Tag: Tennessee Legislature

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

NRA Foreplay in Tennessee

The NRA convention is coming to Nashville this weekend, so the Tennessee Legislature is trying to pass as many gun-friendly laws as possible before their overlords get here. That’s not hyperbole. Some members have actually said in public that this is a concern. The NRA must be appeased, and quickly, lest Wayne “Wackjob” LaPierre call them out from the podium as sissies. Was there ever a clearer demonstration of who these folks are actually working for?

One of this bunch’s signature pieces of legislation is the “guns in parks” bill, which would override the rights of Tennessee’s cities and counties to make the rules for allowing guns in their parks. The proposed bill essentially allows guns in all local parks, no matter what the local preference might be.

This is being done in response to overwhelming public demand, right?

Of course, it’s not. There has been no outcry from the citizenry to allow guns in our parks. Quite the opposite. Local government and business leaders around the state have denounced the law. It’s just another dog-whistle bill to appease the NRA and the state’s gun fetishists, public opinion be damned.

But they have a problem: The Senate upped the crazy a notch by adding an amendment that would allow armed handgun-carry permit holders onto the capitol grounds and into the building itself. Using their own “logic,” you could rightly ask, “What’s wrong with that?” After all, half the bozos in the legislature proudly carry guns, so you’d have plenty of responsible “good guys with guns” to take care of any responsible handgun carrier on capitol grounds who might become, er, irresponsible. Plus, there are plenty of police and security guards around. But the House doesn’t like this idea.

Let’s review, shall we? A) Our noble representatives are in favor of allowing people carrying guns to walk around freely in our parks and on our playgrounds (and, for that matter, pretty much anywhere they want), despite what the local citizenry might prefer; and B) they are not in favor of allowing people carrying guns to walk around where they are — a heavily secured and protected government facility. Nope, no hypocrisy there.

The lone hope for sanity lies in the hands of Governor Bill Haslam, who has, thankfully, expressed some reservations about all of this. He expressed regret that the legislature had not bothered to take testimony from local government leaders. (Representative Chuck “Chuck” Burpuss [R-Muletug] responded, “Testimony? We don’t need no steenkin’ testimony.”) Well, not exactly. But close.

Haslam, not surprisingly, was not invited to speak to the NRA gathering. Given his recent efforts to push through Insure Tennessee, there appears to be a spark of humanity and common sense in our governor. Here’s hoping he summons the courage to take on the anti-business, pro-bullet idealogues of his own party and vetoes this bill. In so doing, he’d show the legislature who the real sissies are.

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Editorial Opinion

Commission Kudos

In Washington there appears to be no hope for anything like bipartisan cooperation — not even to mention nonpartisan thinking. Everything in our nation’s capital is akin to trench warfare, with the two sides — the now dominant

Congressional Republicans and the demoralized Democrats of the House and Senate glaring at each other across a no-man’s land of stalled or vindictive legislation.

It is much the same with the Tennessee General Assembly in Nashville, where the most obviously beneficial possibilities — think Governor Haslam’s proposed Insure Tennessee vehicle for overdue Medicaid expansion — are doomed to inevitable oblivion once the GOP super-majority there finds a way to link them to the name of President Obama.

American history — if a nation this conflicted can actually survive — will surely reflect at some future point on the ignominy of a time when an entire national party devoted itself not to the art of governing but to a grim determination not to govern. (The periodic attempt of Republicans in Congress to shut down the government is not the anomaly it is often presented as by a credulous media; preventing government would seem to be not a stratagem but an end in itself for the anarchist ideologues who control the party’s right wing.)

Luckily, though, there is one governmental unit that still seems to be functioning across party lines with the goal in mind of securing the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s the Shelby County Commission, whose seven Democrats and six Republicans have demonstrated twice in this calendar year that they not only can achieve unity of purpose, but do so in such a way as to shame the bodies that theoretically represent the larger enclaves of state and nation.

Casting partisanship aside back in February, the members of the commission, among whose responsibilities it is to maintain the effectiveness of Regional One Health (aka The Med) voted 12-0 for a resolution urging the General Assembly to approve the Haslam plan, which would have brought $1.4 billion a year into Tennessee for the rescue of its financially challenged hospitals.

