Tag: Steve Mulroy

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Politics Politics Feature

Cold Comfort

CREDIT: Casada from capitol.tn.gov; Malone by Jackson Baker

By all reports, it was as frosty and weather-worn in Nashville on Monday as it was here in Memphis, but there was enough of a quorum in both the Senate and the House to finish up some pending legislation.

What got the most attention statewide was the final Senate passage of a compromise wine-in-grocery-stores bill, SB 837, which — local referenda permitting — allows wine sales by grocery retailers and whichever convenience stores meet the 1,200-square-foot area requirement, in most cases as early as July 1, 2016. Liquor stores, meanwhile, will be allowed to sell beer and other sundries as early as July 1st of this year.

As Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, a prime mover of the bill, noted, it “allows for the expansion of consumer choice while protecting small businesses that took risks and invested capital under the old system.” In other words, a lot of trade-offs entered into the bill, which now goes to Governor Bill Haslam for signing.

Over in the House on Monday, there was a curious dialogue between state Representative G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) and state Representative Glen Casada (R-Franklin) over the meaning of an innocuous bill (HB 394 by Hardaway) that allows community gardens in Memphis to flourish independently of sales-tax levies and control by the state Department of Agriculture.

Casada, a well-known advocate and author of bills imposing state authority over local matters, as in his notorious legislation two years ago striking down local anti-discrimination ordinances, went disingenuous on Hardaway.

“Are we in any way telling local government what they can and cannot do? … Are we in any way dictating actions to local government at our state level?” Casada asked, all innocence.

Realizing he was about to be fenced with semantically, Hardaway responded just as disingenuously: “You and I share that concern, that we not dictate to local government, and I’m proud that you’re joining me on this bill, where we are making it clear that local government has the options to proceed on these community gardening efforts, sir.”

A few back-and-forths later, Casada said, “I just want to be clear. So we are, in a few instances, telling these local governments how they will handle these parcels for their gardening projects. Am I correct?”

Hardaway would have none of it. “Quite the opposite. We are telling state government that we want local government to conduct the business of local gardening instead of the state Department of Agriculture.”

Casada insisted on drawing the moral of the story another way, defining Hardaway’s bill not as the sponsor himself saw it — as a measure freeing local vegetable gardens from state control — but as yet another case in which the state can tell localities “how they will or will not” do things. “From time to time we do dictate to local government … and this is a good bill,” he concluded.

That prompted Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner of Nashville to confer mock praise on Casada for his consistency in wanting to “bring big government to press down on local government.”

In any case, the bill passed with near unanimity, something of a unique instance in which, depending on who’s describing it, a bill is said to be both a defense of local autonomy and the very opposite of that concept, a reinforcement of overriding state control.

That’s Nashville for you.   

   

• When Shelby County Commission Chairman James Harvey dropped out of the race for county mayor at last week’s withdrawal deadline, saving his marbles (and his long-shot candidacy) for a run at city mayor in 2015, he left behind what is going to be a seriously contested three-way Democratic primary for the leadership of county government:

County Commissioner/U of M Law Professor Steve Mulroy, aided by experienced and connected campaign adviser David Upton, will be everywhere at once with a carefully articulated message for rank-and-file Democrats. The Rev. Kenneth Whalum may not be as ubiquitous, but he has a potentially potent fan base developed during years of a highly visible ministry and an outspoken school board presence.

Both will have to make their case against a seasoned candidate who has earned a large and loyal cadre of supporters from her years in public life and from campaigns in years past. This is Deidre Malone, a well-known public relations consultant and former two-term county commissioner who ran hard in the Democratic primary for county mayor four years ago, losing out to Joe Ford, a former commission colleague who had the advantage of running from a position as interim mayor.

Appearing on Wednesday of last week before a packed meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club at Coletta’s on Stage Road, Malone cited a detailed list of mainstream Democratic positions on issues and looked past her Democratic rivals to voice a resounding challenge to incumbent Republican Mayor Mark Luttrell, challenging his bona fides as a crossover politician and as a leader.

Making an effort to debunk the incumbent mayor’s mainstream status, Malone disparaged Luttrell’s claims to have been a regular participant in meetings of the post-school-merger Transition Planning Commission (“Leadership is not sitting in a meeting”) and to have supported pre-K efforts (“When he had an opportunity for the first county pre-K initiative … he came out against it.”).

Leadership, said Malone, means, among other things, having an opinion: “Sometimes it’s comfortable, sometimes it’s not, but leadership is making that opinion known, so people will know where you stand. So I’m going to ask you today, Democrats here in Germantown and across Shelby County, for your vote. … I’m excited about the primary, but more excited about the opportunity to represent the Democratic Party in general, because he [Luttrell] knows that I’m coming, and he knows that I’m going to be nothing nice.”

Before she spoke, her campaign manager, Randa Spears, took a straw vote of the attendees, an exercise Spears repeated after Malone’s speech. The results in both cases showed Malone hovering around the number 20, with her opponents in single digits — the chief difference between the two votes being that significant numbers of votes for Mulroy (whom Malone seemingly regards as her chief opponent) had — according to the tabulation, at least — shifted over to “undecided.”

Granted, Malone’s cadres were out for the event, and those of Mulroy and Whalum, for the most part, were not, and the ad hoc poll could by no means be regarded as scientific. The fact remains that Malone, a well-known African-American public figure going into her second run for county mayor, was able to demonstrate some core support among a group of predominantly white Democrats meeting out east, and that fact should tell some kind of tale to her opponents.

