Tag: Tennessee General Assembly

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

New Bill Threatens to Eliminate a Shelby County Court

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, on the basis of 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, who journeyed to the state capitol to make their resistance to the bill known. 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.

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Editorial Opinion

Good Tidings

As the Tennessee General Assembly winds down, we find ourselves more gratified than usual. For one thing, the solons up thataway managed to bite the bullet and actually pass a major new tax bill to fund long overdue improvements in the state’s seriously needy roadways. The good thing about the 6 percent tax increase on gasoline at the pump (that’s 10 percent for diesel) is that a substantial hunk of it will be paid by the 18-wheelers and doubled-up dinosaurs that come wheeling through Memphis in such quantity on a daily basis, contributing more than their share of wear and tear to our thoroughfares.

Never mind that the legislature’s conservatives made certain to “balance” (actually, over-balance) the gas tax with massive new tax cuts to benefit corporations and the well-off. We’ll do our best to give the benefit of the doubt, one more time, to those who imagine that such giveaways actually create a “stimulus” to growth or an incentive to new industry. But no such rosy scenario can justify the Assembly’s decision to accelerate the expiration of the Hall tax on interest and dividends — a modest levy that disproportionately affects the wealthy and has been the source of needed revenues for the state’s cash-strapped municipalities.

Nor has there ever been a true rationale for the ongoing abolition of the estate tax (the “death tax” as its critics disingenuously call it), something which only the tiniest percentage of the state’s ultra-wealthy have ever had to pay, and in percentages so small as to leave the well-being of their lucky heirs utterly intact.

But, after all, another throw-in to the gas-tax package — optimistically called the “Improve Act” by Governor Bill Haslam, who aggressively pushed it — is a 20 percent reduction in the tax on food and groceries. That’s something that benefits everybody — rich and poor, buyer and seller.

Politics, when it works, involves trade offs, and, all things considered, the Improve Act is a good trade off.

Another area in which the General Assembly has gotten down to business in a commendable way is that of criminal justice, where cooperation between Democrats and Republicans can be said to be flourishing. Highlights have been bills to facilitate the employment of rehabilitated felons and to reduce the pain and effort and cost of expungement. Such measures have a positive effect on workforce recruitment; at the same time, they serve as encouragement for Tennesseans determined to correct past mistakes and to improve their lot in life.

To be sure, there have been legislative actions to carp about — like the absurd bill, steamrollered through both chambers, that removes impediments to the sale of silencers for firearms and was sold on the basis that its intent is to safeguard citizens’ hearing. The gun lobby still has too much power in the General Assembly.

But, as we have noted more than once, not much time was wasted this year on such misbegotten measures as the “bathroom bill” targeting transgenders or the “natural marriage” act with its presumptuous challenge on a matter that the U.S. Supreme Court seems to have resolved by its recent ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

And, one more time, private-school vouchers didn’t make it.

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Politics Politics Feature

Meatless Monday

CREDIT: JB

JB

Everybody knows the old saw about the process of legislation resembling sausage-making: meaning you don’t want to watch all the grisly stuff — the bloodletting, the grind, the slop, the drip, the smell — everything that goes on to create your hot dog.

But at least you get a hot dog. What happened at the Monday meeting of the Shelby County Commission was a kitchen mess with no meat to show for it. An anticlimax. A fizzle. A toot. A zip. A swing and miss.

No, scratch that last one. The batter who swings and misses at least is trying to connect. Nobody took the bat off his shoulder on Monday. And we can safely say “he”; the one woman on the Commission, Republican Heidi Shafer, took the day off. She didn’t miss a thing, after all.

Everybody who was there had something to be embarrassed about. 

Monday, March 20th, was the last possible day to set up a schedule, pending a special election in June, to name an interim replacement in the current legislative session for state Representative Mark Lovell, the freshman legislator from District 95 in the Tennessee House of Representatives who, amid allegations of sexual misconduct, resigned his seat after serving barely a month.

District 95 is a sprawling area, including hunks of Germantown, Collierville, and Eads. All these are high-growth areas that surely deserve to be served by somebody during the 2017 session of the legislature.

They won’t be. District 95 will not have votes recorded for it on issues of such gravity as Governor Bill Haslam‘s pending gas tax and infrastructure plan, medical marijuana, urban de-annexation, health care, an overhaul of the state’s tax structure, and on so much else. 

