Tag: Worth Morgan

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Politics Politics Feature

Mayor Floyd Bonner?

Floyd Bonner electioneering this year (Photo: Jackson Baker)

There is, it would seem, a different Name of the Week in generalized speculation about the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race. Confessedly, there have certainly been different figures to talk about in successive weeks of this column.

Previously mentioned as likely mayoral candidates next year have been: NAACP head Van Turner, who is finishing up his second and final term of the County Commission this week; Paul Young, the president/CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission; Karen Camper, caucus leader of the state House of Representatives Democrats; and Joe Brown, the onetime Criminal Court judge and former TV celebrity judge.

Brown’s intentions, though he has certainly promoted a possible race, may be more fanciful than real. The others are, one way or another, making tangible plans to run. Turner has basically already announced, Young is reportedly lining up some serious financing for a campaign, and Camper is expected to make an announcement any week now.

Other names that are getting some mention are those of the Rev. Keith Norman of First Baptist Church-Broad, a chief lobbyist for Baptist Memorial Hospital and a former Democratic Party chair; Beverly Robertson, president/CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber; Patrice Robinson, City Council member and former Council chair; and Worth Morgan, City Council member and defeated Republican candidate for county mayor this year.

This week’s most mentioned mayoral prospect? Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who in two successive county elections has led all other candidates for office and has a decent-sized campaign account left over to start a mayoral campaign with.

Bonner’s popularity with the voters as a Democratic candidate has been such that Shelby County Republicans did not even bother to nominate an opponent for him this year and themselves endorsed him.

His interest in running for the nonpartisan office of mayor is a very real thing, and he has definitely had preliminary discussions about mounting a campaign next year. Bonner’s status on the eve of the Memphis city election has been likened by more than one observer to that of AC Wharton in the first decade of this century, when Wharton was considered an inevitable candidate for, successively, Shelby County mayor and Memphis mayor, both of which offices he would win.

Jason Martin (Photo: Jackson Baker)

• Jason Martin, the Nashville critical-care physician who emerged as the winner of the Democrats’ three-way gubernatorial primary, was the speaker at last week’s Germantown Democratic Club meeting.

Addressing an audience of 70-odd attendees at the Coletta’s restaurant in East Shelby County, Martin deplored GOP Governor Bill Lee’s policies on several counts, including Lee’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights, his refusal to countenance Medicaid expansion and the annual federal outlays of $1 billion that would come with it, his striking away of gun regulations, and his moves toward privatizing public education.

Said Martin: “The other side is so radical on these issues that most people are like, ‘That’s not me.’ And that’s why we’re getting traction.”

• As first reported last week on memphisflyer.com, outgoing District Attorney General Amy Weirich will be taking a position as assistant DA with the office of Mark Davidson, district attorney for the adjoining 25th Judicial District, which serves the counties of Tipton, Fayette, Lauderdale, McNairy, and Hardeman.

A press release from Davidson’s office on Monday confirmed that Weirich will be sworn in as special counsel to his office on September 1st, a day after the swearing-in of Steve Mulroy, who defeated Weirich in the August 4th county election, to replace her as Shelby DA.

• The ever-worsening situation of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert, under fire for mishandling license-plate distribution and her office affairs in general, almost got even bleaker Monday when the Shelby County Commission, in its final meeting as currently composed, failed by one vote to appoint a special counsel to begin ouster proceedings.

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Politics Beat Blog

County Mayor Candidates Skirmish

“Well,” said one woman as she left The Bluff restaurant on Highland following a Tuesday Rotary club luncheon debate between county mayor candidates Lee Harris and Worth Morgan, “that was a case of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm versus Mack the Knife!” 

She didn’t specify which was which,and there was abundant antagonism on both sides of the match, but presumably she was assigning the attacker’s role to Harris, the Democratic incumbent who seeks a second four-year term from the voters.

Having won the coin toss supervised by moderator Otis Sanford, Harris opted to go first on the program, and for several detailed minutes, he dismissed his Republican challenger as a neophyte and a lightweight who had shunned positions of leadership and key votes during his seven years so far on the Memphis City Council..