• Another change in the May 6th primary picture for countywide offices was the Shelby County Election Commission’s decision last week to overrule the previous disqualification of Martavius Jones, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the new District 10 county commission seat, because of a disallowed signature on his filing petition.

That creates a legitimate two-way race between Reginald Milton and Jones, with political newcomer Jake Brown likely to function as a spoiler (though Brown may have a rosier outlook, seeing a split between Milton and Jones as giving him a real chance).

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Politics Politics Feature

Ready to Rumble

CREDIT: JB

JB

Judge Joe Brown makes his pitch at IBEW.

I’ll say this for Shelby County’s Democrats: If in the county elections of 2014 they should go down to another defeat like that of 2010, when the rival Republicans, representing a minority of the county’s voters, swept all the contested races, it won’t be for any lack of intensity.

There was more than enough of that to go around last Thursday night, when a lengthy list of candidates — declared, undeclared, likely, and unlikely — had a chance to address the local Democratic Party’s executive committee at the IBEW Union Hall on Madison Avenue.

In a way, Thursday night’s decidedly hurly-burly affair was a kind of segue from a previous party event.

Last month, when the Democrats had what appeared to be a successful Kennedy Day fund-raiser at the Bridges building downtown, a once and maybe future party politician rose up to interrupt what had been, up until then, serial recitations of the usual boilerplate and talking points and sounded a late note that was both jarring and curiously rousing.

It was Carol Chumney, a former state representative and Memphis Council member who felt that, in her last race two years ago for district attorney general, she had been deprived of the kind of party solidarity that might have given her a chance to win against incumbent Republican Amy Weirich.

“Let’s stick together!” she demanded of her assembled party mates. But she didn’t restrict herself to mere exhortations. She went so far as to call out one of the party’s main men, 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who not only was in attendance but had played a major role at the fund-raising dinner, arranging the appearance of its keynoter, U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, a House colleague of Cohen’s from California.

Cohen had introduced Lee, who responded to his flattering characterization of her with some kind words of her own, citing Cohen for his “tremendous leadership in Congress” and going on to say: “We know that he is a true champion for economic and social justice. And we know, all of us, we know in the House that we can count on Steve to be with us on behalf of what is just and what is fair and what is right and on behalf of his constituents. … I can’t think of a more loyal or stronger or smarter ally than Steve.”

That was not how Chumney saw it. To her, Cohen was most remarkable for “Republi-Democrat” sentiments, by virtue of his having declined to endorse her candidacy against Weirich. “I think that very few people would say I was not qualified to be district attorney, but somehow one of our congressmen seemed to think that. He said he ‘birthed’ me, Congresswoman Lee!”

In deciding two years ago not to endorse her in the race for D.A., Cohen had indeed claimed, in what may have been an awkward attempt at a conciliatory grace note, to have midwifed Chumney’s entry into public office. (Anybody who covered Chumney’s successful 1990 race for state representative can attest to his daily omnipresence on her behalf in a crowded and contentious field.)

Between 1990 and 2012, clearly, the relationship had changed. And, in the immediate aftermath of Chumney’s remarks, another Democrat, state Representative G.A. Hardaway — whose 2012 primary opponent, fellow state Representative Mike Kernell, a longtime Cohen ally, had won the congressman’s endorsement — offered some payback of his own, referring in an email broadside to “treacherous political deeds” by Cohen and imputing to the congressman, routinely regarded as the most liberal Democrat in Tennessee, a previously unsuspected hand-in-glove relationship with Republicans.

Though most of that sound and fury had been, strictly speaking, more personal than political, the theme of party solidarity at all costs and outrage over potential apostasies carried over into last week’s executive committee meeting.

Speaker after speaker trumpeted the theme, and several, like Coleman Thompson, once again a candidate for Shelby County register, an office that eluded him in 2010, stoked the lingering belief that the party’s electoral wipe-out by the Republicans in 2010 had not been an honest result. “We caught them stealing,” he insisted.

Nowhere was this alleged GOP perfidy more prominent than in a lengthy and impassioned philippic against local Republican-dom delivered by Judge Joe Brown, whose title derives both from his former service as a bona fide elected criminal court judge and his long run as a reality show judge adjudicating domestic disputes on television.

It was the latter experience more than the former that had whetted his talent for tough talk, and Brown dished out lots of it, naming names and speaking of “secret accounts,” “differential vote counts,” stolen elections, “extortion,” sneaking privatization of public business, even a conspiracy to undermine traffic safety on the A.W. Willis bridge. Brown’s charges prompted voices in his audience to cry out, “Teach!”

Brown’s bottom line, reinforced by the fact that his TV show has been discontinued: He has “not quite made up [his] mind” about running for D.A., to end what he had characterized as a reign of error and terror.

Chumney, who had widely been rumored to be eyeing another race for D.A. herself, but who had as of yet given no public indication of it, was on hand again, with a retooled version of her Kennedy Day speech, again calling for Democrats to be “united for the team” and this time citing city council members Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn as Democrats who had abandoned her in 2012 and supported her Republican opponent.