As bad as that is, that’s not the worst of it. Shelby County at large, by virtue of this abject default on the part of its governing legislative body, has failed to signify any sort of large general will on the issues confronting the state and the county — on all the ones just listed and one more that it had taken special note of and vowed to have an effect on.

This was the issue of school vouchers. A month ago, the commission, all 13 members of it, representing precincts and neighborhoods from the inner city to the outer suburbs, worked themselves into a condition of moral purpose and high resolve and voted resoundingly, without a nay vote, to defend public education by sending someone to Nashville in Lovell’s place who would cast a vote against the annual bill — introduced this year, as usual, by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) — that would authorize the diversion of taxpayer funds from public schools to use as tuition money for private schools.

This year’s version, creating a “pilot program” in Shelby County, was aimed directly at Shelby County Schools, already underfunded and struggling for survival.

A number of credentialed would-be interim legislators were ready to apply and be interviewed by the commission for the right to go to Nashville on behalf of District 95 — even if that meant service only for a week or two. After all, the voucher matter, as the commissioners knew, was usually one of the last things left hanging that late.

Then a group of Shelby County Democrats got the bright idea of prevailing on their party’s technical 7-6 majority on the Commission to get a Democrat up there to represent District 95, arguably the most Republican district in Tennessee. For a scant few days, mind you, hardly long enough to make any sort of dent on behalf of the legislature’s nearly extinct Democratic Party but long enough to potentially antagonize any Republicans straddling the fence on vouchers.

And the naked partisanship of the proposal alienated the commission’s Republicans to the point that they moved away from their previous position of solidarity with the body’s Democrats and convinced themselves that a better course would be to forgo sending any District 95 representative at all. And so it turned out on Monday. As if to mock the presumptuousness of it all, two Democrats used to siding with the Republicans in a pinch had the squeeze put on them and did so again. A majority voted not to make an appointment.

The bottom line: No Democrat and no Republican to represent District 95, nobody at all from the district to vote on vouchers or anything else.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Voucher and De-Annexation Issues Both Headed for Showdowns

CREDIT: JB

JB

County Commissioners Steve Basar and Terry Roland during deliberations on Wednesday.

Two matters of significant importance to Memphis and Shelby County (considered both separately and as a single geographic unit) are hanging fire as of this week.

One involves the question of school vouchers, which is sure to come to a head in the state General Assembly before it adjourns in April. The other has to do with de-annexation legislation directly affecting Memphis and its suburbs, and this matter, too, is likely to have a reckoning in Nashville before session’s end.

VOUCHERS: Until this week, it seemed reasonably certain that the Shelby County Commission was prepared, on a tight deadline, to establish the machinery for appointing an interim state Representative to fill the state House vacancy created by the resignation last month of Rep. Mark Lovell in District 95 (Germantown, Collierville).

A schedule had already been prepared, calling for applications for the interim position to be made available between March 21st and March 27th, with applicants to be interviewed by the commission on March 29th and an appointment to be made during the Commission’s regular public meeting of April 3rd.

Given that the legislature has plans to adjourn sometime in April, that left little time for an interim Representative to serve. (Governor Bill Haslam had meanwhile issued a writ establishing a schedule for a special election, to be completed in a general election in June — well after the end of the current legislative session.)
The momentum for the Commission’s determination to appoint an interim successor to Lovell was the likelihood that at least one voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), and possibly another, sponsored by state Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), would be among the late measures still requiring a definitive vote in the waning days of the General Assembly.

The Commission had voted unanimously on February 20 to oppose voucher legislation pending in the General Assembly. The Commission’s seven Democrats, all African Americans from Memphis districts, and six Republicans, whites with constituencies in East Memphis and the suburbs, were firm on the issue.

They all saw voucher legislation, which would enable public funding for tuition at private schools, as being a threat to the financial and logistical underpinning of both the Memphis-based Shelby County Schools district and the six independent municipal districts in the suburbs.

But a complication arose over the weekend in the form of a concerted effort among various Shelby County Democrats to persuade the seven Commission Democrats to vote as a bloc to appoint prominent Germantown Democrat Adrienne Pakis-Gillon as the interim appointee from District 95.