Although some Republicans in Nashville were ready to concur, a band of GOP ideologues on a single Senate committee prevented the plan from even getting to the floor. All hail gridlock!

More recently, the commission put itself on record this past Monday with the same degree of unanimity in opposition to voucher legislation which has already cleared the state Senate and is ready for processing by the House. The Republicans and Democrats of the County Commission pointed out the obvious: Any money channeled into private schools will be at the expense of the state’s — and the county’s — public school systems.

The Shelby County Commission seems to have gotten the knack of seeing beyond abstract partisanship so as to do some real governing on behalf of their community. It’s an elementary habit of mind but one that seems unhappily lost to the denizens of state and local government.

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Editorial Opinion

Support Insure Tennessee

No one can say that we were lax in urging Governor Bill Haslam to find some way to come to terms with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Tennessee, with its large lower-income population and a financially threatened hospital network, needs to take advantage of the billion or so federal dollars that come annually with Medicaid expansion.

Had the Governor made his peace early on with the ACA (or Obamacare, as Republicans prefer to call it), he might have been able to get his plan across in quick order and relatively uncomplicated fashion. He chose to procrastinate, however, possibly to keep the restive Tea Party component in the Republican-dominated legislature at bay. He proclaimed the existence of something called “The Tennessee Plan,” which, he said, was in the process of creation and which, when complete, would form the basis of a waiver request with the Department of Health and Human Services.

We would later learn that there was — at that time — no such plan, not even much of a skeleton for it. And meanwhile the GOP majority, goaded on by determined ultra-conservative foes of Medicaid expansion (and perhaps even of Medicaid itself) like Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey, took advantage of the delay to pass legislation that requires approval by both houses of the General Assembly for any state involvement whatsoever with the ACA.

Haslam, it seemed, had put himself — and the state, especially its working poor and its medical providers — in a box from which there was no escape.

Well, who is to say that the age of miracles has passed? The governor, at length, did come up with a plan called “Tennessee Promise,” with a two-track modus operandi that would allow participants either to accept vouchers for use with private insurors or to come within TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid) with an obligation to make modest co-pays and premium payments. It seemed a genuine compromise between the ideology of the marketplace and governmental intervention to meet an obvious social need.

And Haslam’s plan possesses a “fail-safe” provision that allows for automatic discontinuation of the state’s program in case of default by either the federal government, which promises to provide 90 percent of funding after the first two (fully paid) years or the Tennessee Hospital Association, which has pledged to take care of the remaining 10 percent.

This last provision should have invalidated the oft-expressed doubts by critics of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee that the state would veer into ultimate insolvency by committing itself to the federal funding, but it hasn’t. The critics have merely shifted ground a bit, crying rhetorical crocodile tears and claiming that either the feds or the Hospital Association or both will weasel out in two years’ time and leave the impoverished masses once again without coverage.

To call this claim “disingenuous” is to give it too much credit. The population on which this bogus concern is lavished is without coverage now. Even in the critics’ implausible scenario, something now is far better than nothing, ever.

All sophistries aside, Haslam’s plan is entitled to full and bipartisan support in the February 2nd special session. We urge its passage, the sooner the better.

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Politics Politics Feature

It’s a New Year in Politics, Too

As the second week of the New Year began, the aura of the holidays finally began to fade, and politics per se moved into high gear, locally, statewide, and nationally.

In Memphis, the city council stumbled over an early deadline that left a majority of applicants ineligible for a council vacancy, including a putative favorite, then recovered its balance with a fresh interpretation of the city charter by attorney Allan Wade that gave all seven hopefuls more time to complete their petitions.

In Nashville, the 2015 General Assembly convened to take on such key issues as health care, educational standards, changes in taxation, and legislation designed to exploit the constitutional changes effected by the state’s voters in the November 2014 election. In the cases of educational standards and “Insure Tennessee,” Governor Bill Haslam‘s proposal for Medicaid expansion, the trick will be to back into the essential structures of Common Core and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), respectively, with improvised Tennessee-specific substitutes.