The youthful-looking Morgan responded not in visible anger but with a show of forbearance toward what he said was Harris’ mischaracterization of his record. “Personally, it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “And I know my heart. I know my positions, and so it doesn’t shake or bother me, but professionally, it is disappointing.” That turned out to be a prelude to his own attack on Harris.

“Some of that disappointment that I see today is something that I’ve also seen over the last several years, [when] I’ve been disappointed with Shelby County’s response, especially the mayor’s office response … to the pandemic … to economic development. The community depends on the Shelby County mayor to be a leader on so many of these issues. My hope is that this is a fast-paced moving world and we haven’t been left behind. There’s still opportunity.”

Morgan continued: “We’ve got a great story to tell here in Shelby County. We’ve got to have somebody out there to tell it; you’ve got to have a pitchman speaking on behalf of people, speaking on behalf of the community, for Shelby County. And we haven’t had that. We haven’t had the leadership that we needed.” 

His ingenue appearance notwithstanding, Morgan proved to be every bit the aggressor that Harris was. He enumerated important issues, such as crime, economic development, jobs, education, and poverty. With “the chief among those,” he said, being public safety. As he has before on the stump, Morgan suggested Harris had failed to work in harmony with other divisions of county government, with the courts, the state, and Shelby County’s seven municipalities.

Morgan cited in particular the county’s problems on rolling out vaccines to counter the Covid epidemic. “Was he responsible for the response from the health department for the vaccine distribution that had to be taken over by the state? Absolutely. When you look at our numbers compared to other major counties, where we still don’t have the vaccine rate that you see in Davidson County. … We’ve had close to 3,400 deaths in Shelby County.”

Responded Harris: “There’s only been one investigative report about the handling of the vaccine scandal, and it was performed by Memphis Business Journal, and the Memphis Business Journal after doing their investigation concluded, without equivocation, that the whole scandal was made up — that there was a fiction invented by representatives from the state. … I’m proud that during the COVID-19 [pandemic], our county outperformed all 95 counties regularly. When it came to transmission rates per capita, Shelby County was the best-performing county in our state regularly. Now that is unprecedented.”

Harris continued: “There were hundreds of meetings around COVID response, hundreds of opportunities for my opponent to make his presence known. Councilmember Morgan could not be found during the last two years of the pandemic.”

Morgan replied that Councilman Dr. Jeff Warren, not himself,  had been the council’s speaker-designate on Covid issues, and, after lauding Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s follow-up success in dealing  with vaccine distribution, he said “the only statistic that really matters is that we have had 3,400 deaths as a result of the pandemic. Davidson County has about 1,700. Our population is 34 percent  higher, and the death rate was 97 percent higher.”

Morgan waffled somewhat when moderator Sanford asked him directly about state interference with Shelby County’s decisions on mask mandates and school openings. Morgan: “We are still in a little bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, trying to understand did we lose more in our school system by having kids out than we protected them by having them in place? There’s a lot of national debate that’s going on about that.” 

Harris saw his opening and took it. “I don’t know Mr. Morgan. I only met him recently, as per this process, in the last few days. So I’ve never seen him in the community. I’ve never shaken hands with him or anything like that before. But what I know about him from the last few days of getting to know him, is that when it comes to leadership opportunities, he has a whole encyclopedia of excuses of why he couldn’t attend hundreds of COVID response meetings for two years. And we have a member of the Memphis City Council that says, ‘Wait, somebody else do it. I can’t go.’ Leadership requires courage.”

Morgan’s response: “If you’re ever leaving a meeting and you feel like my voice is missing from the discussion, feel free to pick up the phone and call me. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

Sanford asked the contenders for their position on Governor Bill Lee’s ongoing voucher program for private schools — which is confined to Memphis and Nashville — and the governor’s intent to import charter schools from right-wing Hillsdale College. Harris was unreservedly against both. Morgan had an arguably equivocal answer: “This is a program that’s going forward. How can we make sure the kids in our public school system, the kids that are in the private school system, the kids that are in voucher programs, the kids that are in charter schools, how could they be successful, and make sure that they all have a path and opportunity to that next level?”