Inasmuch as District 95 is, by some reckonings, the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican House district in the state, the GOP members of the Commission expressed concern at this possible breach of what they considered a long-standing gentlemen’s’ agreement that governmental vacancies should be filled by members of the same parties that had occupied the seats previously.

Though that tradition had been flouted once before, in the case of a vacant Commission seat, it never had been in determining interim appointees to the legislature.

Consequently, in Monday’s meeting of the Commission’s general government committee, there came a motion from Republican Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to abandon the idea of appointing an interim successor to Lovell, leaving the District 95 seat vacant until the 2018 legislative session, come what might on vouchers in 2017.

Roland’s motion failed on a vote of 4 ayes, 4 noes, and one abstention among the committee members present, but, ominously for opponents of the voucher bills, one who supported Roland was GOP Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett, a former School Board member who had been arguably the most determined opponent of vouchers on the Commission and who had spearheaded the unanimous anti-voucher vote of February 20.

As late as Tuesday morning, Reaves was insisting that, as he told the Flyer, “”We need to appoint somebody to represent the district.” But on Wednesday, with partisanship threatening to supplant vouchers as the issue, Reaves had begun to backtrack on the need for an interim appointee.

He had assumed, along with other Commissioners, that the gentlemen’s’ agreement would hold, and that some moderate Republican (Reaves himself suggested former School Board colleague David Pickler) would fill the void in Nashville long enough to express the will of the Commission on the voucher issue.

Now everything was in doubt, with Democrats and Republicans beginning to eye each other across the partisan divide and a showdown scheduled for Monday, March 20, when the Commission will meet again, with one last chance to begin trying to get someone up to Nashville on behalf of District 95 before legislative adjournment.

Much depends on whether, as of March 20, there is anything resembling bloc unity among the Commission’s seven Democrats on the matter of an interim appointment for Pakis-Gillon or any other Democrat.

An informal survey of the Democratic contingent by the Flyer indicates that such is not the case, that as many as three Democratic members have yet to decide on the matter, and one or two have strong doubts about the propriety of risking long-term bipartisan comity for the sake of a transitory and perhaps Pyrrhic symbolic victory.

Especially for its effect on what looms as a forthcoming extra-tight House vote on vouchers.


DE-ANNEXATION: On Thursday, the day after the inconclusive Commission vote on District 95, the aforesaid Terry Roland was on his way to Nashville, in tandem with a group of suburbanites from the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas desiring to de-annex themselves from Memphis.

The point, as Commissioner Roland explained it, was to force more or less immediate action on a de-annexation measure in the face of what appears to be a dilatory attitude by the Memphis City Council toward acting on a home-grown de-annexation alternative offered up recently by a joint city-county task force.

“They don’t want to wait around until 2020 or 2021 when the Council might or might not have got something done on the task force plan,” Roland said, referring to a “rightsizing” initiative prepared to the City Council last month by Caissa Public Strategies on behalf of the Strategic Footprint Review Task Force, the ad hoc city/county body created to explore formulas for potential voluntary de-annexations.

That report cited six areas considered suitable for de-annexation via City Council action. Several of the areas were large but thinly inhabited land masses where the cost of providing essential city infrastructure was judged to outweigh returns to the city via sales and property tax revenues. But included also and key to the proposal were the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas, both annexed by Memphis relatively recently, both sources of significant revenue for the city, and both hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment.

Some residents of both those areas, while pleased at being included in the “right-sizing” plan, professed themselves at subsequent public meetings to be dissatisfied by the plan’s proposed scheduling, which put off final implementation of their de-annexation until 2020 or 2021.

These residents’ restlessness has been increased further by the apparent disinclination of the Council for a definitive vote on the right-sizing plan before the legislature’s planned adjournment in April, and further yet by a growing consensus on the Council to arrange instead for referenda down the line in the affected city areas.

Hence the decision by the Roland group to exert direct pressure on the legislature to act on its own during the current session. “I’d be fine with having the Council act on it, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to,” declared the Millington Commissioner and declared candidate for County Mayor in 2018.

If the legislature should act on its own, it could well favor a reprise of the 2016 measure proposed by two Hamilton County suburbanites, state Rep. Mike Carter (R-Oooltewah) and state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), whose original measure enabled easy referenda on de-annexation by any community annexed by a city since 1998.