Nationally, Tennessee’s two Republican U.S. Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, attained new levels of influence as a consequence of the GOP’s capturing a majority in the Senate. Alexander became chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and Corker ascended to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Alexander, who is behind legislation to revise the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” act, is widely regarded as a possible liaison between Republicans and Democrats in the highly fractionated Senate. Corker indicated, in a conference call with Tennessee reporters last week, that he intends to bring a new activist focus to what he regards as a drift in the Obama administration’s foreign policy. For that, he has been touted by columnist George Will as potentially “the senator who matters most in 2015,” though Corker has drawn more attention of late for his proposals to raise the federal gasoline tax.             

• The city council imbroglio and subsequent fix stemmed from the revelation late last week that only former Councilmember Barbara Swearengen Holt Ware and local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson had met what appeared to be the council’s deadline for filing a petition bearing 25 valid signatures of voters in District 7.

That would have meant that five others — including former interim Councilman Berlin Boyd, regarded in some circles as the favorite — could not vie for the right to succeed Lee Harris, now a state senator, in the vacated District 7 seat. Most of the five, including Boyd, were credited with 23 or 24 valid signatures — one or two short of the total needed — though all five had met the filing deadline of noon, last Thursday.

The situation was repaired with a hastily issued opinion from council attorney Allan Wade, who interpreted the city charter as giving additional flexibility on the deadline for submitting valid voter signatures. The new deadline was established by Wade as being Thursday, January 15th — a date that would seem to give the other candidates enough leeway to qualify.

Of the five, Boyd and Curtis Byrd Jr. had already submitted 23 signatures deemed valid by the Shelby County Election Commission (whose chairman, Robert Meyers, had noted that it was the council, not the commission, which had applied the signature requirement for regular elections to the instance of filling vacancies). Audrey Jones and David Pool had 24, and Charles Leslie had 15.

The council will choose a successor to Harris from among the ultimately eligible candidates next Tuesday, January 20th.

• At a farewell dinner last week for Harris, who was recently elected by his party colleagues in the Senate to be Democratic leader there, the new state senator got off a memorable quip: “Within this month, I’ll be drawing three government checks — from the city council, from the state Senate, and from the University of Memphis Law School. That proves I’m a Democrat!”

• The council does not lack for quipsters. Councilman Kemp Conrad, who was the host for a massively well-attended holiday party over the break, responded to someone’s suggestion that he might consult city planning czar Robert Lipscomb for help in building a parking garage to accommodate excess traffic. “A TDZ!” Conrad proposed.

• It would appear that the forthcoming session of the General Assembly in Nashville will not lack for controversy. The formal convening of the legislature, at noon on Tuesday, was preceded by a 10 a.m. “Women’s March on Nashville,” whose participants included another new state senator from Memphis, former Tennessee Regulatory Authority member Sara Kyle, who was elected in November to succeed her husband, Jim Kyle, now a Shelby County chancellor.

The rally was called to address several matters, including health, wage, and poverty issues, but a central concern of it was to counter a proliferation of bills in the legislature to impose new restrictions on abortion in the wake of the narrow passage of Amendment 1 by state voters in November.

Tennessee Right to Life, an organization that supports the proposed restrictions, indicated in advance that it had plans for a counter-demonstration.

Besides the abortion measures, other expected controversies include a renewed fight over proposed Common Core standards and efforts by several Republicans, including state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, to abolish the Hall Income Tax in the face of resistance from Governor Haslam, who considers the potential loss to state revenues to be prohibitive.

But the major battle will take place in a session within the session. Haslam has called a special session, to begin on February 2nd, dealing with his “Insure Tennessee” proposal for accepting Medicaid expansion funds under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

The governor’s plan, which apparently is assured of a waiver from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provides for a two-track structure in which persons eligible under poverty-level guidelines could either accept vouchers to purchase private health insurance plans or come under TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, through acceptance of modest co-pays and premiums.

Funding could amount to as much as $2 billion annually, with the federal government absorbing the full costs for two years and 90 percent of them after that period. The state Hospital Association, which has been lobbying tirelessly for the Medicaid expansion funds, has indicated it would assist with the remaining financial obligation after the two-year period.

Haslam has made a special appeal to the General Assembly’s Democratic minority to help him pass enabling legislation for Insure Tennessee. A bill spearheaded by Kelsey and other opponents of Medicaid expansion to require legislative approval of any administration plan under the ACA was passed in the last General Assembly. And, though Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey has expressed a degree of open-mindedness, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville and several other GOP members seem reluctant to endorse Insure Tennessee.