The candidates disagreed on the extent to which local politics should concern itself, at least symbolically, with national issues. Said Harris: “When it came to one of the darkest moments in our community’s history, members of the city council decided to condemn the January 6th insurrection. Except for Councilman Morgan. He said, I can’t vote. I can’t work on that issue. I can’t lead in this moment. When it came time to celebrate one of the proudest moments in our country’s history, the elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman Supreme Court justice, every city council member wanted to do it. Every county commissioner wanted to do it. Except Council-member Morgan.’”

Said Morgan: “We have a lot of resolutions that get introduced to the city council that I call sky-is-blue resolutions, or the resolutions that council members are grandstanding on, getting repetitive-stress injury for just how far they’re patting themselves on the back. In my opinion, a resolution that is outside the scope and authority of Memphis City Council in terms of what we have power and control to do, is not one of the things that we need to be spending time on, considering the issues of crime, potholes, economic development — all the obligations that we have. “

Harris and Morgan differed on the merits of the state’s new “Truth-in-Sentencing” bill, which would in effect abolish parole for offenders convicted of certain violent crime. Morgan saw it as “one tool in the chest” and Harris objected that “you have to have conditions upon release from prison. You’ve got to have drug-screening requirements, and you’ve got to have job search requirements. That’s how you make folks who are released from prison reintegrate successfully back into the community,”

Harris went further, criticizing Morgan for publicly celebrating passage of the bill “because he’s publicly declared he invested in Tennessee prison companies, and investors in Tennessee prison companies stand to make profits off of incarceration. I think it is a cruel and a bad way to make a buck. And I think celebrating [something that] stands to grow our prison industry is unwise.”

Morgan responded that his investment in prison stock had been part of a blind trust that he was unaware of, and that he disposed of it as soon as he was.

Harris was skeptical. “You have to declare under penalty of perjury, that you know what is going on in your life and know what your investments are. This is just not that hard. This is repeatedly why we can’t know what’s going on or why we can’t vote or we can’t go to meetings. This is the absence of leadership. And it is frustrating.”

There were other issues discussed and many more back-and-forths, but for all intents and purposes, the rest of the debate conformed to the recurrent pattern of charge and countercharge — Morgan trying to assert variants of his campaign slogan that “We Deserve Better” and Harris doing his best to indict his opponent’s lack of experience and essential commitment.

In reality, neither contender was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and both proved able and willing to use the scalpel. Next week’s election totals will indicate who left the most marks.

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Politics Politics Feature

Down to the Wire

Tuning it Up: GOP state Senate candidate Brent Taylor at campaign kickoff last week with country singer John Rich (Photo: Jackson Baker)

As the August 4th countywide election cycle winds down, the marquee race is still, as before, that for district attorney general between Republican incumbent Amy Weirich and Democratic challenger Steve Mulroy. The race remains the focus of attention in local politics. It has also engendered significant statewide and national attention.

A quiet moment in a turbulent campaign (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The Tennessee Journal, a weekly which is the preeminent statewide source for political news across Tennessee, featured the race in its lead story for the July 15th issue. Editor Erik Schelzig recaps some of the significant charges and other back-and-forths of the contest, highlighting the two candidates’ major differences regarding the state’s new “truth-in-sentencing” law, which eliminates parole in several major violent-crime categories.

Weirich, who boasts her years-long efforts on behalf of passing the law, points with pride. Mulroy sees it as a case of vastly increasing state incarceration expenses while blunting possible rehabilitation efforts.

In the several recent debates between the two candidates, the challenger notes that his skepticism puts him on the same page regarding “truth-in-sentencing” as opponents like the American Conservative Union and GOP Governor Bill Lee, who declined to sign the bill, letting it become law without his signature. Weirich seizes upon Mulroy’s mentions of that fact as an opportunity to advertise her purported independent-mindedness, noting that she also disagrees with Lee (and the Republican supermajority) on such issues as open-carry gun legislation. “I don’t care what the American Conservative Union says,” she adds.

