Tag: Tennessee Legislature

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Talking Politics Online

Those of you who cannot live without political dialogue are in luck — at least if you’re Democrats. The Tennessee Democratic Party is hosting a town hall of sorts on Facebook every Thursday for the duration of the pandemic. The first one is at 4 p.m. today (Thursday, March 26), accessible via the state party’s Facebook page, facebook.com/tndem.

Subjects to be discussed: “the current stage of TN’s legislature, where we are beginning this campaign year, the expedited budget process, and COVID-19.” Hosts are party chair Mary Mancini and State Rep. Mike Stewart, House minority caucus chair. (Scroll down for “Cocktails and Questions.”)

When we learn of equivalent Republican efforts, we’ll pass on information about those, as well.

Meanwhile, the proceedings of the now-suspended legislative session — including videos — are accessible at legislature.state.tn.us.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby Legislators in the Thick of It in Nashville

NASHVILLE — As the 2019 session of the Tennessee General Assembly concluded its first full week of activity last Friday, it became obvious that several Shelby County legislators are in the eye of the tiger. District 83 state Representative Mark White, a Republican, is chairman of the House Education Committee and, as such, is already riding that tiger.

During an introductory session of his committee last Wednesday, White scheduled two groups of presenters to testify before the committee. One group was a duo from SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education), the organization founded by former U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The SCORE representatives talked about the group’s efforts to collaborate with the state’s professed educational goals and were able to cite several successes in the state’s educational achievement.

The second group, composed of two representatives from the state Department of Education, got a stormier response from committee members. The subject that dominated discussion was the “debacle” (that has been the operational term) of the state’s failure so far to implement a completely workable testing apparatus for teacher and student assessment under the TNReady formula. TNReady is the state-devised system that replaced the testing system existing beforehand under Common Core, the nationwide eductional initiative whose uniform standards became controversial for a variety of reasons, some of them frankly political.

Questar, the vendor that has the contract under TNReady — one worth $150 million over a projected five-year period — suffered a number of system breakdowns last year that made reliable testing impossible under the online methods adopted and caused the legislature to pass measures late in the 2018 session that, in effect, nullified the validity of the results.

In the course of an intense questioning by Education Committee members, the Department of Education representatives acknowledged that Questar was still due to be paid $26 million of the $30 million pro-rated annual payment called for under the state’s contract with the company and, further, was eligible to make a submission under a re-bidding process undertaken by the department. Moreover, until that process is completed, Questar remains the vendor of record.

That was too much for District 90 state Representative John DeBerry of Memphis, a Democrat. “I want to know why that company wasn’t fired on the spot,” he demanded. “The fact of the matter is that that system failed our children, failed our mission, failed the state of Tennessee. … I watched our teachers, our administrators, our students, including my own grandchild, in tears.”

The fact, explained the Department of Education representatives, was that federal regulations required that a contract be in place and that the testing debacle occurred too late to arrange a replacement company. Hence the new RFP (request for proposal) process.

In any case, chairman White will have his hands full dealing with the issue, as will the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Republican Dolores Gresham of Somerville, with two Shelby Countians, Republican Brian Kelsey and Democrat Raumesh Akbari, serving as co-chairs.

And so will Penny Schwinn, the Texan appointed by Governor Bill Lee to replace the departed Candace McQueen as commissioner of education. Schwinn was deputy education commissioner of education in Texas and — ironically (or appropriately) — experienced first-hand there the job of amending a failed assessment program that paralleled Tennessee’s experience.

• State Representative Antonio Parkinson has figured importantly both in the debates about marijuana legislation of the 2018 session and (so far, indirectly) in the general outcry over House Speaker Glen Casada‘s advice to committee chairs that they have the power to prevent broadcasting committee sessions online over social media. Parkinson was prominent in live-streaming such activities last year and his actions are regarded as one of the catalysts for Casada’s advisory.

The future effect of Casada’s edict is uncertain for several reasons, including the fact that questions have been raised as to whether the policy could be applied to citizen attendees or media members.