The Carter-Watson measure, considered Draconian by Memphis and other affected cities, passed the House last year and was tabled in a Senate committee only by dint of monumental last-ditch exertions against it by officials of Memphis and other urban areas and by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce.

One word of caution for the politically ambitious Roland from a Council source: “Curry Todd (R-Collierville) and [Steve] McManus (R-Cordova) got a message last year” — the idea being that former state Representatives Todd and McManus may have lost their reelection battles last year at least partly due to their zeal for the Carter-Watson bill and the resultant disaffection of influential donors in commercial and financial circles.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Dem Leaders on New Health-Care Plan: “Hooey!”

CREDIT: JB

With the 2017 legislative session just three months away, Democratic leaders in the General Asembly have made it clear that they are in no mood to accept the healthcare compromise offered up by House Speaker Beth Harwell’s task force on the subject.

That plan, which is sure to be the subject of debate when the legislature convenes, is a much-winnowed-down and highly-conditioned version of Governor Bill Haslam’s ill-fated Insure Tennessee proposal, first introduced during a special session in 2014 and bottled up by a Republican super-majority then
JB

Rep. Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), at Wednesday’s TNA forum, talks things over with District 96 House candidate Dwayne Thompson (center) and Thompson campaign adviser Bret Thompson.

and in another try since.

In a forum on state and federal legislation held Thursday night by the Tennessee Nurses Association at Jason’s Deli on Poplar, both state Senate Democratic leader Lee Harris of Memphis and House Democratic leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley denounced the would-be substitute plan presented by the Harwell task force, which bears the name “3 Star Health Insurance Pilot,” in the process renaming it. Their name for it? “Hooey!”

Instead of providing expanded Medicaid coverage for all Tennesseans currently uncovered by health insurance, this plan would, during a two-year trial period, offer coverage to uninsured veterans and people suffering from mental health needs, withholding any larger coverage pending a legislative re-evaluation that would include an opportunity to suspend the plan altogether through a variety of “circuit breakers.”

Harris drew first blood when asked about the task force plan: “Beth Harwell’s proposal sounds like a bunch of hooey to me. On our side of the aisle we are still pushing for expanded Medicaid in the form of Insure Tennessee or a similar alternative.”

Harris described Insure Tennessee as “the best way to take care broadly of a population that’s uninsured and [of] hospitals around our state that are suffering under financial strain and some of which are completely out of business.”

Insure Tennessee never got a fair consideration, Harris said, because “Republican party chairmen from around the state wrote in to Republican legislators and said ‘you better not consider Obamacare.’” Harris said the current “meltdown” in Republican politics caused by the internal party strive over Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy afforded Insure Tennessee a better chance of passage. In any case, “we don’t have to react to a bunch of hooey.”

Those remarks were basically seconded by Fitzhugh, who repeated the epithet: “This 3-start hooey is a bad idea.” Fitzhugh said “the worst part” of the task force proposal is that, instead of the 9 to 1 federal to state match proposed by Insure Tennessee, “in this 3-star plan it is only a 2-to-1 match, and the numbers aren’t going to work out. It’s going to be expensive to the state, and then they’re going to start crowing about what happened when we expanded Medicaid and the state did it on their own and almost sunk our ship.’”

Fitzhugh also drew attention to the fact that the state, under the 3-star plan, could continue to be denied the $1.5 billion in annual federal funding it would draw under Insure Tennessee. “The only upside” of the task force plan is that it would “keep the issue alive,” Fitzhugh said.

Two Democratic candidates for the House — Dwayne Thompson, running against incumbent Republican Steve McManus in District 96, referred to the task force plan as a rudimentary program…Obamacare Very Light” and said “my opponent bottled [Insure Tennessee] up in committee.

Thompson indicated that, if elected, he would attempt to amend the task force plan so as to broaden its coverage if Insure Tennessee itself could not be considered. He was seconded in that respect by Democratic candidate Larry Pivnick, running against incumbent GOP Rep. Mark White in District 83. “If they offer the compromise bill first I’ll move to amend it to include everybody. We have to call the question.”

Mark Lovell, unopposed after defeating incumbent Curry Todd in District 95, and the only Republican in attendance who was running for a state position, commented that he himself was “fortunate to be able to buy my own health insurance,” but said he thought the task force plan would “fix a huge void” and that “we should do whatever we have to do to take care of certain other people. We all need to make sacrifices.”

