Categories
Tag: Tennessee
Categories
State and Gender
The first hat has been thrown into the ring in the 2010 Tennessee governor’s race, and it belongs to former state representative and House majority leader Kim McMillan of Clarksville, who has filed papers to form an exploratory committee for the race.
First elected to the Tennessee House in 1994, Democrat McMillan served 12 years there, the last four as majority leader. A lawyer, she was the first woman in state history to hold that office. She then took a position as senior adviser to Governor Phil Bredesen, resigning last year to become director of community and business relations for Austin Peay State University in her hometown of Clarksville.
McMillan’s announcement of candidacy promptly drew raves from state House speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington, who praised her service as majority leader and said, “I think she’d make an excellent governor, and I do see her as someone I could support. It’s time we broke that gender barrier in Tennessee.”
Naifeh’s commendation, which McMillan termed an “endorsement,” fueled speculation in some quarters that the state Democratic establishment has earmarked McMillan as a possible opponent and counterweight to 7th District Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, who is reported to be looking at a gubernatorial race in 2010.
Blackburn, who now has a race on her hands in the Republican primary, where she is challenged by Shelby County register Tom Leatherwood, recently owned up to a failure to properly disclose some $250,000 in campaign expenditures over the past six years, as well as roughly $50,000 in campaign contributions. After engaging the services of an accounting firm, she has since made a full disclosure to the Federal Election Commission, though Leatherwood charges that she withheld doing so until after this year’s filing deadline.
Other names mentioned prominently as likely gubernatorial candidates are those of former U.S. senator Bill Frist and state lieutenant governor Ron Ramsey on the Republican side and, among Democrats, former 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr., former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell, and 4th District congressman Lincoln Davis.
• Is state senator Rosalind Kurita in trouble this election season or not? Opinions differ in Nashville, where Clarksville Democrat Kurita holds the office of Senate speaker pro tem under Republican speaker Ramsey of Blountville.
Ramsey got his position (and consequently Kurita got hers) in January 2007, when Kurita cast the surprise vote across party lines that deposed longtime speaker John Wilder, a Somerville Democrat. That action resulted in Kurita’s virtual ostracism by her fellow Democrats, notably from Jim Kyle of Memphis, the Senate Democratic leader whom many credit as the sponsor of Clarksville lawyer Tim Barnes‘ challenge to Kurita in this year’s Democratic primary.
Not so, says Kyle, and even Kurita can’t say so for sure. But she has to take Barnes seriously. He was a near winner against GOP state representative Curtis Johnson in 2006. No less an authority than McMillan, who as a fellow resident of Clarksville knows them both (and who actively supported Barnes two years ago), compares the Kurita-Barnes race to another ongoing contest. “It’s very much like the situation between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. We’ve got two good candidates, whoever wins,” McMillan opined.
As a likely sign of official GOP regard for Kurita, no Republican filed in Senate District 22, which was handily carried by George W. Bush in the last two presidential elections.
• By all accounts, District 29 state senator Ophelia Ford, who returned to legislative service in March after being sidelined for almost a year by illness, is performing well, or at least without incident, attending Senate floor sessions, keeping up with legislation, and attending to her committee assignments.
• Memphis state representative G.A. Hardaway (District 92) may have lost out on his recent radical proposal to mandate paternity tests for all state births, but he continues to be active on behalf of legislation in the sphere of gender and parenting. His proposal to strengthen the rights of non-custodial parents through Juvenile Court passed through the House State and Local Government committee last week on its way to Judiciary.
Hardaway, a lobbyist for fathers’ rights before entering the House via a special election victory in 2007, is opposed for reelection in the Democratic primary by Eddie Neal, who held the seat briefly as an interim appointee in 2006.
Categories
Looking Ahead
“The tide is turning.” That’s Jim Kyle‘s confident declaration about the forthcoming election season in state government. Kyle, the Memphis Democrat who leads his party in the Tennessee state Senate, cites a number of precedents for his belief that 2008 will be a triumphant year for long-suffering state Democrats, who have been seeing their legislative numbers recede for a decade or two.
“Democrats just took over the Virginia state Senate, for one thing. And we’ve got more Democrats running in Republican districts, even in East Tennessee, than we ever had before,” Kyle said Tuesday — the very day that his opposite number, GOP Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, was due in Shelby County for a meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club.
Ramsey, a Blountville Republican, came with Mark Norris, a Shelby Countian who is currently serving as the Senate Republican leader and who, Kyle and most other observers believe, wants to succeed Ramsey as Speaker and lieutenant governor should the GOP regain the tenuous majority it held for most of this year’s session and should Ramsey go on to run for governor in 2010, as all the selfsame observers expect.