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Editorial Opinion

Grading Government on the Curve

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It is probably too early to give out report cards on our various branches of government, but before we move deeper into what could turn out to be a crucial year, a little preliminary judgmentalism might serve a constructive purpose.

Justin Fox Burks

Lee Harris

To start with the national government: Now, that is an unruly classroom. As a collective institution, it gets an Incomplete, and that’s grading charitably. The president, Donald Trump, gets an F, and that, too, is almost an act of charity. It almost implies that Trump is trying to succeed at something. There’s no question that the president has failed singly — to articulate and carry out a coherent, productive theme of government, as well as to accomplish any of his sundry private goals, notorious among which is his insistence on building a wall on our southern border. One of the first things most of us learned in school was the folly of the Great Wall of China. At enormous expense, an impenetrable barrier was erected across that Asian nation’s northern frontier, preventing potentially troublesome access from without but also dooming a once thriving kingdom to hundreds of years of isolation and stagnation from which it is only now recovering. Trump would have us repeat that doomed experiment. Meanwhile, he is failing at various other assignments and seems not to know the meaning of homework.

On the score of conduct, he also fails at working and playing with others — having made a mess of our relations with long and trusted allies and simultaneously permitting — or inviting — outside bullies of his acquaintance to nose into our classroom and creating enough mayhem of his own to shut things down altogether. All in all, some form of expulsion may be the only option here.

At the level of state government, we’ve just begun what amounts to a new semester, and from the looks of things [see cover story], the various students involved in the  process seem entitled, at the very least, to an A for effort.

We have a city council that is just getting reorganized after several of its members transferred to other institutions. The reconstituted group is about to undergo crucial exams in the form of an election year, as is Mayor Strickland, whose authority to lead the body is about to be tested as well. The final grades here will come decisively this fall.

County government is off in a brand new direction under the tutelage of a new mayor, Lee Harris, who is proposing what amounts to a new curriculum based on re-evaluating the nature of justice. So far the body of commissioners he’s working with seem inclined to follow his example and are working in harness, keenly exploring the new group project. This effort, too, needs some additional time for evaluation, but we are impressed so far.

Government is an inexact science, and opinions about it are famously subjective. All grading is, more or less, on the curve of our relatively modest expectations. We will periodically  look in on the various branches of government in this space and let you know what progress, if any, is being made.

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Editorial Opinion

Tennessee’s Waffle House (and Senate)

The odyssey from his home state of Illinois to Tennessee of Travis Reinking, the armed assailant who killed four people at a Nashville-area Waffle House early Sunday morning is instructive, especially considering information given to the media from Nashville police chief Steve Anderson after a manhunt resulted in Reinking’s capture on Monday.

As Anderson explained things, Reinking had been violating no Tennessee laws until he started pulling the trigger in the wee hours of Sunday morning. This was despite the fact that Reinking was on record as having violated firearms laws in his home state of Illinois and had been dispossessed of four different weapons after a series of misadventures both there and in Washington, D.C.

On a visit to the nation’s capital, the obviously disturbed young man had been arrested by secret service agents when, bearing the aforementioned firearms, he attempted to enter the White House for a “meeting” with the president.

After the White House incident, Illinois state police revoked Reinking’s license to own firearms and confiscated his four weapons. They were turned over to Reinking’s father, who seems to have compounded the prior violation of Illinois law by returning the guns to his son. They were in young Reinking’s possession when he subsequently moved into Nashville, the capital city of a state whose legislature has in the last decade struck down virtually every known and every possible restriction on possession and use of firearms.

Most recently the General Assembly, where the National Rifle Association’s word is the closest thing to holy writ, has given serious consideration to a “Consitutional-carry” bill that would allow any citizen to carry weapons about his person at will, and, failing that, to legislation that would recognize as valid in Tennessee such gun-carry rights as may have been granted an individual by the laws of any other state. As of now, however, if Chief Anderson is correct, transgressions of law in other states seem not to be honored within Tennessee’s boundaries.