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News The Fly-By

State Considers De-annexation and De-funding Bike Lanes

Memphis had a lot at stake in Nashville this week as key votes were expected by the Tennessee General Assembly on several bills that would have direct and deep impacts here.

De-annexation

Memphis could lose Hickory Hill, parts of Cordova, and nearly $80 million in tax revenue if legislators approve a bill that would allow some areas to de-annex from cities.

The bill passed the House on Monday, and now it’s headed for the Senate.

Defeating the bill is the biggest legislative priority for Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who headed to Nashville this week to talk to lawmakers about it. Strickland said money saved by not servicing those areas would not equal the tax money lost, which is about 12 percent of the city’s budget.

“In the short term, it would be very difficult to avoid a property tax increase to help cover that lost revenue,” Strickland said. “Remember, it’s already a challenge just to balance our budget with current revenue.”

The bill’s sponsors said they want to stop cities from annexing areas to capture tax revenue but then de-annex roads, bridges, or anything else they’d have to pay to maintain. Similar legislation died on the last day of the legislature’s session last year.

Strickland said that while he is open to shrinking the size of the city’s footprint, he’d want to do it more slowly, deliberately, with stakeholders involved, and “not as part of a messy financial crisis.”

Areas Memphis has annexed since 1998

Bike lanes/pedestrian paths

A bill that bicycle and pedestrian advocates call “dangerous” was slated for key votes on Tuesday, possibly clearing major hurdles on its way to becoming law.

The bill would prohibit cities and counties from spending state gas tax funds on bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and “other non-vehicular facilities.” The bill is sponsored by Rep. Mike Carter and Sen. Todd Gardenhire, both from the Chattanooga area.

The Senate bill headed to the powerful Senate Finance, Ways, and Means Committee this week, but it arrived there with a negative review from a sub-committee that oversees state revenues.

The chairman of that sub-committee, Sen. Doug Overbey (R-Maryville) said concerns about the bill from constituents have “filled up my inbox.” Gardenhire laughed and told him “that’s what they make that delete button for.”

Portions of the state gas tax are required to go to cities and counties. Those governments sometimes use the funds to build bike lanes or for matching dollars to get federal money for bike and pedestrian projects.

Gardenhire said legislators would likely be asked to consider a gas tax hike next year, and his constituents want the money spent on bridges and roads, “not for recreational use,” noting that cities that want bike lanes “need to pay for it themselves.”

Skunks as pets

Having a skunk as a pet remains a Class C misdemeanor in the state after House members voted down a measure that would have made it legal.

Lawmakers were concerned that loosening the law could lead to the spread of rabies. State Senators didn’t think so, though. They passed the bill in February on a vote of 27-3.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

State Senate, House Reach Agreement on Appellate Judges

CREDIT: JB

The unexpectedly complicated sequel to the passage last year of a constitutional amendment on judicial conformation seems to have ended finally with an agreement hammered out in the General Assembly.

JB

state Sen. Brian Kelsey

The amendment called for appointment by the Governor of state appellate judges, followed by confirmation by the legislature. Given that the legislature is composed of two chambers, which occasionally have differing points of view, some controversy had swirled around just what was involved in legislative confirmation — whether the two chambers might should express themselves jointly or separately and whether one chamber could offset the opinion of the other.

A conference committee of the state House and state Senate reached a compromise solution allowing separate initial considerations of an appellate nominee by either chamber, followed by a joint vote, and allowing either chamber to block an appointment by a two-thirds vote. 

The solution is addressed in the following news release about Senate Bill 1, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), who is also chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee and was the sponsor of the original constitutional amendment.

(NASHVILLE) – The Senate and House of Representatives have adopted a conference committee report on Senate Bill 1 which puts into place a framework on how the state’s appellate judges should be confirmed or rejected under the new constitutional mandate adopted by voters in 2014. The bill is sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown).

Under the constitutional amendment, appellate judges are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the legislature. The voters of Tennessee have the ability to vote to retain or not retain judges at the end of their 8-year terms or, if an appointment is to fill a vacancy, at the next even year August election.