All that being said (and it’s consistent with her would-be crossover slogan, “Our DA”), the race as a whole is between Weirich’s right-of-center hard line and Mulroy’s highly reform-conscious point of view. Mulroy wants cash-bail reform and systematic post-conviction reviews, the latter including DNA testing. Weirich is open to modifications in those areas but not to major changes.

The two have battled over the matter of alleged racial disparity issues in the DA’s office, with Mulroy charging, among other things, that Weirich has an 85-percent white staff of attorneys prosecuting a defendant population that is 95 percent Black. Weirich says she’s trying to alter the ratio but cites the difficulty of competing with better-paying private law firms in efforts to acquire African-American legal talent.

Both contenders have seemingly forsworn the Marquis of Queensberry rules regarding the etiquette of competition. With no real evidence to base her claim on, Weirich’s ads consistently try to saddle Mulroy with the onus of being a “Defund the Police” enthusiast. He answers that he would like to see more police hired, and at higher salaries, and given “better training.” His ads portray Weirich as being a Trumpian (a stretch) and the “worst” district attorney in Tennessee, one saddled with several citations for misconduct from state overseeing bodies and with an ever-rising violent-crime rate during her 11-year tenure that is the worst in the nation.

The two candidates took turns in verbally pummeling each other in a series of almost daily formal debates the week before last. The venues were the Rotary Club of Memphis, the Memphis Kiwanis Club, and an Orange Mound citizens’ association. Neither gave any quarter, each attacking the other along lines indicated above.

Much of the aforementioned Tennessee Journal article is dedicated to the two candidates’ fundraising and campaign spending. In the second quarterly disclosure of the year (April through June), Weirich reported raising $130,400 and spending $240,400 — much of it on the Memphis consulting firm of Sutton Reid, where her blistering TV and radio ads are prepared. She began the quarter with nearly half a million dollars on hand and ended it with $361,00 remaining.

Mulroy raised $279,000 in the period, a sum which included a loan from him to his own campaign of $15,000. He spent $194,000 and had a remainder on hand of $159,000.

As noted by the Journal, Weirich has gotten almost all her funding from within Tennessee, all but $1,600. Mulroy, who has the avowed support of such celebrities as singer John Legend and author John Grisham, is also boosted by several national groups with a professed interest in criminal-justice reform. Some 35 percent of his funding has come from out of state.

One key venue for Mulroy is New York, where he has traveled twice recently, attending public occasions in tandem with such supporters as criminologist Barry Scheck, mega-lawyer Ben Crump, and entertainer Charlamagne Tha God. Mulroy’s travels and his funding sources are reportedly the target of a new Weirich TV spot which begins this week. It should be noted that the vast majority of Mulroy’s trips out of town during the campaign — all unpublicized until now — have been to Pensacola, where he drives down regularly to look in on his elderly mother.

With early voting about to expire and a week to go before the judgment day of August 4th, polling information is being held close to the vest by both principals, though Mulroy publicized an early one showing him with a 12-point lead.

A fact that looms large to all observers and to both participants and their parties: The position of district attorney general, is, as of now, the only major countywide position held by a Republican. Early voting statistics gave evidence of serious turnout efforts by both parties.

• There are other key races, to be sure. The race for county mayor, between Democratic incumbent Lee Harris and Republican challenger Worth Morgan has been something of a back-burner affair, with neither candidate turning on the jets full-blast in the manner of the DA race. Harris basically is resting on what he sees as a high productive record, and Morgan, though he challenges that, saying the county “deserves better,” has not featured many specifics beyond Morgan’s ill-based claim that Harris has — wait for it — defunded the police (strictly speaking, the Sheriff’s Department).

A recent TV ad shows Morgan in interview mode, chatting about his life and outlook and looking and sounding likable. Given Harris’ edge in incumbency and party base, that is probably not enough for now, but it does bolster Morgan’s name and image for later on.

In the race for Juvenile Court judge, Dan Michael’s incumbency works for him, while his opponent, city Judge Tarik Sugarmon, has a well-known local name and an active Democratic party base working on his behalf. Michael is heavily backed by the GOP in what is technically a nonpartisan race.