Whenever gun violence erupts somewhere, opponents of gun regulation legislation, in Tennessee and elsewhere, have learned to shift attention away from such sensible restrictions as strengthening background checks and, in particular, closing the infamous gun-show loophole, which allows unimpeded over-the-counter sales of firearms. One of the gun lobby’s favorite diversionary tactics has been to change the subject, usually to pretend grave concern for the mentally ill, blaming all eruptions of deadly violence not on the weapon that accomplished them but on the mental state of the perpetrator.

After the Waffle House shooting in Antioch, Democrats in the Tennessee legislature called this particular bluff, attempting to offer legislation in the closing days of the current General Assembly that would make it difficult-to-impossible for someone diagnosed as mentally ill to possess a deadly weapon. Did the Republican majority, many of whose spokespersons in office have invoked “mental illness” rhetoric whenever a gun is fired in anger, consider the legislation? They did not. Instead they blocked any such legislation from consideration as the legislature prepared to adjourn for the year.

The site of the shooting in Antioch is not the only place where the word “waffle” deserves to be in the title.

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Editorial Opinion

Against Vouchers for Shelby County

Sometime in the next few weeks, before the scheduled adjournment of the Tennessee General Assembly in April, the state House of Representatives will take a deep breath and vote on an issue as crucial to the future of education

in Tennessee as anything that is happening or about to happen in Washington, D.C.

State Senator Bryan Kelsey

The issue is that of a school-vouchers bill sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), who has tried and failed with similar legislation for several years running. The current bill is styled as a pilot program and is written so as to single out Shelby County in general and the Shelby County Schools system in particular. As of this week, it has advanced through the state Senate Education Committee on its way to that chamber’s Finance, Ways, and Means Committee and was due for action in the House Education administration and Planning Committee.

The bill has undergone some amendments already and may undergo further amendments before it is subject to floor votes in both Senate and House, but its basic provisions are clear enough. It would use taxpayer funds to provide vouchers that students might use to defray the costs of tuition at private institutions. According to state Representative John DeBerry (D-Memphis), one of the bill’s relatively few legislative supporters in the inner-city areas that presumably would be targeted by the measure, the Kelsey bill amounts to little more than “just another tool in the toolbox, just another innovation” at a time of openness to experimentation on the part of both state and federal governments.

One problem is that the “tools” — i.e., education dollars — that would be handed over to participating private institutions would come directly out of the financial toolbox that would ordinarily be subject to the use of the Shelby County Schools public school system itself. “The dollar follows the child” is the rule of thumb in allocating the state’s education funding, and every dollar that follows a child to private school is a dollar that is denied a public-school system that is already in a near-catastrophic financial squeeze.   

The bill would multiply the number of “scholarships” year by year, increasing the number from 5,000 in 2017-18 to as many as 20,000 in 2020-21.

Another major problem is that the famous — and increasingly endangered — constitutional dividing line between church and state could become porous to the point of dissolving altogether. The bill — again, subject to amendment — would allocate as much as $7,000 per student per year, and that amount, though far beneath the annual tuition requirements of Shelby County’s preeminent private institutions specializing in college preparation, is well within the tuition range of numerous parochial schools whose parent churches significantly augment the institutions’ financial base.

However disguised as a “pilot program,” the bill directly challenges the state’s constitutional prohibitions against “private” (i.e., locality-specific) legislation that is not endorsed by the governing body of the locality.

This bill is definitely not so endorsed. The governing body, the Shelby County Commission, made a point in its February 20th meeting of opposing this voucher bill. That vote was unanimous, including Republicans, Democrats, and the representatives of city and county alike.

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Opinion The Last Word

Legalized Bigotry: Tennessee outdoes Mississippi and North Carolina

CREDIT: Tlovely | Dreamstime.com

Not wanting to be outdone by Mississippi and North Carolina in the Great Southern Race to the Bottom, Tennessee’s state legislature last week decided it was time to revisit the issue of where people go to the bathroom. After designating an official state rifle and making the comically unconstitutional proclamation that we Tennesseans are officially Bible-readin’ folk, the Joint Committee on Bumpkin Behavior convened and resolved that we need to work a little harder if we want to be a true national joke.