The sentiment of six GOP legislators from Shelby County who addressed the Republican Women of Purpose group at Southwind TPC last week varied from lukewarm to defiantly opposed to the governor’s plan.

State Representative Curry Todd prophesied “a lot of blood-letting” in the special session regarding the plan; Kelsey insisted Republicans needed to “shrink the size of government, not … expand the size of government,” and cast doubt as to whether the federal government would or the state Hospital Association could pay its pledged share in two years’ time. State Representative Jim Coley lamented the plan’s “dependence on the federal government” and said he “hope[d] to persuade the governor this is not the most appropriate plan.”

State Representative Steve McManus said it might not be so easy to opt out of the plan after two years as Haslam suggests. He contends that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services might withhold Medicaid funds entirely as retribution. “It’s like Hotel California,” he said, meaning that once you check into the plan, you can never leave.

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Living Wage

Memphis has the second-highest unemployment rate among large metro areas, and the highest poverty rate of cities with less than one million people. Nearly half of all children here live in poverty, and average wages are 11 percent under the national mean. In this bleak setting, efforts to raise wages are particularly important. So it was a significant victory last week when the University of Memphis affirmed plans to raise employees’ base pay to $10.10.

Nationally, economists have raised concerns that income inequality and low wages pose serious threats to economic growth. Some cities have responded to these concerns, and to growing public pressure, by hiking minimum wages significantly. Those that have are seeing some of the fastest job growth in the country.

Not so in the Volunteer State. In 2012, Tennessee’s legislature passed a bill barring local government from raising minimum wages or setting any number of community-benefit employment standards. The law preempted efforts to raise Memphis’ minimum wage. It also overruled a 2006 Memphis city ordinance, which required that city employees and workers at city contractors, be paid a living wage — a level that meets the cost of living. In 2014, ballot initiatives to raise state minimum wages passed in four red states, but Tennessee was not one of them. Governor Haslam has stood firm by an economic policy that has given our state the highest rate of minimum wage jobs in the country. 

It is in this hostile political environment that the University of Memphis, bowing to protracted pressure from a grass roots movement, raised base pay to $10.10. The increase affects about 130 workers and establishes a pay floor 40 percent above the federal minimum wage. The new policy is a bump for Memphis’ economy and a testament to what committed grassroots organizing can accomplish. 

Four years ago, three groups came together to launch a living-wage campaign at the University of Memphis. United Campus Workers is a union of higher-education workers. Progressive Student Alliance is a group of active and concerned students. Workers Interfaith Network (WIN) is a faith and labor community organization that led the broad effort in 2006 to gain a city living-wage ordinance. The three united around the idea that a job should keep you out of poverty, not in it; and that the University of Memphis needed to do better. 

The campaign kicked off with a campus speak-out to shine a light on U of M’s wage policies. More than 75 percent of workers in facilities services made less than the cost of living; scores of custodial employees were paid less than $8 an hour, even after years of service. Two U of M custodians in the union, Emma Davis and Thelma Rimmer, shared the story of their personal struggles trying live on poverty wages. 

The next year Davis, Rimmer, and I, and 1,500 other working people from Tennessee went to Nashville to meet with legislators and rally for living wages. Later that day, 50 workers took over the legislative chamber where senators were voting on anti-worker bills, and seven of us were arrested in an act of civil disobedience. We returned to the capital every year after that and continued to rally on campus. Last year, we were joined by fast-food workers, and the national movement for $15 and a union. We continued to organize, write articles, hold demonstrations, and send postcards, petitions, and letters to the governor, the legislature, and to the president of the University of Memphis. 

And then, almost suddenly, U of M made its announcement: Base pay would rise to $10.10. Despite an adverse political climate, we won. Our lessons — organize, connect to national politics, and apply pressure to a leader with executive authority — will need to be applied elsewhere. Even $10.10 is still below the cost of living, and the raise excludes part-time employees, adjuncts, and subcontracted workers. And there are still tens of thousands of low-wage workers making less with other employers in Memphis.