Few surprises are expected elsewhere on the ballot, though Democratic County Clerk Wanda Halbert, who has fumbled the issuance of new automobile plates, may get a scare (or worse) from Republican opponent Jeff Jacobs.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Political Ads Gone Awry — Cases in Point

County DA candidates Amy Weirich and Steve Mulroy. (Photos by Jackson Baker)

Yes, “Defund the Police” was a terrible idea and a genuinely stupid slogan. Any true believers in it are deserving of whatever comeuppance they get.

But the fact is, the unjust  linking of the term to political adversaries has turned into the latest political smear. It’s McCarthyism on steroids — right up there with a previous era’s “Soft on Communism.”

A solid piece of fact-checking by The Commercial Appeal’s Katherine Burgess conclusively made the case against County Mayor candidate Worth Morgan’s allegation that incumbent County Mayor Lee Harris, whom he opposes, defunded Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s budget, to the tune of some $4½ million. The accusation turned out to be so much jiggling of budget numbers, and Morgan has since owned up to having made an “error.” The clincher is that the Sheriff himself disowns any such complaint.

The “defund-the-police” smear has meanwhile become an increasingly prominent aspect of incumbent District Attorney Amy Weirich’s campaign against her Democratic challenger, Steve Mulroy.

It is the linchpin of a currently playing TV commercial on Weirich’s behalf, one in which Mulroy is not only accused of having advocated defunding the police — something which he denies and for which no credible record exists — but is represented, through a highly creative juxtaposition of images, as having marched in a parade with activists carrying “Defund the Police” signs.

Fact: a still photo of Mulroy holding a picket sign (but obscuring what the sign says) quickly segues into a video of the aforesaid defunders’ march. The reality is that his sign (and his march) belonged not to that affair but to a wholly different one, on behalf of Starbucks employees’ efforts, ultimately successful, to unionize their workplace.

Similarly, the same commercial misrepresents Mulroy’s support, during a severe phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, of ongoing  litigation to secure improved safety precautions for at-risk jail inmates. The ad would have us believe the suit, by Mulroy himself as the litigant of record, was against Bonner for the simple purpose of releasing criminals  — any and all criminals, it would seem — from jail.

This is not to suggest that Mulroy himself, or his own ad-makers, are wholly innocent of misrepresentation. An  ad on his behalf yoked Weirich together with Donald Trump and the ex-president’s  “mobs”  on the occasion of Trump’s recent appearance in nearby Southaven. Yes, Weirich is running for reelection as the Republican nominee, but there is little in her record to suggest that she is a party-line Republican, much less a Trumpian fanatic.

The balance of Mulroy’s ad is more defensible. He alleges, correctly, that violent crime has risen during Weirich’s tenure as D.A., and viewers of the ad can decide for themselves whether that upsurge has occurred because of, or in spite of, her crime-fighting techniques. It is also true, as the ad suggests, that Weirich has been accused by official tribunals more than once of professional misconduct.

On a recent prime-time evening, the two ads ran back-to-back on local television — Weirich’s first, followed without a break by Mulroy’s. To say the least, the combined effect did not add up to an ideal instance of the Socratic method at work. (Not that TV advertising of any kind is totemic with regard to truth.) And, in fairness to the two candidates, head-banging distortions of the sort described here  seem to be the rule, not the exception, for political advertising in particular.

POSTSCRIPT: Despite the fact-checking in the CA, a TV ad continues to push Morgan’s claim that County Mayor Harris “defunded the police.”  The “defunding the police” claim put forth by Weirich against Mulroy is still extant as well. Meanwhile, the Mulroy ad mentioned above continues to appear, though both he and Morgan have aired new commercials.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Weirich, Morgan Get Endorsements from Police, Sheriff’s Department Associations

Top: Amy Weirich (3rd from right) at endorsement ceremony. Bottom: Worth Morgan (front and center). (Photos by Jackson Baker).

The Memphis Police Association (MPA) and the Shelby County Deputy Sheriffs Association conferred their official endorsements on two candidates for major office — Amy Weirich, the incumbent District Attorney General, and City Councilman Worth Morgan who is running for Shelby County Mayor. Both are Republicans.