So last week HB 2414 and SB 2387 — the “bathroom bill” previously sent to summer study in March after opposition from businesses, civil rights groups, legislators from both parties, and anyone with a brain — swung that stall door wide open once again. If passed, the law would require students in Tennessee public schools and universities to use the facilities corresponding with the sex listed on their birth certificates. Not the gender they express and with which they identify, but the check mark beside M or F on a document that they received at birth.

Tlovely | Dreamstime.com

Better things to poo?

I doubt the sponsors, Senator Mike Bell of Riceville and Representative Susan Lynn of Mt. Juliet, have actually met a transgender person. Otherwise they would understand just how ridiculous and illogical the bill is. Then again, something tells me the “2006 Recipient of the Rush Limbaugh Feminazi Resistance” and the lead sponsor of the 2014 “Religious Freedom Act” probably don’t care. If the bill succeeds, they’ll get right to work on expanding it.

Supporters of the bill claim transgender students using the bathroom where they feel most comfortable “risks bodily exposure to the opposite sex.” In other words, it’s got nothing to do with keeping transgender people safe, though they’re the ones being harassed. It’s about protecting the delicate sensibilities of pearl-clutching Philistines who struggle to accept the fact that some people are different from them.

I have so many questions I don’t even know where to begin. How will this be enforced? Will ushers guard all restroom doors, checking birth certificates? That’s one way to create jobs, I guess. Or will transgender people have to wear some kind of patch so everyone knows what equipment they’re packing “down there”? That oughta keep them real safe. What could possibly go wrong?

Will there be a hotline number one can call to report seeing a hot dog where only buns are permitted? Would I be thrown in the slammer for choosing to use the unoccupied men’s room rather than waiting in line for the ladies’? Whatever, it’s usually cleaner anyway. What about parents with young children, or people caring for special-needs or disabled family members?

Legislators have not answered these questions, because this isn’t about safety. There are already laws that prohibit someone from entering a public restroom to hurt, harass, or invade the privacy of another person. And guess who they protect? Everyone. This bill, and laws like it in Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina are about discrimination. They’re about making people feel othered and unwelcome.

Privacy in public restrooms is a nonissue. It’s a right-wing dog whistle that has the potential to cause a lot more damage than “but what if somebody sees a penis?” ever could. Aside from being immoral and repressive, it’s bad for business. The bill puts Title IX funding in jeopardy — that’s $1 billion federal dollars for secondary and post-secondary education. Sorry, students: We’re just trying to keep you safe.

And let’s not forget the lost revenue from tourism, conventions, events, and businesses. Those precious millennials that cities are so obsessed with luring? Kiss them and their money goodbye, too.

Even if the bill does not become law, state legislators are making it clear that a) they’re bigots, b) they’d rather let everyone know they’re bigots than deal with legitimate policy concerns, c) they don’t actually care about their constituents, other than the fellow bigots who keep voting for them. And they’re making it harder and harder to rationalize living in the South.

Come to Tennessee! We’ve got gorgeous weather, majestic parks, and attitudes straight out of the 1950s … uh, did we mention the weather?

Please get it together, Tennessee lawmakers. Your civilized citizens are counting on you. Work on setting the state on a path forward instead of backwards. If that’s too difficult, maybe work on selecting an official State Cheese Dip or something. The obvious choice is Pancho’s, by the way.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and digital marketing strategist.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Making Tennessee Great Again!

I’m writing this from the restroom facility at Big Hill Pond State Park in southern McNairy County. On Monday, I commandeered the building, which contains the men’s and women’s restrooms, some racks of pamphlets, and two vending machines. There’s no one here right now, but I plan to stay as long as necessary to protest the fact that the state of Tennessee is run by oppressive know-nothings who wouldn’t know small government — or freedom, for that matter — if it bit them on their considerable backsides.