“I am thrilled the agreement passed the Senate and House with overwhelming majorities,” said Kelsey. The Senate passed it unanimously (33-0) and the House tally was 86-5. “I look forward to holding the first ever confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming weeks. We are setting precedent for quality judges in Tennessee for the next hundred years.”

Under the agreement, the Senate Judiciary Committee and its House counterpart will each hold a meeting to hear from the appointee. Following the hearing the committee will vote to recommend confirmation or rejection of the appointee to the full Senate. Next, the Senate and House of Representatives will meet in joint session to either confirm or reject the governor’s appointee.

If both chambers vote to confirm, the appointee is confirmed. If both chambers vote to reject, the appointee is rejected. Also, one chamber may reject the appointee by a two thirds vote.

On January 7, Governor Bill Haslam appointed Judge Roger Page of Jackson to the Tennessee Supreme Court, replacing Justice Gary Wade, who retired in September. Upon being signed into law by Governor Bill Haslam, the process laid out in the bill will be used when lawmakers consider his nomination.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jury Still Out on Tennessee Appellate Conundrum

CREDIT: JB


Tennesseans may have thought that they’d solved the question of judicial confirmation back in 2014, when a constitutional amendment to clarify how the state’s appellate judges were appointed passed easily. 

The amendment, co-sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) and state Representative Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), abandoned what had been a judicial nominating commission on the front end and added the important proviso of legislative approval or rejection on the back end. The middle process, by which state appellate judges would be appointed by the governor, remained in place.

JB

Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris

Although the constitutional amendment seemingly established a process similar to that by which federal judges are appointed — in that case, presidential appointment, followed by Senate confirmation — and was partly sold to the state’s voters that way, the real point of the change was to give the legislature final say over appointments.

In Tennessee’s system, state trial judges are elected directly by the people, as mandated by the state constitution, and controversy had raged for years about whether appeals court judges should be named by the same process. Besides establishing the principle of legislative control, the 2014 constitutional amendment would seem to have resolved that issue.

Left unresolved was a newly created conundrum: What exactly does legislative confirmation mean in a bicameral legislature? Should the two chambers — the state Senate and the state House vote as a collective body (in special session, as it were) on approving a gubernatorial selection? Or should each chamber vote separately? And, if the latter, what happens if one chamber votes yes and the other chamber votes no on an appellate judge’s appointment?

Lo and behold, the two chambers don’t agree on the point. The Republican Party may have an unbreakable monopoly (i.e., super-majority) in the General Assembly, with majorities in both chambers that cannot mathematically be offset by the small Democratic remnants in each body, but human nature, which abhors a perfect concordance, occasionally asserts itself in wrangles between Senate and House, each of which is jealous of its own power.

So it is that one of the first agenda items for the just reconvened General Assembly to resolve is the effective meaning of “legislative confirmation” as it applies to the 2014 constitutional amendment on selection of appellate judges.

And the issue is hardly moot. In September, state Supreme Court Justice Gary Wade retired, leaving Tennessee’s ultimate judicial tribunal one member short of its five-member quota. Governor Bill Haslam has appointed Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Roger Page to fill the vacancy, but Page cannot take his seat on the court until his appointment receives legislative confirmation — whatever that turns out to mean.

There is a fail-safe in the process. If the legislature remains in session 60 days without producing either a yes vote or a no vote on Page, the state constitution allows him to be confirmed by default. But nobody wants that to be the endgame. It would leave the conundrum unresolved, with other judicial appointments sure to come before the legislature in the relatively near future.

And such a conclusion would leave the legislature as such looking ineffectual in the process — a direct contradiction of the intent of the constitutional amendment.

And, as Ed Cromer of The Tennessee Journal has noted in a definitive article on the controversy, reliance on the 60-day default process would inevitably lead to possible accusations of “stalling” by one chamber against another or even to the enabling of questionable appointments by some future “bad actor” governor.

The onus is on the General Assembly to resolve the matter as soon as possible in the current legislative session.

An effort was made to break the impasse last spring, in a compromise proposal drafted by Senate-House conferees calling for judicial-confirmation votes to be achieved by votes of the two chambers sitting together, with a majority of the entire General Assembly — 67 votes — needing to be achieved.

That plan was rejected in the Senate, where it got only four of the body’s 33 votes and was condemned by the Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) as threatening “the end of the bicameral legislature.”