We need to pressure more employers to raise pay and force the city to require that companies receiving tax breaks commit to pay their workers fairly. And ultimately, we need to build a fair economy, united in the idea that everyone deserves a job that keeps them out of poverty, rather than in it.

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Editorial Opinion

Call Us Pollyanna …

Attentive readers will have noticed that the current issue of the Flyer is devoted to variations on that annual chestnut, the New Year’s resolution. Our staffers have searched their souls (and reserves of will power) to provide examples

of this eternal urge to be made new and better than ever (and to expunge undesirable habits) purely through determined actions of one’s own.

If we take a few liberties with the notion, we can also find instances of such a resolve in affairs of state, where it is sorely needed. Lamar Alexander, the recently reelected senior U.S. senator from Tennessee, has become the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Alexander, as an old governmental hand (now in his third six-year Senate term, (with a lengthy spell as Governor of Tennessee and a shorter one as U.S. Secretary of Education behind him) seems bent, not on creating new habits, but on recreating old ones of across-the-political-aisle collaboration with members of the other major party. 

As governor, especially, Alexander was able to pioneer significant reforms in public education, but only with the advice and consent (and votes) of supportive Democrats, who then constituted a majority in the Tennessee legislature. Not only is Alexander capable of doing good in his own right, he is potentially a resource for President Obama to learn from. The Democratic president has had precious little luck so far in getting congressional Republicans to even consider working with him. Alexander can perhaps give both the president and his stiffer-necked GOP colleagues pointers for getting along with each other. (Yes, we know this has a Pollyanna sound to it, but so do all New Year’s resolutions.)

Tennessee’s other Republican senator, Bob Corker, who has ascended to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also well placed to effect some useful collaboration, and he has been known to proclaim (and practice) the utility of constructive bipartisanship in the past. So far, though, he hasn’t tipped his hand on meeting Democrats halfway on any of the several foreign policy issues now pending.

Closer to home, we have the case of Governor Bill Haslam, another Republican who in crucial ways of late has attempted to cross the political divide. The governor’s decision to participate in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (even if disguised within a plan called Insure Tennessee) is long overdue but welcome all the same. We suspect he’ll have more trouble convincing his fellow Republicans to go along than he will with the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, who will have their own opportunity to demonstrate government rather than partisanship.

In any case, both in Nashville and in Washington, the two power capitals that influence our destinies the most, we see evidence, however modest and tentative, of a genuine desire to change. Wishful thinking or not, that would certainly make for a Happ(ier) New Year! So let us hope.

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Opinion Viewpoint

How Tennessee Turned Red

Given how fast and complete the fall from power of the Tennessee Democratic Party has been, the fact that the state’s Democrats in 2014 actually have a contested primary for a major statewide office — Terry Adams vs. Gordon Ball in the U.S. Senate race (see “Politics,” p. 12) — is more than remarkable.

Almost as remarkable as the fall itself. This is a party, after all, whose control of state government was reasonably secure from the end of Reconstruction until well into the current century. There had been challenges from the Republican Party, to be sure — beginning in the mid-1960s, when tensions between pro- and anti-Clement factions allowed the election of Republican Senator Howard Baker, who was followed into statewide power by Governor Winfield Dunn and Senator Bill Brock.

There were GOP stirrings in the legislature, too. But Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal tamped things down a bit, in Tennessee as elsewhere. And arguably it was only the Nixonesque follies of scandal-ridden Democratic Governor Ray Blanton that allowed the two-term gubernatorial interlude of Republican Lamar Alexander.

The GOP got another bounce in 1994, with the election of Senators Bill Frist and Fred Thompson and Governor Don Sundquist, but this was at most a bellweather period for Tennessee, with the balance between the two major parties corresponding to that in the nation at large.

In any case, Tennessee Democrats had control of the governorship, the state’s congressional delegation, and both chambers of the General Assembly as recently as 2006.

That was then, this is now, when, in the estimation of state Senator Reginald Tate, the Memphian who aspires to be the next Senate Democratic leader, the Democratic Party may have five members to start the forthcoming legislative session. 

“Man, we could have caucus meetings in my car,” says Tate, who lost his first bid for leader in 2013, by a vote of 4-3, to fellow Memphian Jim Kyle, the Senate Democrats’ traditional caucus head and a leading candidate for Chancery Court this year.