Cohen, who had made a point to greet Chumney cordially, was there to address the committee and was all high road, noting that he had become a ranking member (meaning lead Democrat) on the Constitution and Civil Justice subcommittee of the House Judiciary, recounting his efforts on behalf of voting rights and immigration legislation, and making a special appeal to President Obama to ameliorate unfair sentencing procedures for drug offenses.

The congressman was applauded, but so was the next speaker, attorney Ricky Wilkins, his announced opponent in this year’s Democratic primary. Wilkins boasted of his South Memphis background and his 20 years of effort on behalf of improving public housing in Memphis, promising to bring the same degree of “compassion, energy, and fire” to Congress that he’d evinced in his law career, and making a point of pledging his loyalty in advance to this year’s Democratic nominees.

There were other speakers — Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, for example, on the need to oppose anti-abortion legislation in Nashville, and Councilman Lee Harris on putting an end to the lockout of employees at Kellogg. But it was the evidence of intense intra-party rivalries in this year’s primaries, coupled with the near-paradoxical demand for party unity (party chairman Bryan Carson announced that disloyalty would “not be tolerated”), which animated the evening and bespoke the revved-up nature of local Democratic ambitions this year.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the party’s hopes of recapturing the office of Shelby County mayor from Republican incumbent Mark Luttrell.

The Democrats’ committee meeting had begun with statements from four mayoral hopefuls, all with established names and ambitions.

Shelby County Commission Chairman James Harvey offered “leadership at another level” and promised “stability.” Former commissioner and previous mayoral candidate Deidre Malone — making, as she proudly noted, her second try — rejoiced that “we have a Democratic primary.”  

County Commissioner Steve Mulroy touted his “core set of principles” and said, “I’m a real Democrat, and I can win.” And well-known minister and former school board member Kenneth Whalum Jr. brandished some stirring populist oratory, boasted his role in defeating the last sales- tax referendum, and asked the audience to help him decide whether or not to run.

Whatever happens in the May 6th countywide primaries (for which next week’s February 20th filing deadline is imminent) or on August 7th, date of the county general election as well as state and federal primaries, or on November 4th, election day for state and federal offices, last week’s Democratic meeting provided ample energy and abundant foreshadowing.

Discord and harmony, rowdiness and composure, affection and displeasure, logic and libido — all were present in equal and co-existent measure. The only given in the mix was that Shelby County Democrats aren’t likely to sit this one out.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this column had indicated that Deidre Malone had made two previous runs for county mayor. She has only made one to date; her current race is her second effort.

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Politics Politics Feature

Redistricting Revisited

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As the filing deadline of February 20th for races on this year’s May 6th county primary ballot creeps ever closer, the effects of the Shelby County Commission’s much fought-over reapportionment, post-2010 census, are worth a cursory look.

District 1: One of the nearly forgotten showdowns of the last few years was that between Millington Republican Terry Roland and the rest of the GOP membership of the commission over the issue of redistricting.

Jackson Baker

Terry Roland

Roland’s preference for a limited, preferably Millington-based district in which to seek reelection was stoutly resisted by other Republicans on the commission, who preferred continuation of a large, multi-member district in the suburbs. It culminated in a wild night at a Collierville Republicans Club meeting in January 2012.

Roland, who was being heckled mercilessly by his party colleagues as he advanced his small-district thesis, began to back up a point with an anecdote concerning his father when he thought he heard his filial sentiments being mocked by fellow commissioner, Chris Thomas. “If you say anything, I’ll knock you out of that chair,” Roland responded, as Thomas protested that he was being misconstrued.

The meeting resumed after that flurry, but then-Commissioner Wyatt Bunker reacted to Roland’s threat by calling the police, who showed up just as the meeting was breaking up. No action was taken, especially since tempers had cooled by that time, but this reporter had captured Roland’s threat on video, and, when posted online, it went viral.

That was then. This is now, when the redistricting matter, which would simmer for several months longer, has been resolved in favor of a 13-member single-member system.

Of Roland’s active GOP antagonists back then, Brent Taylor, who was serving an interim term, and Bunker, who left after election as Lakeland’s mayor, are gone. Thomas, while serving out his commission term, is concerned with new duties as Lakeland city manager. Only Heidi Shafer, running for reelection like Roland, is likely to be around for awhile.

Ironically, Roland, who had disliked the notion of having to face a threat to his reelection from any of several rumored opponents from elsewhere in suburbia, got the smaller district he wanted, but finds that he has a primary opponent, anyhow. This is Dennis Daugherty, a Memphis firefighter who resides in Arlington and picked up enough signs of support on the commission during a recent bid for the vacant commission seat later won by Mark Billingsley to suggest he could become the beneficiary of whatever anti-Roland sentiment there might be in District 1.

Meanwhile, Shafer, a dedicated sparring partner of Roland’s during the reapportionment dispute, when she vehemently opposed single districts, has, so far at least, no Republican primary opponent to worry about in her new District 5, though Tanya Bartee, a Democrat, has pulled a petition.

Another incumbent commissioner who was also seriously disinclined to accept a single-member-district format, is Justin Ford, who during the reapportionment debate, tended to side with the commission’s Republicans in defending the principle of large, sprawling multi-member districts.

Indeed, for a while, his “Ford plan” for achieving that result had the support of the GOP majority. But his motive for keeping to the large-district format differed from theirs, which was, rightly or wrongly, attributed by Democratic Commissioner Steve Mulroy, a single-district proponent, to a desire for “incumbency protection” by discouraging newcomers’ election efforts in a sprawling land mass.