There were separate announcement ceremonies at different locations on Wednesday. The first announcement at MPA headquarters on Jefferson, was for Weirich. After expressing thanks to the two organizations for their vote of confidence, she hastened to note a piece of news that she thought relevant to her campaign against Democratic D.A. candidate Steve Mulroy.

“We saw last night something that we rarely get an opportunity to see and that is consequences of potential decisions that we might make,” Weirich said. “In San Francisco last night, the district attorney was recalled. And make no mistake — the district attorney’s platform in San Francisco is and has been identical to that of my opponent, making statements that he would not seek the transfer of juveniles to adult court, meaning that murderers, rapists, armed robbers, armed carjackers, armed kidnappers, would face no more than two years in prison.”

Weirich was asked what her position was toward recent anti-abortion legislation by the General Assembly attaching criminal penalties to doctors who might violate provisions of the very restrictive new law.

“All that is hypothetical,” Weirich said. “You  would first have to assume that doctors in this community would break the law. And then you would have to assume that that criminal conduct was reported to law enforcement. And then you have to assume that an investigation is conducted and that there is enough information to make a charge against someone. Too many hypotheticals, too many hoops to jump through, and that’s not the universe I live in. I don’t make conjecture statements about what I could or should do. We deal in facts.”

Morgan’s event was at his Park Avenue headquarters in East Memphis. He, too, expressed gratitude for the endorsements. “Together these two organizations represent almost 4,000 members of law enforcement in our community,” he said. “They are on the streets, they are in our communities, they are in our neighborhoods every day 24/7/365. They know what’s going on. They know the issues that we’re facing, they know and see and interact with the victims and the perpetrators on a daily basis. And I ask that you trust their judgment, you trust their intuition, you trust their endorsement of my campaign for Shelby County Mayor.” 

Regarding his opponent, incumbent Democrat Lee Harris, Morgan said, “We’ve got a current county mayor that is not taking meetings with people, and people don’t want to take meetings with him. You can’t get it done.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Still Party Time?

Worth Morgan (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Not too long ago, Republicans held a one-vote majority on the Shelby County Commission. Then, for a spell beginning in the mid-aughts, it was on the slim end of a 7-6 ratio — still a force. As of 2018, the ratio became eight Democrats to five Republicans, and the “gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby the parties would swap chairmanships year by year, was allowed to lapse. If the Democrats win all of the contested races remaining to be settled in August, as they are favored to do, the ratio will be 9 to 4.

Though pendulum shifts of a sort will possibly continue, the general trend is clear. Assuming the continuation of partisan elections for county offices — begun under GOP auspices in 2002 — Election Year 2022 is almost a last-stand occasion for the Shelby County GOP as an electoral force, countywide.

By general consent, the big race on the ballot is that for District Attorney General, where Republican incumbent Amy Weirich, running as “Our D.A.,” hopes to continue for another eight years.

The thrust of Weirich’s strategy is made plain by that self-description. In what is a throwback of sorts to the days of Democratic dominance in the state, she chose, in a signal event last week, to downplay her party identification. This was at a Republican Party unity rally at the Grove in Cordova, in which Todd Payne, the party’s nominee for the Commission’s District 5, played something of a host’s role.

Following remarks by Worth Morgan, the Republican nominee for county mayor, who himself struck a basically bipartisan note, Weirich began, “I’m going to say something that may offend you. I don’t want your vote just because I have ‘Republican’ by my name.” Voters, like elected officials, should think in bipartisan terms.

Stressing the issues of public safety and economic development, Morgan also minimized partisanship: “You have to be able to bring all those different divisions of county government together, including the state, including the Memphis Police Department, which has a major role to play, and sit down at the table and work through those issues.”

In short, the Republican Party needed a “reach-out” strategy to become again what, in theory, it had been for much of the previous two decades — the governing party of Shelby County.

In an interview after his remarks at the rally, Morgan pledged to pursue a policy of “transparency” and to hold regular press conferences — something he said the Democratic incumbent, Lee Harris, had been “negligent” about. And he promised to process “without resistance or delay” any press or public requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

To regain something resembling its former footing, the Republicans need strong showings in other remaining contested positions on the August ballot besides the high-profile ones. Besides Payne in Cordova, who opposes Democrat Shante Avant, another determined GOP candidate for the commission is businessman Ed Apple, who opposes incumbent Democrat Michael Whaley in District 13.