There were seven Senate Democrats in the 2013-14 session, out of a total of 33, and the party’s House delegation numbered 28 of the chamber’s 99 members.   

So what happened? Like the rest of the South, Tennessee began drifting toward the GOP at about the time, paradoxically, when the Democratic Party, long the party of middle- and working-class whites, began to expand its mission to people of color, to women, and to a variety of other erstwhile heterodoxies.

For a while, that process swelled and sustained the Democratic coalition, but at some point the white middle class — the male part of it, especially — began to make common cause with the well-off constituencies (“job creators” in the jargon of today’s conservatives) who had always constituted the core of Republicanism.

Wealth is, after all, just one kind of status quo. “Values” voters had something to hang on to, as well. Most of the latter never quite got out from under economic duress — especially in the costlier new suburbs to which they retreated in an effort to rekindle the ever-eroding homogeneity they had been used to. They discovered that they, too, like the traditional businessmen and industrialists of the old GOP, resented the hell out of taxes, which they increasingly saw as destined to support unfamiliar ethnicities and radicalisms. Hence the rabid distrust of government by the Tea Party, that bloc of right-wing populists whose New Deal ancestries still survive in their hatred of big-bank bailouts.             

There were other triggers along the way. The Tennessee Waltz prosecution of local and state governmental figures mid-way through the current century’s first decade netted Democrats disproportionately — either incidentally or, as skeptical Democrats eyeing the Bush-era Justice Department might imagine, on purpose.

Then there was the presidential election of 2008. Barack Obama’s nomination and subsequent election may have been a triumph for progressivism and the American dream, but what remained of a coherent Democratic power structure in Tennessee had been loyal to Hillary Clinton, and her defeat in the national primaries left it in shambles — a circumstance made worse by the Obama-Biden ticket’s disinclination to campaign in Tennessee or to channel significant funds to the state party.

In 2008, the state House joined the state Senate in electing a Republican majority. And in 2010 — a political off-year on steroids — Democratic candidates were engulfed by a newly indigenous Tea Party wave. And 2012 — ironically the year of another Democratic victory nationwide — saw the Democratic Party in Tennessee, pitilessly gerrymandered, authentically unpopular, and afflicted by self-doubt, virtually eliminated.

So here we are.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Waiting for a Cure

Taking stock of his governmental realm in a luncheon address to members of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell listed several areas of public life that he was especially concerned with — most of them expected: education, public safety, and economic development prominent among them.

Mark Luttrell

An additional one that he laid special emphasis on was public health — an issue which, as he acknowledged, he had little familiarity with in his previous roles as a prisons administrator and as Shelby County Sheriff. It had come to loom large in this thinking, though — notably the problem of the county’s soaring rates of infant mortality, which have attained crisis proportions.

What, he was asked, would be the impact of a decision by the state — even at this late stage — to accept funds for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act? What has been the impact of the Haslam administration’s inclination so far not to accept the funds? And what was his attitude toward it all?

As diplomatically as possible (given that Luttrell is a member in good standing of the state’s reigning Republican Party), the mayor explained that the impact of not having the expansion funds has been serious, even critical, since a major portion of federal funding to The Med had been discontinued on the expectation that substitute funding to it and other hospitals administering indigent care would be administered through Medicaid expansion.

Luttrell took note of Haslam’s frequent reiterations of his hopes that he will be able to obtain a waiver from the Obama administration that would allow the state to secure the add-on Medicaid funding to be administered through private insurance sources. The mayor said he had hopes that Tennessee might obtain such a waiver at some point.

The reality is not so hopeful. Arkansas is the major (and perhaps the only) other state to get such a waiver, and our neighboring state began floating a more or less complete version of its plan well over a year ago. As anyone knows who has paid close attention to the workings of Tennessee state government — and especially to the actions of the last two legislative sessions — Governor Haslam has owned up to not having a developed waiver plan and is in the position of asking that one be presented to him by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Moreover, while Haslam is thought to be sincere in his wish to find some contrivance that would allow the state to make use of Medicaid funding, the fact is that the GOP majority in the General Assembly is ill-disposed toward the idea and has basically tied the governor’s hands with legislation in the session just ended. Any plan that the governor might come up with, or that he and HHS might agree on, must be approved by both chambers of the legislature.