As Ford explained it recently, his case was one of wanting the largest possible scope for his local constituency. He is a Ford, after all, and, as such, has ambitions for higher office down the line. (The Ninth District congressional seat currently held by Steve Cohen is something he has his eye on.)

The larger district, the better for springboard purposes. And sharing it with other commissioners, as the large-district format required, was no problem.

But the single-district format prevailed, and, as previously noted in this space, Ford has a fight on his hands in the new Commission District 9 against three Democrats with public names of their own — former school board member Patrice Robinson, current Memphis-Shelby County Education Association President Keith Williams, and veteran educator and frequent candidate James O. Catchings.  

Several of the new single-member districts, however, not only involve new lines encompassing smaller constituencies, but new faces, at least new to the commission grid.

In District 3, for example, centered on the suburb of Bartlett, no fewer than three seemingly credentialed Republicans have pulled petitions to contest what is one of several open seats.

Kelly Price, the African-American proprietor of the Memphis Entrepreneurship Academy, is one petititon puller; two others, Shelby County Schools board member David Reaves, and Sherry Simmons, a longtime local educator and GOP activist, have already filed — a circumstance making for an interesting one-on-one even if Price ultimately stays out of it — especially as Simmons will have the assitance of her husband, Bartlett alderman Bobby Simmons.

More on these and other developing commission races anon.

• A circumstance that has much distressed local Democrats was the 2010 Shelby County election, in which party candidates — though in theory representing a larger constituency — were completely routed by the Republican slate. Many Democrats continue to suspect hanky-panky in that race, though it is more likely that the chief factor driving the GOP margin of victory was a spirited three-way race for governor in the Republican statewide primary, which coincided with the county general election.

Nothing like that will be the case this time, inasmuch as neither Democrats nor Republicans will apparently have a high-stakes primary going on leading up to the statewide primary/county general election date of August 7th.

Though it may not have a perceptible down-ballot effect on other county primary races (or on August 7th voting), the Democrats will apparently have a decent turnout on the May 6th primary date.

That is due to what is shaping up as a lively Democratic primary for county mayor. Filing on Monday was former county Commissioner Deidre Malone, whose two terms on the commission, prominence in local affairs, and previous race for county mayor in the 2010 primary definitely give her viability.

But also on Monday, county Commissioner Steve Mulroy picked up a petition, presenting Malone with the prospect of one able primary opponent, while two more, current commission Chairman James Harvey and former Shelby County Schools board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., had already drawn petitions.

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Politics Politics Feature

Texts and Subtexts

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The auditorium of the Vasco Smith county building was full, as it normally is when there’s a controversy to be resolved or an appointment to be competed for. In the case of the Shelby County Commission’s regular public meeting on Monday, both conditions pertained.

Given that most of the attendees were on hand to boost the chances of one of three candidates to fill a Probate Court vacancy (and most of those to support candidate Kathleen Gomes), someone suggested leapfrogging down the commission’s agenda to Item 19, the court appointment of an interim judge to replace retiring judge Robert Benham.

The candidates, all lawyers, were Gomes, who boasted many years’ experience trying cases in Probate Court; state senator Jim Kyle, who heads the diminished band of Democrats in the state Senate; and former Shelby County commissioner Julian Bolton.

Gomes was nominated by Heidi Shafer, Kyle by Sidney Chism, and Bolton by Walter Bailey. As befitted the turnout on her behalf, Gomes had the most testimonies by audience members. Bolton’s mother and sister spoke on his behalf. Kyle spoke to his “30 years making decisions in the public realm” and his “ability to work with everybody.”

Commissioners also toasted their favorites. Chris Thomas noted that he himself was a Republican while Gomes was a Democrat and touted that fact as proof that his preference had nothing to do with politics. The claim generated a laugh line when Chairman Mike Ritz, also a GOP member but one increasingly inattentive to the party line, said straight-facedly to the more avowedly partisan Thomas, “Oh, you’re a Republican?”

In speaking for Kyle, Commissioner Terry Roland also made the claim that his choice was above politics. All the candidates were “equally qualified,” said Roland, but, “Me and this gentleman [Kyle], we go way back … [pause] to Ophelia Ford days.” That was a reference to the Senate’s consideration of a contested special state Senate election in 2005, one eventually resolved in favor of Democrat Ford and against Republican Roland. 

Roland said Kyle had not “done right” by him then. But since? “I’ve got to know his heart … have come to respect this gentleman, immensely. I’m throwing my support to Jim Kyle.”

As was fairly well known before Monday’s meeting, and was explicitly volunteered by Roland in a conversation before the meeting, Tennessee lieutenant governor Ron Ramsey, the state Senate speaker and a staunchly conservative Republican, had endorsed Democrat Kyle and had made a point of communicating the fact.

It was less well known, except in Democratic Party circles, that something of an understanding — or at least a hope — existed that Kyle’s Senate seat, if vacated, might be awarded by the commission at some point to former state senator Beverly Marrero, who was defeated in last year’s Democratic primary by Kyle in the district they both shared after GOP-controlled redistricting.