Both Norris and Kelsey are members of a 10-member committee (seven Republicans, three Democrats) assembled for the current session and charged with coming up with a new solution. The committee’s first draft, last week, called for separate confirmation votes by House and Senate, with a split decision resulting in a nominee’s rejection. Since both Haslam and the Tennessee Bar Association immediately expressed their opposition to this plan, other formulas and drafts are due to be considered by the committee this week, with deliberations starting on Tuesday.

Besides the urgent matter of filling out the state Supreme Court to its full complement, there are numerous other ramifications that would seemingly call for an immediate solution — including the fact that, while the constitutional amendment may have strengthened the legislature’s hand on the back end of judicial selection, it weakened it on the front end by allowing the expiration of what had been a built-in legislative screening process prior to the governor’s naming a candidate for an appellate position.

That’s what you might call an “unintended consequence,” one of many that may have been packed into last year’s much ballyhooed constitutional amendment process.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Despite Competing Partisan Claims, the 2015 Legislative Session Was Neither a Grand Success nor a Total Flop

CREDIT: JB

JB

GOP Leaders: (l to r) House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, House speaker Beth Harwell, Governor Bill Haslam, Senator Speaker/Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris

NASHVILLE — Two sets of post-mortems on the 2015 session of the Tennessee General Assembly were held Thursday morning in the state capital — one by Governor Bill Haslam and the Republican leadership, another by the leadership of the Democratic legislative minority.

Haslam, flanked by House and Senate Speakers Beth Harwell and Ron Ramsey and by House and Senate majority leaders Gerald McCormick and Mark Norris, all sitting at a table in the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol, opened up this way:

“The primary constitutional obligation of the General Assembly and the Governor is to present a budget that balances. This actually was an extraordinary year; not only did we do that, but if you think about it, the hardest time to govern is when you actually have extra money.” An A grade, all things considered.

Half an hour later, over in the Conference Room 31 of Legislative Plaza, it was the turn of House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh, standing primus inter pares among some 18 of his party members from both chambers (the total number of Democrats in both is 30, out of a total of 132).

Said Fitzhugh, by way of starting up: “We legislated quickly, and we passed a budget. That’s about it.” Inasmuch as the veteran Leader from Ripley was among the many in both parties and both chambers who had felt rushed by the session’s hyped-up pace and among the few who could not bring themselves to vote for the budget, that was a failing grade.

In fact, both Haslam and Fitzhugh were exaggerating.

The Governor actually made the claim that “all of what you would call Governor’s bills were passed,” when his most important initiative of all, his Insure Tennessee Medicaid-expansion plan, was blocked in both the special session that began the legislative year and in the regular session.

JB

Democratic Leaders: with House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh at podium; Others include House Caucus Leader Mike Stewart and Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris.

And, while Fitzhugh made a point of naming the failures of Insure Tennessee and of a late tax-relief bill to benefit veterans as reasons for his displeasure, it was also true that several measures opposed by Democrats were blocked as well, and by a bipartisan coalition. Among those were a bill to allow de-annexation of rebellious communities from cities and, for the third or fourth year in a row, a bill allowing for a modest school-voucher start-up.

True, a GOP-backed bill to strike down local options on banning guns in parks passed both chambers, but Haslam has made clear his disagreement with the bill and said on Wednesday that he would decide within a week — maybe as soon as Friday — whether to veto it.

UPDATE: To the surprise of most (and the acute dismay of many) the Governor signed the latest guns-in-parks bill on Friday, abolishing thereby the freedom-of-action of cities and other local jurisdictions regarding firearms in their park areas.

There was actual bipartisan concord on several matters — including virtual unanimity in passage of a home-grown educational standards bill to replace Common Core that was so similar in nature to the much-abused original as to be its fraternal twin.

And even the late failure in the House (on Wednesday) of a bill to permit in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants was not due to partisan disagreement — though a GOP right-winger, Rep. Matthew Hill (R-Jonesborough) may have sullied it for some Republicans by comparing it to President Obama’s immigration directives. The real problem may have been the absence of two Democratic supporters from the vote, both for work-related reasons.