“Oh, he’s running. No doubt about it,” said Kyle of his GOP counterpart’s gubernatorial hopes — though Ramsey’s immediate concerns are likely to be the same as Kyle’s: to gain a majority for his party in next year’s statewide legislative races. (For what it’s worth, the Democratic majority in the state House — 53 to 46, at the moment — is unlikely to be overturned, though the Republicans will surely try.)
As things stand now, the two major parties are tied in the Senate at 16-16. There is one “independent,” former Republican Micheal Williams of Maynardville, who was a reliable ally of (and vote for) John Wilder, the venerable Democrat who was deposed as Speaker early this year when Democrat Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville cast a surprise (and decisive) vote for Ramsey during Senate reorganization for the 2007-’08 term.
Kurita thereupon became Senate Speaker pro Tem, displacing Williams, who simmered quietly for a while then announced in mid-session last spring that he was leaving the GOP. Though he didn’t join the Democrats as such, he aligned with them for procedural purposes, giving Kyle’s party a technical majority by the thinnest possible margin.
When Chattanooga’s Ward Crutchfield, a longtime Democratic pillar in the Senate, was forced to resign after copping a guilty plea as a defendant in the Tennessee Waltz scandal, the Republicans nominated Oscar Brock, son of former U.S. senator Bill Brock, to vie for Crutchfield’s seat.
But Brock was beaten by Democrat Andy Berke in this month’s special election and with a percentage of the vote, 63 percent, that Kyle contends is 10 points in excess of the normal Democratic edge in the District 10 seat.
“That’s one more reason why I think the tide is moving our way,” Kyle said.
Of course, the Republicans are not sitting idly by without mounting a strategy of their own to gain control of the state Senate. They, too, evidently intend to compete seat by seat, district by district, as Kyle says the Democrats will, and one obvious GOP target is octogenarian Wilder of Somerville, who has so far given no indication whether he will seek reelection to his District 26 seat.
“Nobody knows. He’ll just have to decide how much he wants to be in the Senate for four more years,” said Kyle, who carefully skirted the issue of whether Wilder, who served as Speaker for 36 years until the narrow January vote that cast him out, might have ambitions of regaining the position. As Kyle noted, several other Democrats — not least, himself — might decide they want to be Speaker when the time comes.
Republican state representative Dolores Grisham, also of Somerville, has signaled her desire to compete for Wilder’s seat, and she expects to be strongly funded for the effort. “I don’t have any worries about John Wilder’s seat in a race against Dolores Grisham,” Kyle said drily.
In any case, the state Senate will be technically, and actually, up for grabs next year, and the two parties will both be making serious efforts. That fact may preclude Kyle’s making waves by recruiting a primary opponent for Kurita, whom he still has not forgiven for her vote on Ramsey’s behalf.
“We don’t,” the Democrats’ Senate leader said simply when asked how he and Kurita were getting along. That’s one thing that probably won’t change in 2008.
The Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, in cooperation with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), will honor fallen U.S. military personnel and Iraqi civilians with its traveling exhibition: Eyes Wide Open: The Cost of War to Tennessee.
The exhibit will be on display in Federal Plaza, 167 N. Main St. on August 28, 2007 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. A press conference will be held at noon to launch a sustained campaign of public education, outreach and nonviolent direct action.
Eyes Wide Open: The Cost of War to Tennessee focuses on the specific costs of war to the state of Tennessee. The exhibit includes 72 pairs of boots representing fallen servicemen and women from Tennessee, and a visual representation of the Iraqi civilian casualties. This exhibit is part of AFSC’s national Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War network.
Categories
Best in Gun Show?
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence grades each state on its laws protecting families from gun crime. The grade represents an average of marks in seven categories, and in 2005, the Volunteer State received a D+ in the Brady group’s assessment.
After student Cho Sueng-Hui went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University last week, many news reports mentioned Virginia’s lax enforcement of its gun laws. The state’s background check failed to turn up Cho’s history of mental illness, and his name was never sent to federal or state databases that listed him as a prohibited buyer.
According to Brady standards, Tennessee has acceptable laws in place to prevent minors from buying or possessing guns, but it goes downhill from there. Tennessee has no child access prevention laws, no safety-lock laws, and no private-gun-sale background checks.
Aside from laws designed to keep guns away from kids, Tennessee has few legal obstacles for adult would-be gun owners. No license is required to purchase a handgun, police are not permitted to maintain gun sale records, firearms can be purchased at gun shows without a background check, and no waiting period exists for firearm purchases anywhere. There are no limitations on assault weapons or the number of handguns that can be purchased at a given time.