The Senate-appointment issue, in any case, was the source of a sore spot that developed during the voting. After the first ballot, Kyle had six of the seven votes needed, Gomes had four, and Bolton had two. Bailey, who had committed to Bolton on the first ballot in homage to his ex-colleague, quickly announced he was switching his vote to Kyle, giving him seven votes and, for the space of a few seconds, making him the apparent probate judge-designate.

Then occurred what is surely the most awkward and potentially embarrassing moment in the commission career of Democrat Steve Mulroy, a Kyle voter on the first ballot. Immediately upon Bailey’s switch, Mulroy announced his own. Instead of voting for Kyle, he would pass.

Mulroy later said that he had made no promises to Kyle and had voted for him on the first ballot as a courtesy but had always anticipated voting for Gomes in what he expected would be some subsequent ballot. Whatever Mulroy’s motives, his action was, to say the least, an eyebrow-raiser, and he had best not be expecting a place on Kyle’s Christmas card list this year.

This was the second time in a two-year span that Kyle had suffered a sudden reverse at the hands of a fellow Democrat on the commission. In 2011, he had applied for the position of interim member of the Unified School Board, just then being appointed by the commission, and was within a vote of victory when Democrat Justin Ford decided to cast his vote for Republican Kevin Woods, Kyle’s opponent and, thereby, the victor.

It should be noted that Mulroy was not the only Democrat ultimately recorded as voting for Gomes. So were Melvin Burgess and Henri Brooks.

• Brooks would figure as one of the principals in another surprising development Monday, and this one, too, had some importance. This was regarding a resolution authorizing the payment of some $103,889.28 to the lawyers engaged by the commission to litigate the ongoing school-merger controversy. This is the kind of vote that normally, with all 13 members voting, gets an 8-5 outcome, with the supporters of school merger in the majority and opponents, mainly suburban members who support municipal school districts, in the minority.

This time the resolution failed, however, getting only six of the seven votes needed for passage. The vote was taken in the immediate aftermath of a philippic made by Brooks against Chairman Ritz, a merger supporter, whom she accused of speaking to her rudely. Whether for that reason or some other, Brooks abstained from voting. And Democrat Bailey, another merger supporter, was temporarily out of the chamber.

Presumably, the commission will have opportunities to vote again on the matter at a subsequent meeting.

• The other major development at Monday’s meeting was the commission’s vote, by the aforesaid 8-5 margin — seven Democrats plus Ritz versus five Republicans — to approve an ordinance, on third and final reading, to exempt from Shelby County residence requirements all of the erstwhile Memphis City Schools teachers coming into the new county system via merger.

Another ordinance, proposed by Millington’s Roland, a vehement foe of merger, would have authorized a referendum on the issue of revising the county charter so as to eliminate the residency requirements for all county employees. To reject this ordinance after passing the preceding one would be “hypocrisy,” said Roland, who went on to say, “I know a lot of people in Nashville. Surely you wouldn’t want the legislature to see this.”

When his proposal went down 8-5 (though with a different mix of ayes and nays than usual), Roland, who has taken to suggesting with increasing intensity and frequency that he, in effect, sits at the right hand of Ron Ramsey, thundered that the legislature might be brought to overrule the commission’s previous vote to enlarge the permanent Unified School Board from seven to 13.

• The Tennessee General Assembly was, however, moving quickly toward a scheduled mid-April adjournment, and, though school legislation favored by Shelby County’s suburban municipalities — bills to enable municipal schools and private-school vouchers, among others — still had some hoops to pass through, they seemed headed toward final passage this week or next.          

In a longish chat with reporters last week, Ramsey made the case for the legislature’s current pell-mell progress toward adjournment as a matter of recovering what had once been the norm. Ramsey also strongly advocated legislation, now scheduled for consideration in the assembly’s final week, that would allow the nomination of U.S. Senate candidates by party caucuses in the legislature rather than, as at present, in open public primaries.

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Politics Politics Feature

Steve Mulroy Is Giving Away a Kidney (Really)

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The English have a figure of speech which posits that possession of a good kidney is right up there with having a good heart or (more bluntly) a set of balls.

So when a public figure announces, out of the blue, that he intends to give away one of his kidneys to someone else who is in desperate need of one, that’s, paradoxically, having a good kidney, all right. And when the would-be donor is donating a kidney not, as one would expect, to a loved one but to whom-it-may-concern out there in the population of renally afflicted John Does, well … it boggles the mind.

County commissioner Steve Mulroy, who represents the 5th District of Shelby County (East Memphis, essentially), will be undergoing voluntary surgery in a little over a month to have one of his kidneys removed and made available to whoever might need it in the area served by the UT-Methodist Transplant Institute, whose head, Dr. James Eason, will perform the surgery.

(Eason, it will be recalled, performed the liver transplant on Apple founder Steve Jobs in 2009, which, presumably, kept that serial innovator alive long enough to change world culture once again with the introduction of the iPad.)

Mulroy, a Democrat, is the closest thing we have in these parts to an all-purpose crusader for liberal concerns (wage theft and rights for the LGBT community have been two of his recent concerns) and for such other causes as an effort to preserve the erstwhile Zippin Pippin at the Fairgrounds.

He has been in the news frequently enough for one thing or another that a fair enough number of skeptics and a few downright cynics might consider him, frankly, capable of publicity stunts.

Believe it, folks, this is not a publicity stunt.  

