Tag: State Senator Raumesh Akbari

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News News Blog News Feature

Juneteenth Bill Recommended For Passage Despite Fiscal Concerns

Credit: state of Tennessee

A bill that would change Juneteenth (June 19th) from a day of special observance to a legal holiday was recommended for passage by the Senate Finance, Ways, and Means committee on March 21st. As the Flyer reported, the bill was sponsored by Senator Jack Johnson (R-Franklin), but it had stalled in recent legislative sessions.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari( D-Memphis,) explained the importance of the holiday, stating that on June 19th, 1865, 2,000 Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas, to let all enslaved people know that they had been freed. While the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two-and-a-half years earlier, Akbari said that Juneteenth marked the true end of slavery for Americans.

Sen. Akbari said that the holiday was not only important for African Americans, but also for other Tennesseans across the state. Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald,) said that he had asked several people within his district if they knew what Juneteenth was and that very few people knew. Hensley said that he would be voting “no” on the bill. “I don’t think we need to be making a holiday for something that happened in Texas.”

Akbari countered that the city of Columbia, Tennessee, had already decided to recognize Juneteenth as an official city holiday in 2020. But Hensley said that he would be voting “no” on the bill was because of its potential financial impact. “This is going to cost the state $700,000. It’s a holiday that most people don’t know what it is. It’s coming two weeks after Memorial Day, two weeks before July the 4th. I just don’t think we need to make a holiday just because the Federal government does, I don’t think we need to.”

Information provided by the Department of Human Resources on the fiscal note of the bill, assumed that “approximately 4,000 employees earn compensatory time or some type of overtime annually on July 4th. It was estimated that the value of “earned time, based on the hourly rates of employees,” was $691,890.

“Due to multiple unknown factors, the precise amount of any such increase in expenditures cannot be quantified but is reasonably estimated to range from $173 per employee per holiday ($691,890 / 4,000) up to $691,890 for all employees per holiday. Therefore, the annual increase in fiscal liability to the state is up to $691,890,” the note said.

Despite Hensley’s concerns, the bill was recommended for passage.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tweet That Was …

Laurie Cardoza-Moore

This may seem unlikely to readers of this column who are still clinging to the golf slacks of the former president and write me uncharitable emails, but I actually do research these weekly missives. I copy links to relevant or interesting articles into a “column fodder” folder on my desktop; I save interesting emails; I even look up stuff.

I also reread my Twitter feed, which isn’t exactly research, but sometimes it can capture the zeitgeist of a particular week. To wit: Editor & Publisher posted a story last Thursday about how their publisher had pulled off a stunning deal to buy all 1,100 Gannett newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal. Whoa!

I read through the first couple graphs rapidly, slowing to reread only when I got to this part: “The new Operations Center is to be located about two miles northwest of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous United States. Newton will be recruiting retired NASCAR drivers to get the newspapers into each individual market within 72-hours of printing, which is, on average, two-days faster than currently being provided by most Gannett properties.”

Then I remembered the date: April 1st. Got me.

That same day, County Mayor Lee Harris issued a tweet urging all of us to get a COVID vaccine, citing the emergence of a highly contagious and deadlier Brazilian variant, which is definitely no joke. I’m a month post-vaccination and feeling somewhat bulletproof, though I still wear a mask in public. There’s no better feeling, right now. Seriously, if you’re sentient enough to be reading this and haven’t started the process of getting the vaccine, there’s really no excuse left, except “I’m an idiot.”

Later in the week, a Twitter debate broke out about which state had the absolute worst trifecta of governor and senators. Top contenders were Texas (Abbot, Cornyn, Cruz); Missouri (Parson, Hawley, Blunt); Florida (DeSantis, Scott, Rubio); Mississippi (Reeves, Hyde-Smith, Wicker); Alabama (Ivey, Shelby, Tuberville); and Tennessee (Lee, Blackburn, Hagerty). South Dakota (Noem, Thune, Rounds) also got some mention, to be fair, but the South truly owned this competition. So proud!

Speaking of pride, there were lots of tweets about the Tennessee legislature’s appointing Laurie Cardoza-Moore, an anti-Muslim, anti-BLM, 9/11 truther, vax-hoaxer, and all-around nutball to the state Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission, which, among other things, selects the textbooks used in Tennessee’s public schools.

Memphis Senator Raumesh Akbari interviewed the candidate on the Senate floor, picking apart her past lunacy and concluding, after questioning: “I cannot think of someone who is more uniquely unqualified to be in this position.” Senator Brian Kelsey, the ever-reliable GOP tool from Germantown, pooh-poohed the idea that Cardoza-Moore would be a problem, because, well, he’s Brian Kelsey.