I’m talking about Andy Holt and Mae Beavers and Ron Ramsey and all those other dolts running things in Nashville, the people who think we elected them to fight an imaginary war against Sharia law and oppose gay marriage and suckle at the teat of the N.R.A. They’re not patriots. They’re self-aggrandizing morons, and I’m taking my state back. I want to make Tennessee great again.

I’m not kidding. I’ve had enough, and I’m serving notice: If the state of Tennessee wants this building back, they’re going to have to come and pry it from my freshly sanitized hands. And don’t think it’s going to be easy.

I’ve got a nice Beretta 12-guage automatic (the one I got as a wedding present from my brother-in-law), an (almost) full box of birdshot, and three pretty substantial bottle rockets. I’ve got four packages of thick-cut Benton’s smoked bacon, some nice sourdough loaves from Fresh Market, 15 Lindt Intense Orange chocolate bars, six heirloom tomatoes, several pounds of artisanal dark roast Kona, 12 bags of Skinny Pop, and two cases of Wiseacre Tiny Bomb.

Check and mate, my friends.

Not to mention, there’s enough toilet paper and hand sanitizer in here to last me ’til June, at least. And don’t forget those vending machines. Also, the Tuscumbia River is just over the hill, and I packed a sweet five-weight Sage and a nice selection of spring dry flies. A country liberal can survive. Underestimate me at your peril, Cousin Bubba.

Of course, I got the idea for this boondoggle, er, courageous stand for freedom, from those guys out in Oregon, the ones who bravely stormed and liberated an empty U.S. national park building that mostly catered to bird-watchers during migration season. Then they hung a bunch of U.S. flags everywhere and asked people to send help via the U.S. Post Office.

Because of that, some people are making fun of them, calling them “Vanilla ISIS” and “Y’allQueda,” but I think those right-wing mokes have the right idea. If you don’t like something, call the government’s bluff! Take over a federal building. For Freedom. And news coverage. What’s the worst that could happen? Not much, apparently.

So, here I am in good old Big Hill Pond State Park, making my own stand for freedom in sympathy with my Oregon brothers-in-arms. And like them, I’m locked and loaded and angry, and I’m not leaving until some big changes are made … or I get some airtime on national television.

So, Governor, er, Lieutenant Governor, Ramsey, you can send in the National Guard, I don’t care. Hell, send in ol’ Mae Beavers. I’d love to chat with that poofy-headed dipshizzle face-to-face. That’s right, you Nashville yahoos, I’m here on Tennessee state property in McNairy County, I’m Memphis as eff, and I’m not going anywhere. Come at me, bros.

Oh, and did I mention I’m white? Well, I am. Really, really white. Sooo … you know. Take it easy.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Age of Magical Thinking

“Magical thinking” happens when people believe that their thoughts, by themselves, can bring about change in the real world. Psychologists tell us that magical thinking is most prevalent in children between the ages of 2 and 7. An example would be, say, when a child is sad and it begins to rain, and the child attempts to make it go away by singing a happy song.

We are now living in the golden age of magical thinking, a time in which many Americans well past the age of 7 seem to think that if they believe something strongly enough, they can make it true.

For example, two Tennessee lawmakers, state Senator Mae Beavers (who else?) and state Representative Mark Pody are introducing a bill that says … well, let me just put it here, verbatim: “Natural marriage between one (1) man and one (1) woman as recognized by the people of Tennessee remains the law in Tennessee, regardless of any court decision to the contrary. Any court decision purporting to strike down natural marriage, including (a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision), is unauthoritative, void, and of no effect.”

Beavers and Pody apparently believe (1) that the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was just a suggestion, and (2) that if they just legislate hard enough they can come up with a state bill that magically trumps the law of the land. Of course, given the proclivities of our hillbilly heroes in Nashville, this bit of foolishness will probably pass, leading to expensive legal fees for the state and much derision from the rest of the country. For Jesus, of course.

Other examples? How about Kim Davis, magically thinking that she can wish away that same Supreme Court ruling, and Mike Huckabee magically casting Davis as a persecuted Christian martyr? Or Carly Fiorina, imagining a scene that never happened from a video attacking Planned Parenthood, and using it as a cudgel in the last GOP debate? Even when confronted with the evidence of her mistake on Fox News, of all places, Fiorina determinedly held her ground. “Who you gonna believe?” she seemed to be saying. “Me or your pesky facts?”