We are endowed from birth with two kidneys. They are as necessary for the preservation of life itself as the liver is, or the heart is, or as lungs are. As in the case of lungs, a person can get by with one kidney, but to voluntarily take oneself down to a one-and-only condition seriously reduces one’s margin of safety and is an act of extreme self-sacrifice.

It happens all the time, of course. Fathers do it for daughters, sisters for brothers, and often people do it for unrelated persons close to them or even to people in need whom they happen to have heard of. The Reverend Val Handwerker of Immaculate Conception Church did it only last year for one of his parishioners.

That act was one of the things that spurred Mulroy, a fellow Catholic and a friend and admirer of Handwerker, to think about it. Another catalyst was the appearance of a series of billboard public service announcements touting service to others under the head “Pass It On.” One of the instances dramatized was that of a man who donated bone marrow to a complete stranger.

Mulroy says a simple thought occurred to him: “I’m a nice guy. I could do that.”

I could do that. You have to understand, as those who know him well do, that Mulroy seeks out and responds to challenges. He ran a marathon to see if he could do it. Ditto with a triathlon competition. Jumped out of an airplane to try sky-diving. Just last year, he climbed White Mountain Peak in California.

Just like the cliché has it, he does things because they’re there. Donating a kidney? “It’s got the same potential for being an interesting, once-in-a-lifetime experience. With the added benefit of saving a life.”

That “added benefit” is what turned the trick, of course. As a member of the county commission, Mulroy had become conversant with the life-and-death aspects of transplant surgery and the not inconsiderable number of people whose chances of survival are dependent on it. Just last year, the commission heard abundant testimony from Eason and others about the pending organ shortage facing UT-Methodist Transplant Institute and local patients in general because of a shrinkage of the Mid-South donor base by the United Network for Organ Sharing, a federal liaison authority.

Mulroy found out enough about transplant issues to know that there is what he calls a “logjam” in available organs — one that could be loosened up considerably by acts of “altruistic donation,” the term of art for what he intends to do in late April. Unlike the kind of one-for-one exchanges that kinfolks do, making a kidney available for matching up with an unknown needy recipient at random could actually help generate a flow of available organs, Mulroy believes.

How risky will the operation be for him, the donor? “Life is risk,” Mulroy answers. But he estimates that the operation, timed for the gap between the spring and summer sessions at the University of Memphis Law School, where he teaches, will require a base recuperation period of maybe 10 days.

“That’s the time it will take for me to get back to where I can sit at a desk and teach a class,” he says. No doubt he’ll have to miss a commission meeting or two, as well. And it will likely be some months before he gets back to running his usual six miles a day or finding other mountains (literal or figurative) to climb.

Mulroy’s intended kidney donation, by the way, is something that came to light in the process of checking out a recent hothouse rumor that he intended to leave his commission seat prematurely (he’ll be term-limited as of the election of 2014). “I fully intend to serve out my term,” says the commissioner, who thinks the rumor was linked to news that leaked out about his pending operation.

As for his recently expressed interest in running for Shelby County mayor, that’s still a prospect, too, Mulroy says, though, in conventional political fashion, he professes to be concentrating on issues relating to his commission service just now. And to questions relating to his kidney.

• Shelby County’s Democrats completed round one of their biennial reorganization Saturday, holding caucuses at Airways Middle School to select delegates to the party’s forthcoming convention at the same venue on April 6th. At the convention, the delegates will elect a new party executive committee and select a chairman from among three candidates — Bryan Carson, a unit supervisor at St. Jude; entrepreneur Terry Spicer; and probation supervisor Jennings Bernard.

A slight contretemps developed over the weekend, when Spicer made a premature announcement that he was to be endorsed by Bernard, who presumably would be leaving the race. Bernard promptly denied either possibility, however, and the race goes on.

• Reorganization of another kind is on the mind of Democrats statewide after the wide circulation this week of a rumor, so far unverified, that two Democratic legislators — state senator Lowe Finney of Jackson and state representative Jason Powell of Nashville — intend to offer a bill that would change the way in which the party’s state executive committee is constituted and reduce its membership.

The rumor started with a blog post by Democratic blogger Randy Neal in Knox News stating that the two legislators intended to “reorganize the state party’s executive committee and eliminate popular election of committee members.” Attributing his information to “sources,” Neal said Finney and Powell “will propose legislation as early as this week to designate the Democratic House delegation as the executive committee, and let the House and Senate each appoint five other members from around the state.”

Under current state law, the state executive committees of both parties are made up of one male member and one female member from each of Tennessee’s 33 state Senate districts for a total of 66. The bill, if there is one, could be limited to apply the new criteria only to Democrats.

There are currently 27 Democrats serving in the state House and seven in the Senate. That many, plus five to be designated by the Democrats in each chamber, would make a total executive committee membership of 44 if a plan like the rumored one should be adopted.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Kyle or Mulroy?

CREDIT: Kyle by Seanna Lyn Brandmeir; Mulroy by Justin Fox Burks

Something of an irony may be shaping up for 2014, the next fully fledged political year in Shelby County. (One year out of every four is in theory election-free in Memphis and Shelby County, and 2013 is one such year; a plethora of special elections has somewhat jimmied the cycle in recent years, however.)

The main local entrée on next year’s political menu will be the race for Shelby County mayor. Incumbent Republican Mark Luttrell is considered a certainty to run for reelection, and there is of yet no consensus among Democrats as to who should oppose him.