House Democratic caucus leader Mike Stewart (D-Nashville) did what he could Thursday to deflect possible recriminations against the two, Bo Mitchell and Darren Jernigan, both from Davidson County, by saying, “This is a citizen legislature. Absences are going to happen.” The fact remains that the bill fell one vote short of the 50 needed for passage.

Stewart was less forgiving in the case of Insure Tennessee’s failure, clearly brought about by the failure of the Governor’s own Republican Party (with some exceptions) to support it. An “extraordinary failure,” the Democratic caucus leader called it, and, indeed, even as Haslam vowed at the GOP availability to continue supporting it as “the right thing to do,” Lt. Governor/Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, sitting to the Governor’s immediate left, opted out loud for the alternative of a two-year scenario involving election of a Republican president in 2016 and conversion of Medicaid funds into pure block grants.

The Democrats, for their part, vowed to renew their support for Insure Tennessee. Fitzhugh announced that the combined party caucuses would be sending Haslam a letter before the week ended beseeching him to call another special session to deal with the measure. It’s fair to say that’s pretty unlikely, and the fact that next year is an election year decreases the likelihood of action in the 2016 session as well, especially given the scenario spelled out by Ramsey.

The Governor had expressed pride in getting safely through two “contentious” matters in the session just concluded. One was the Common Core matter, and that could be stacked up with other education-related successes of the Haslam agenda, including the roughly $170 million in “new money” appropriated for K-12 education and backing for higher education initiatives as well, including Drive for 55 and Tennessee Promise, both aimed at raising the level of adult post-secondary education.

Haslam was on thinner ice in expressing satisfaction in how the legislature had skirted (to his mind) major controversy in limiting anti-abortion legislation to the imposition of a 48-hour waiting period. The Democrats made whoopee on that matter, regarding which Planned Parenthood and various organized women’s groups remain outraged. “Their mission is to change the way women live. They are taking their rights away,” Rep. Sherry Jones (D-Nashville) maintained.

Still, a fair assessment of the just-concluded session from a neutral observer might be: Could have been worse; surely could have been better. Some of the outright wack stuff, like the attempt to make the Bible an official state book, was beaten down by bipartisan action, and there was intermittent harmony on other issues as well.

One such was the hectic pace of the legislature’s increasingly abbreviated sessions — an innovation that, quite obviously, has been driven by Ramsey, who has set mid-April adjournment deadlines for a body that in recent years had continued its deliberations well into summer.

At the Republican leadership availability in the old Supreme Court chamber, Ramsey had expressed pride in what he called cost-conscious “efficiency” gained from the sped-up pace and claimed, “We didn’t even feel rushed.” But, after a brief pause, in which he must have noticed either slight murmurs or rolled eyes out there among his auditors, he added, “OK, we were rushed.”

Earlier Thursday morning, a bipartisan group of legislators having breakfast at the Red Roof Inn, a modestly priced alternative to the state capital’s more expensive hostelries, sat together, grumbling about what they saw as a much too frantic pace, which one or two of them attributed to Ramsey’s need to get about his auctioneering and real estate businesses as early as possible in the spring.

In any case, these legislators agreed that key bills were being overlooked in the undue haste and some, like the in-state tuition bill which they all happened to support, had fallen victim to it. If there is a true bipartisan consensus developing on any one matter, this matter would seem to be it.

In any case, here it is, still April, and the General Assembly is over and out.

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Bill Increasing Animal Fighting Penalties Passes Tennessee Legislature

A bill that will increase penalties for attending an animal fight or bringing a child to an animal fight is headed to Governor Bill Haslam’s desk after passing both the Tennessee House and Senate by an overwhelming majority vote in its favor.

The bill makes it a Class A misdemeanor to attend an animal fight or to bring a child to an animal fight. Both provisions carry maximum penalties of up to 11 months and 29 days in jail and up to $2,500 in fines. The mandatory minimum penalty for bringing a child to a fight would be a $1,000 fine.

The bill passed the House in a 90-2 vote on Monday night, and it passed the Senate in a 24-1 vote last month.

“The General Assembly has spoken loud and clear, and the message is: Tennessee will no longer be a refuge for anyone who sets animals against each other in fights to the death,” said Leighann Lassiter, the state director for the Humane Society of the United States. “Senator [Bill] Ketron and Representative [Jon] Lundberg, [the bill’s sponsors], and 112 of their colleagues have made our state a more humane place with their good work.”