Our legislators and governor also bum-rushed through an open-carry law that will allow any mouth-breathing crackpot to take a gun pretty much anywhere his tiny penis tells him to go. The law was opposed by all major law-enforcement organizations, attorneys general groups, and the vast majority of Tennessee voters. After the law’s passage, Governor Bill Lee made a quick call to the NRA to thank them for their support, making it pretty clear whose opinion matters to him. I really hope I live long enough to see these shameless GOP hacks get sent packing.

But it wasn’t all bad news. There were tweets about how the Memphis Fire Department, community advocate groups, and MATA set up a vaccination center for the area’s homeless, and inoculated dozens of folks who are living in the most vulnerable of circumstances. Good for them. And for us.

What else? I met a friend inside an actual restaurant for dinner for the first time in almost 13 months. We had steaks and split a bottle of Bordeaux and bitched and told the usual stories, and for a couple of hours, life seemed normal again — except for our longtime bartender saying we were starting to sound like the two old guys in the balcony in The Muppets.

Tough crowd. Tough year.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bill to Expand Teaching of Black History Moves On

It remains to be seen whether, and to what extent, State Senator Katrina Robinson’s destiny is affected by two pending indictments against her

State Senator Katrina Robinson

on fraud charges, but the first-term Memphis legislator seems to remain focused on whatever legacy her work in the Senate will leave.

On Thursday, Robinson saw SB 1101, her bill to expand the teaching of Black history in Tennessee schools, pass safely out of the Senate Education Committee and onto the body’s Calendar Committee, which will prepare the measure for an imminent vote on the floor of the Senate.

Tennessee law already requires the teaching of Black history in public schools, but Robinson’s bill would expand the scope of such teaching and mandate that it be taught in the 5th and 8th grades, though, as Robinson pointed out, local LEA’s [school districts] would have broad say on curricular matters.

Discussion of the bill probed into the matter of what is new in the legislation. Robinson stressed that existing instruction on the subject tends to be “somewhat anecdotal,” focusing on “enslavement, the Civil War, and maybe a 30,000-foot view of the Civil Rights movement.” Similarly, State Senator Raumesh Akbari, her fellow Memphian, summarized the thrust of such education as largely being limited to “slavery, segregation, and Barack Obama.”

Both senators noted that a fuller account would include the role of Memphis music in history and an enormous number of social developments, many of which have occurred since 1972, when state standards on teaching the subject were last established. “Black history is our history. It belongs to everybody,” Akbari said.

Some of the objections raised in committee were that the bill’s reach, which extends to “information on the history, heritage, culture, experience, and ultimate destiny of all social, ethnic, gender, and national groups and individuals,” might be over-broad, and that a new and enlarged state mandate might take too much authority on the matter away from local LEA’s.

Education Committee chairman Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) concurred on this latter point with state Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald), and the two of them were the only No votes on the committee, which moved the bill on by a 6-2 vote.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Senate Vote Gives Rep. DeBerry New Opportunity to Run for Reelection

The Tennessee legislature may not have seen the last of Memphian John DeBerry. The longtime state representative from state House District 30, whose bona fides as a Democrat were formally denied by the state Democratic executive committee in April, thus disqualifying him as a candidate in the party primary, has now been enabled to run for reelection as an independent.

The state Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a House amendment to a vaguely related Senate measure on the tenure of General Assembly members, the effect of which was to reopen the opportunity for DeBerry to file to run for his office as an independent on the November election ballot.

As stated, the amendment “[a]uthorizes an incumbent member of the General Assembly who has filed a petition for reelection to file a new petition as a candidate for another political party no less than 90 days before a primary or general election if the incumbent is disqualified from candidacy by the current affiliated party’s executive committee.”

DeBerry expressed gratitude at the outcome and indicated he would indeed take advantage of the opportunity to run again for the seat he has held for 13 two-year terms. “There are some nice new people running, but I think the people of my district know me well, and I want to continue to serve them,” he said.

Three candidates — Torrey Harris, Anya Parker, and Catrina Smith — will vie on the August primary ballot for the Democratic nomination and the right to oppose DeBerry in November.

DeBerry, who had always previously been elected as a Democrat, had filed to run in the party primary but was disallowed by a majority of the party’s state executive committee in response to complaints from Democratic activists regarding what they saw as DeBerry’s over-cozy relationship with legislative Republicans and his habit of voting for GOP-sponsored initiatives.

Among other matters, DeBerry has consistently voted for anti-abortion measures in the legislature, has supported private-school vouchers, has received significant financial support from Republican sources, and, in general, has been regarded by the complaining activists as being as a sort of GOP fellow traveler. DeBerry has always contended that he merely represents the interests of his district and votes his conscience.

The vote in the Senate Thursday was 29-1, with the only nay vote coming from state Senator Jeff Yarbro of Nashville, the Democrats’ Senate leader. Yarbro contended that the bill amounted to “enacting a protection for incumbents” and was backward-looking in its import. Other Democrats approved the measure — including state Senator Raumesh Akbari of Memphis, who as a member of the party executive committee had voted in DeBerry’s favor back in April.