One name that is always mentioned in such a context is that of state senator Jim Kyle, the Senate’s Democratic leader. After a pro forma period of letting his name float, Kyle normally withdraws his name from consideration. Next year could be different, if for no other reason than Kyle’s frustration with being a member of an increasingly powerless minority in Nashville.

Last week, the formative one for the 2013 session of the General Assembly, was a rough one for Kyle, who seems to be on the losing end of a campaign for a rules change requiring the dominant Republicans to hold their caucus meetings in public.  

Moreover, having barely won reelection as leader of the truncated Senate Democrats with a 4-3 victory late last year over fellow Memphian Reginald Tate, Kyle last week saw Republican members of the Shelby County delegation engineer the election of the GOP-friendly Tate as delegation chairman over state representative Antonio Parkinson, whom Kyle had supported.

If Kyle should once again reject a race for county mayor, a very real Democratic prospect is Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, who is term-limited from running for reelection in 2014. The commissioner often serves as point man for Democratic initiatives and did so again of late with his proposal for a wage-theft ordinance.

As a white Democrat with significant Poplar Corridor appeal, Mulroy might indeed be able to marshal a strong campaign against Luttrell, and he is inclined, as are most politicians, to aspire upward rather than laterally, which would be the case if he sought a Memphis City Council seat in 2015, as some have suggested to him as an alternative.

The aforementioned irony in a Luttrell-Mulroy race would be a limited one, actually — confined to the fact that the current mayor was himself an outspoken advocate for action against wage theft during his race for mayor in 2010. The then sheriff and mayoral candidate told a gathering of Midtown progressives, as we reported at the time, that he favored “legal alternatives to the incarceration of the mentally ill and stepped-up actions against ‘wage theft,’ the exploitation of workers, mainly Hispanics, by unscrupulous employers.”

Luttrell was a virtual nonparticipant in the recent county debate over wage theft, however. Mulroy’s county ordinance, which was directed against such offenses as employers’ holding back employees’ wages or declining to pay overtime, was narrowly rejected on its third reading on Monday after a systematic campaign against it by local business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce.

Crucial to the outcome was the conversion of Democratic commissioner James Harvey from proponent of the ordinance to opponent.

A companion wage-theft ordinance, sponsored by Myron Lowery, is still pending in city council. • Planned Parenthood, the venerable provider of what it describes as “high-quality, affordable sexual and reproductive health care for millions of women, men, and teens” and which has been under consistent attack of late by social conservatives, in and out of government, for its enabling of abortion procedures, has a big night planned for Tuesday, January 22nd.

In tandem with the Center for Research on Women (CROW) at the University of Memphis, Planned Parenthood is sponsoring an event entitled “Religion, Law, and Reproductive Rights: The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.” The event, which has numerous local sponsors, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the University of Tennessee Medical Association, includes a documentary film and a panel of speakers from the ranks of law, politics, and local clergy.

The free event will be held at the U of M’s University Center Theater from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

Categories
News News Blog

Shelby County Wage Theft Ordinance Passes First Reading

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Shelby County is one step closer to adopting a wage theft ordinance that would make it easier for employees to reclaim lost or stolen wages. The ordinance, proposed by County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, passed on its first reading at the Shelby County Commission’s general government committee meeting today.

Kyle Kordsmeier of the Workers Interfaith Network was present at today’s committee meeting to stand in support of the ordinance; Herbi-Systems owner Kenny Crenshaw of “Lemme Kill Your Weeds” fame showed up to say, “lemme kill your ordinance.”

The county ordinance is scheduled to go up for its second reading next Monday. But the real test will be next Tuesday, when an identical ordinance, sponsored by Memphis City Councilman Myron Lowery, goes up for its first reading at city council. Because the Shelby County ordinance would only cover unincorporated Shelby County, the same ordinance must also pass in the city council for it to have an effect on wage theft in Memphis.

Categories
Opinion

Good Debaters? Names Might Surprise You

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What America needs is one more commentary on the debate. Eleven million Tweets is not enough.

And my earthshaking thought is . . . debating is hard. Few people are good at it, and Barack Obama is not one of them. He’s lucky Sarah Palin was on the GOP ticket in 2008. And Mitt Romney, celebrated by Republicans today who scorned him a month ago, is more actor than debater, and, gets the benefit of looking presidential.

It’s been widely reported that Obama was a real tiger on the campaign trail the day after the debate, which only highlighted his shortcomings the night before. Debating is not the same as making a speech, with or without a teleprompter, before a friendly audience or even a hostile one. It is not making a witty comment in a roundtable discussion on a television talk show. It certainly isn’t like writing commentaries or blogging to a computer screen.

And it isn’t reciting deficit numbers or Simpson-Bowles and Dodd-Frank Act to a nation coping with unemployment, pissed off at banks, Wall Street, and each other, and partisans hungry for blood and red meat. In journalism we call that inside baseball, or casting your remarks for insiders and advisers instead of viewers and readers at large. Both Obama and Romney played inside baseball.

My nominations for best Memphis debaters are school board members David Pickler and Martavius Jones. They squared off dozens of times before and after the consolidation vote, sometimes in the suburbs, sometimes in the inner city, and many times in public meetings when the television cameras were on, the stakes were high, and the comments of their fellow school board members competed for attention.