Or the Republicans in Congress voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare, when they know the votes aren’t there. Math, schmath! Let’s click our heels and vote again! Real hard, this time.

The sad thing is, it doesn’t seem to matter. Much of the public seems to have confused “reality” with reality television. All Donald Trump has to do is keep wearing his “Make America Great Again!” hat, and that’s all the evidence these folks need. It’s right there in front of their eyes. So it must be true.

In the last GOP debate, Rand Paul attempted rational discourse, saying that Trump’s making fun of people’s appearance was “sophomoric.” Trump’s response? “I haven’t made fun of your appearance. And there’s a lot to work with there.” Big laughs.

Politics has been reduced to entertainment — The Bachelor, with one-liners and homelier people. Resistance appears futile. I guess we just have to let the magic happen.

Categories
News News Feature

Panhandled

There is no social concern that a new law can’t solve. So in the absence of public policies to help the poor, Tennessee lawmakers created a new class of criminal: the aggressive panhandler.

A law went into effect July 1st that prohibits behavior already covered by other state laws, such as following someone who doesn’t want to be followed (stalking) or touching someone who doesn’t want to be touched (assault).

If you think this law is about anything other than protecting business interests in trendy areas, listen to what the sponsors said as the bill moved through the legislature.

“We have an interest in promoting tourism,” said the Senate sponsor, Republican Brian Kelsey of Germantown. “If individuals fear harm to their person because of aggressive panhandling, then they will no longer come here for tourist events and we will lose those state tax dollars associated with those events.”

House sponsor Raumesh Akbari was more direct. “What we’re really trying to get to … there are certain areas in Memphis that are on the upswing,” said the Memphis Democrat, mentioning downtown specifically. “I actually had a constituent who was punched by a panhandler,” Akbari said.

Anecdotes should not be the basis for public policy. But when it comes to ways to punish the poor and prioritize profits over people, if one law is good, then more are better.

In the Senate judicial committee, Memphis Democrat Sara Kyle was the lone voice of concern. “This seems awfully subjective,” Kyle said, wondering how the law would be enforced. “Isn’t this ‘he said, she said’?”

Kelsey had no such qualms. “At the end of the day, that’s going to be an issue for the prosecutor to prove,” he said.

The first violation is a Class C misdemeanor. A second violation is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail.

To her credit, Akbari toned down Kelsey’s bill with two amendments.

“If I’m standing still and you walk past me and I kindly ask you to give me a dollar, that’s not aggressive,” she said in a House criminal justice subcommittee. “If someone happens to be intoxicated and says, ‘Please, sir, do you have a dollar to spare,’ that’s not aggressive, just because they happen to be intoxicated while doing it,” she said.

In the end, the bill passed with only one no vote.

Peter Gathje, who helps run the homeless ministry Manna House, had harsh words for the law’s supporters. “Most people’s discomfort around panhandlers is that panhandlers are visible and sometimes verbal reminders that our society is messed up,” he wrote on Facebook.

“If I’m downtown enjoying myself, going out for dinner and drinks, I don’t want to feel like I am that well-dressed and well-fed rich guy in the Bible who went to hell because poor Lazarus didn’t even get the scraps from my table,” he wrote.

Gathje quotes Matthew 5:42, in which Jesus says: “‘Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.’ But then downtown merchants, political leaders, and even a few clergy say, ‘If you give to panhandlers you’re just enabling drug abuse or alcoholism or laziness.'”

Said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose last mission was to unite people across racial lines in pursuit of economic justice: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Pay attention to King’s choice of words. Panhandlers are produced. They are the creation of a nation in which most of the jobs being created pay less than a living wage. They testify of cities where mental health counseling is scarce, substance abuse treatment is nonexistent, and a night at the city’s largest shelter costs more than $5.

