very supportive of Hillary Clinton) is higher, was four to one: Clinton, 66,465; Sanders, 15,985. 

The Democratic Party’s ex post facto process for selecting delegates differs from that of the Republicans, which required would-be delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to file for election on the Super Tuesday ballot on behalf of the specific presidential candidate they chose to represent. The chief vote-getters on each list became convention delegates in a ratio proportionate to how well their candidates did in head-to-head voting.

For the record, Donald Trump won 39 percent of the statewide Republican primary vote; Ted Cruz won 25 percent; Marco Rubio, 21 percent, Ben Carson, 8 percent; John Kasich, 5 percent. (Results rounded off.)

The preliminary delegate list released last week by the state Republican Party did not include the apportionment for Shelby County, but the county’s GOP primary results went as follows: Trump, 30 percent; Cruz, 29 percent; Rubio, 26 percent, Kasich, 8 percent, Carson, 6 percent, and “others,” 2 percent. (Again, results rounded off.)

If all of this appears to be a mite complicated, that’s because it is. Updates will be provided by the Flyer as they are received.