Pickler and Jones stayed on point, knew their stuff, stuck to their guns, did not personally insult each other, and kept coming back for more. Repeated practice made them better, which is something that hurt Obama, as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post noted.

Tomeka Hart is a good debater too, but she didn’t make her case well when she ran against Steve Cohen for Congress. Cohen is a bulldog of a debater, loves a scrap, has encyclopedic political knowledge, and swamped her.

On the Memphis City Council, Shea Flinn and Myron Lowery get my top marks. Lowery has gotten better with age and benefits from his television journalism background. Flinn is a natural with a background in acting. Both use their skills with the knowledge that seven votes carries the day on the council, and, while they’re capable of it, pandering to the crowd is done better by others on the council.

On the Shelby County Commission I like Walter Bailey’s elder statesman appearance and the way he picks his spots. Nobody says more in fewer words or uses the long pause better. Often a maverick, Bailey was on the commission, off the commission, and on again. He has heard and seen it all. Steve Mulroy, also an attorney, is an eager and articulate combatant but spreads himself thin. Terry Roland has aw-shucks appeal when not tossing insults. Good debaters are often not likable but they keep some decorum.

Courtroom lawyers can be good debaters but rarely venture into politics. They play to the jury, and their foes are hostile witnesses and opposing counsel, but that is different than a debate format where each person has two minutes at a time. Former federal prosecutor Tim DiScenza, who did the Tennessee Waltz cases, would have made a terrific debater — plain-spoken, go-for-the-jugular, versed in the facts, and about half mean.

One of the disappointments of the ongoing schools case is the likely lack of a full-blown debate by top lawyers of the underlying issues in school consolidation and resegregation.

That would be worth a ticket.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Voting in a Haze

Elections are volatile and based on incomplete information under any and all circumstances. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the various critiques disseminated by opponents of proposed ordinances 360 and 361. Here, on the eve of voting in Shelby County, was a paragraph in an impassioned e-mail sent out by the usually reliable Joe Saino, proprietor of memphiswatchdog.org:

“So what it boils down to is that the County Commission wants to give themselves and the county mayor more term limits going from two four-year terms to three four-year terms. Then they want to add the Sheriff, Trustee, Assessor, Register, and Clerk in Article VIII and make them County Charter officers and no longer Constitutional officers. This will give them the ability to have control over these five offices, which they do not have as of now because they are Constitutional officers.”

This accusation, leveled at Ordinance 360, is incomplete and misleading in one aspect and dead wrong in another. As is spelled out in the language of the full ordinance, neither current mayor A C Wharton nor any member of the commission that adopted this ballot resolution qualify for a change in the limits currently imposed on them by a 1994 countywide resolution.

That vote of the people was overwhelmingly for a two-term limit — for the offices of mayor and commissioner. But it specified no limits of any kind upon the various other countywide offices that are elected at four-year intervals. What 360 does is extend the concept of limits uniformly across the span of county officialdom.

As Commissioner Steve Mulroy explained this week in what was the last of several information sessions on the two ballot ordinances, the goal of term-limit uniformity was one specifically requested during the commission’s deliberations by Wharton, on the premise that, for budgetary and other reasons, no one county officer should have an institutional advantage over others, based on the differing limits — or lack of them — enjoyed by that official.

As for the elevation of 1994’s two-term limit to one of three terms, Mulroy offered his listeners the technical explanation that voters had never before had the opportunity to express themselves on the lengthier term. Anybody who was present during the wrangling that attended the several commission deliberations that resulted in Ordinance 360 can attest to an even simpler reality: that three terms proved the only acceptable compromise capable of drawing the requisite nine votes from a commission that included diehard opponents of any term limits at all and equally firm supporters of a two-term limit.

As for Saino’s implication that the commission had decided to terminate the constitutional nature of five offices — sheriff, trustee, assessor, county clerk, and register — to the ends of a power grab of its own: That couldn’t be more wrong. Saino’s tireless activity on behalf of governmental transparency is to be commended, but in this case, he’s looking in the wrong direction for a culprit.

The constitutional nature of the five offices in question was ended not by the County Commission, nor by any elected administrator or elected body. It was the state Supreme Court which did the deed in January 2007, when it issued a ruling invalidating the constitutionality of the offices and requiring that both Knox County, which was in a similar fix, and Shelby County redefine several offices by county charter.

It was either that or see them cease to be. And that prospect was not only politically impossible, it would have produced chaos both in local government and in society at large. No sheriff? No tax collector? No assessor of property values? The mind boggles.

And that’s the reality, as opposed to the myth of power-mad county commissioners. Did the commission build in marginally more controls over the offices than had existed beforehand? Well … yes, especially over their right to petition the courts for more public money. One of the paradoxes of this week’s public meeting was that several of the opponents of Ordinance 360 complained that it imposed too much in the way of term limits over such offices as that of trustee, whose late proprietor, Bob Patterson, came in for much praise.

It remains debatable whether, as Saino and fellow citizen-at-large John Lunt argued at this week’s meeting, Ordinances 360 and 361 impose too high a hurdle on the public’s right of review. A controversial aspect of Ordinance 361 sets the amount of signatures necessary to initiate a recall referendum at 15 percent of the county’s registered voters.

Too high? Opponents of the provision during the commission’s own debates called it too low.

In any case, if 360 and 361 don’t make it this week, the commission will have to come up with substitutes for the November ballot, in which case the wrangling can begin anew.