So, like Luttrell, we Tennesseans can still hope for a cure; we just shouldn’t count on one. 

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Remedial Ed

Our Tennessee General Assembly scores pretty low on basic civics, if recent legislative statements are any indication. Law-making in the state legislature should be predicated upon passing a civics test; those who are elected (and pass the test) are seated in the legislature. Those who fail should not be given the daunting responsibility of writing the laws that govern the people of our great state.

Stacey Campfield

Maybe it’s elitist to assume our legislators have attended school and … learned things. Senator Stacey Campfield’s (R-Knoxville) recent statements certainly call into question his understanding of constitutional amendments, concepts covered in elementary school. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill that allows U.S.-born children of undocumented people to pay in-state tuition. It’s actually a nonsense bill because U.S.-born children are U.S. citizens; they’re granted the privilege of paying in-state college tuition in the state of their residency. But Campfield publicly questioned whether U.S.-born children of the undocumented are citizens. He doesn’t think so. Of course, the authors of this op-ed believe the moon is made of Swiss cheese — but we don’t discuss this in public.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, establishes citizenship for anyone born on United States soil. It’s a simple, practical proclamation designed, at the time, to grant citizenship to African Americans and other American-born slaves who were freed in 1865 via the 13th Amendment. Some people in the 1860s did not consider former slaves full citizens: The 14th Amendment cleared that up. In 1868. End of story.

Next, we would administer our civics test to Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). We know Kelsey graduated from a pretty good law school (Georgetown!), so we’re surprised at some of his recent political decisions and observations. For example, Kelsey’s sponsorship of SB 2566 (which would allow individuals or organizations to refuse goods and services that further same sex unions) resulted in much negative press that went viral and national. Kelsey, a smart man with outsized political ambition and panache for political pandering, pulled his sponsorship from the bill to dampen the political firestorm he ignited. Evidently, he never learned about the Equal Protection clause in the 14th Amendment while attending law school.

The Equal Protection clause guarantees the equal application of laws against all persons within a state, and certainly singling out gay people for discrimination would be contrary to this clause. We’re confident that they teach the 14th Amendment and Equal Protection at Georgetown Law School. We suspect the institution frowns upon discrimination. Of course, if we were good investigative journalists, we’d head up to Washington to study the Georgetown curriculum, but we’re busy. And we’re not journalists.

Finally, just last week, state Senator Mae Beavers (R-Mount Juliet) sought an expansion of the 2009 Tennessee Firearms Act to include a provision protecting Tennessee-manufactured guns from the reach of federal firearms laws. The bill never made it out of the legislature because the “Supremacy Clause” of the U.S. Constitution means that federal statutes trump state law. Why would an elected Senator from our state challenge Article VI of the United States Constitution? Maybe she never read the Constitution. Senator Beavers also advocates for the direct election of our Appellate Court judges because the influence of money in politics has worked out so well for our democrac process. Why not extend this practice to the judiciary?

Ultimately, it’s important that those who make laws in Nashville understand the fundamental core of our Constitution — lessons taught in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and in law school.

Just because these lessons are taught doesn’t mean they’re grasped. We think state legislators should have a firm and realistic understanding of constitutional procedures, rather than one based in politics and, apparently, magical thinking. Our civics test, we hope, will force law makers to study some of the basics of law and legislation. In the end, a civics test might not stop all of the nonsense, but we’d like to see some state legislators — as the grades roll in — roll on out of Nashville.

(Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis, Inc.; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.)

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

It’s Vote Time for Koozer-Kuhn on Capitol Hill

CREDIT: JB

Ellis and Jones (in red,standing) counsel Koozer-Kuhn supporters after last week's hearing in Nashville

  • JB
  • Ellis and Jones (in red, standing) counsel Koozer-Kuhn supporters after last week’s hearing in Nashville

UPDATE: HB 1385 was not heard on Tuesday in Health subcommittee but was remanded to “last calendar.” More information on Wednesday.

NASHVILLE — On Tuesday morning, when the General Assembly’s House Health subcommittee votes on HB 1385 by Rep. Sherry Jones (D-Nashville), a.k.a., the Koozer-Kuhn bill, the hopes of medical marijuana supporters in Tennessee could be brought crashing down to earth, but a hearing before the full Health committee last week generated an unexpected high.