They speak to the nose-chopping, face-spiting cruelty of the Republican legislators who, despite the pleas of thousands of constituents, refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid, costing lives and billions in forfeited revenue.

“In the absence of housing or even shelter, we pass laws stigmatizing those who stand and ask for money,” Gathje wrote.

Take comfort in this: If there is divine reckoning at the end of our days, legislators who turned their backs on the poor will themselves have to beg — for forgiveness and for mercy.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Myopia in Nashville

Tennessee had the opportunity, on April 22nd, to join 22 forward-looking states by passing tuition equity, which would have benefited thousands of young people across the state. But a mysterious outbreak of myopia in the House chamber, moments before the bill came up for vote, defeated a nicely crafted Senate-passed bill that had strong support from Tennessee youth, educators, and immigrant-rights advocates.

The legislative push to secure tuition equity — which would have allowed in-state university tuition for undocumented youth — has been arduous. Legislators in Nashville have struggled to understand the ramifications of tuition equity in the context of stalled national immigration reform.

Ironically, the bill’s origin and defeat can be traced indirectly to persistent federal inaction on immigration policy.

Five years ago, the U.S. Senate voted down the “Dream Act,” a bill that would have created a path to residency and citizenship for undocumented youth in the U.S. The Senate’s failure to act essentially denied hundreds of thousands of teenagers the chance to pursue education beyond 12th grade. These youths were effectively assigned to the class of low-wage workers living in the U.S.A.

In response to congressional failure, President Obama signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order in 2012. The order allows childhood arrivals who are pursuing or who have obtained a high school diploma to earn a temporary, renewable two-year immigration status. This frees these folks from fear of deportation and allows them to work and study legally in the U.S.

Some states, as a result of congressional inaction, have cobbled together legislation — sometimes called tuition equity — designed to support young people who hope to earn college degrees and embrace the American dream. Tuition equity can come in a variety of forms but generally means offering in-state tuition rates for undocumented youth who reside in the state and have graduated from the state’s high schools.

The Republican-controlled Tennessee state legislature came close to passing tuition equity in last week’s general session. The Senate recently passed it by a vote of 21-12. The House vote, 49-47, fell one vote short of a constitutional majority (50 votes) needed for passage. This vote divided the Republican ranks. For example, Beth Harwell (R-Nashville) did not vote but claims she would have voted against the bill because, to her, the bill represents a “slippery slope.”

We’re not sure which slope she’s sliding down, but opening up opportunity for more young people, as many as 25,000, to study at our state-supported universities seems more like a step-up. Her lack of leadership on this important initiative is worse than her uninspiring metaphors.

Others have led with conviction and grace: Carla Chávez spoke on April 7th before the Education Administration and Planning Committee. The young woman told of arriving in the U.S. at 5 years old with her parents. She never knew she was “undocumented” until it came time to apply to college. Carla graduated from McGavock High School in Nashville and gained eligibility to work with a work permit, as authorized through DACA. She worked at internships and studied on the side, preparing for college during her free time in the hopes that tuition equity would, one day, pass in Tennessee.

Chávez’s powerful statement had a therapeutic effect on some of our representatives. Kent Calfee (R-Kingston) described the moment as “an epiphany” because he was set to vote against the bill, but was swayed by Chávez.

Representative Johnnie Turner (D-Memphis) invoked the civil rights struggle during a moving, passionate speech.

Representative Mark White (R- Memphis) sponsored and shepherded the bill that ultimately fell short. He deserves credit for recognizing the moral imperative behind this legislation and the positive impact it would have in Tennessee. Last year, this same bill bitterly divided the state legislature and never made it out of committee. This year, a broad coalition led by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), Latino Memphis, Inc., and hundreds of students organized a bold campaign that, while not managing to provoke new legislation, still made significant progress.

In these times of seemingly interminable partisan bickering, we need a state legislature that leads and helps us all look to our better angels. Offering young people the opportunity to take command of their lives through education, dedication, and focused work is the right policy option for Tennessee. We hope the myopia recedes, just a little bit, in the next legislative session.