After an hour’s worth of testimony on Wednesday from patients who testified compellingly that their conditions — ranging from cancer to epilepsy to cerebral palsy — could only be alleviated by legalized access to marijuana, even the subcommittee’s most conservative members seemed, if not convinced, then at least impressed and respectful.

At the conclusion of the hearing, not only Committee chairman Bob Ramsey (R-Maryville), whose deportment had been kindly and solicitous throughout, but other Republicans — vice chair Ryan Williams of Cookeville, Timothy Hill of Blountville, and Tim Wirgau of Buchanan, joined Democrat Darren Jernigan of Old Hickory, an overt backer of the bill, in expressing appreciation for what Hill called “sharing your heart.”

Bernie Ellis, the longtime progressive activist from Nashville who organized the occasion, met with his fellow presenters in a Legislative Plaza caucus room afterward for what was a combination celebration and press conference. But both Ellis, who said he had never dreamed of getting so prolonged and attentive a hearing on the hill, and Rep. Jones cautioned the happy group of patients, family, and supporters not to become too heady, that this week’s follow-up would be the real test.

As both noted, only the committee’s Democrats and an unknown number of Republicans could be counted on to vote for the bill, and converting the GOP majority was going to be a daunting task, no matter how friendly the Republican members had seemed on Wednesday. As Jones put it, don’t take anybody for granted, “even if they kiss you on the lips.”

In her introductory remarks before the Health Committee on Wednesday, Jones had stressed the naturally occurring benefits of marijuana. “The only difference between this plant and other plants is that it has some medical benefits to it, proven medical benefits. that can be traced back to 5000 B.C.”

She noted that 21 states either had legalized medical marijuana or had legislation under way. Koozer-Kuhn was a “very conservative program with strict oversight,” she said, adding that cultivation of marijuana could “make a lot of money for Tennessee,” replacing crops like tobacco that have fallen off.

Polls showed that only 18 percent of Tennesseans disapproved of the concept of medical marijuana, she said. “Nobody dies from using marijuana, nobody ever has.”

Ellis, who served as principal consultant on the bill, pointed out that Koozer-Kuhn met Department of Justice standards for medical marijuana legislation “to the letter,” and repeated that the bill established a “safe access program,” employed “rigorous and reliable standards,” and would restrict use of marijuana “only for serious conditions, well documented.”

Persuasive as both Jones and Ellis were, however, it was the patients and their family members who really had the impact.

Among them were Seth Green, a sufferer from both cerebral palsy and MS, who said marijuana had alleviated both the intensity and the frequency of his seizures, which his prescribed pharmacology, rife with unpleasant side effects, could not do. There was Penn Mattison, father of two-year-old Millie, whose case was described so well by the Flyer’s Alexandra Pusateri (“In the Weeds,” February 6).

Millie, a victim of infantile spasms that her father said were constant and “intractable,” had been on eight different medications, costing over $60,000 a month, with side effects ranging from blindness to bone deterioration. Moreover, “they didn’t work at all.” But a move to Colorado, with its newly legalized marijuana, did.

There was Kathy Walker of Fayetteville, a cancer sufferer who drew heavy applause from the packed hearing room when she observed, “I can’t understand why cancer patients can be prescribed morphine but not marijuana.”

Walker had been so damaged by surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy that she had virtually permanent nausea and was unable to eat. “A few puffs,” she said relieved the nausea and increased her appetite.

Green, too, had made mention of the phenomenon well known to recreational users as “the munchies.”

And Ellis, as well, referred to that aspect of marijuana use later at the press conference/celebration:

“The side effects,” he mused. “I think we are going to continue to say there are side effects, and they’re almost all virtually positive side effects. I joke, you know, that one thing that’s common among medical cannabis users is that they eat too much, talk too much, and laugh too much, and none of those are a problem for a seriously ill person. They’re all positive.”

Glancing around the caucus room, he winked and said, “If this were a younger crowd, a college crowd, I’d say that the principal side effects are that it makes you happy, hungry, and horny. But at least some of us are beyond the age at which that’s relevant.”