At the opening last week of the Midtown headquarters he shares with trustee candidate Steve Basar, Apple mused, “One thing that struck me early on when I was going through the hoops to kickstart this race, was that it was binary: ‘You Republican or Democrat?’ Yeah. Can’t run as an Independent. It really bothered me that people I spoke with didn’t understand what stirred my soul and what made me decide yes. And the main reason was: This is about Memphis. This has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican.”

That’s the rhetoric, anyhow, but the reality is that county elections, for the time being, are still partisan ones, and, like it or not, the two parties are on the line, not just the candidates. And the GOP is up against it.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Race for County Mayor is On!

Harris stumping for candidate Memula (Photo: Jackson Baker)

The announcement Monday by Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan of his candidacy for Shelby County Mayor resolves what had been enormous speculation about Morgan’s long-rumored intentions. But it does more than that: Its effect becomes the beginning of the 2022 election season in Shelby County.

One of the first consequences of Morgan’s announcement is to wet-blanket or even extinguish the previously indicated aspirations of such other potential Republican candidates as County Commissioner Mark Billingsley and City Council Chairman Frank Colvett Jr.

Morgan’s command of big-donor money was amply demonstrated in his council races of 2015 and 2019, and his announcement will accelerate the process of nailing it down again on his behalf.

Pressures regarding 2020 have been raised among Democrats also. The imperative has been sped up for incumbent County Mayor Lee Harris to clarify his intentions regarding a re-election race.

Rumors have abounded over the past several months — that he would cast caution to the winds and declare for the 9th District congressional seat now occupied by Steve Cohen, that he would seek the governorship, that he would ratchet up existing lobbying efforts for a federal judgeship, that he would be open to a job with the Biden administration, and that he would seek the soon-to-be-vacated presidency of the University of Memphis.

All of these possibilities, at one point or another, have had a logic to them; all had obvious pitfalls as well. Consider the university rumor: Harris, for years, was a law professor at the university, he is now serving as a high-level administrator, he has a background suitable for representing a diverse and upwardly mobile university population, and a U of M presidency could serve very well as a launching pad for higher political office.

The hitch to that logic is that Harris has squared off against the university on a number of public issues — notably on the matter of funding the school’s natatorium, when he was eyeball-to-eyeball with current President David Rudd over the university’s foot-dragging on allowing its workers a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The university reportedly wants a quick resolution of its search for a successor to Rudd, who leaves next May, but how would its trustees regard the previous acrimony?

An examination of Harris’ options leads back to what most others consider his most feasible course: running for re-election as county mayor. Rank-and-file Democrats see the mayor as being an odds-on favorite against Morgan or any other Republican; they see Harris as an ideal head for the party ticket. His services as a supporting presence are sought by other candidates, as in his co-hosting last weekend of a fundraiser for judicial candidate Sanjeev Memula.

It comes down to if Harris wants another dose of the mayorship; the job is more demanding than most outsiders imagine, and more riven with political pressure-points. His chances of winning again next year are ranked as very good, more so than those of Ken Moody, the aide to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland who has announced a provisional candidacy.

If Harris does not seek re-election, key Democrats may seek to prevail on County Commissioner Van Turner, who has expressed interest in becoming Memphis mayor in 2023, to alter course and run in Harris’ stead.

In that event Turner would have a hard time refusing.

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Politics Politics Feature

Impressions of Amy Coney Barrett by Former Rhodes Classmates

So we stand at Armageddon, doing battle for the Lord, do we? That’s the essence of what you hear these days from diehard Democrats and other self-declared liberals, and, as often as not, this desperate war cry is sounded, not about the forthcoming presidential election, but about President Trump‘s nomination of one Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court Justice.

Both the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Roe v. Wade are on the chopping block, you hear, and Barrett as a freshly confirmed Justice, will start wielding the axe as soon as the high court begins hearing the ACA case in mid-December. No one doubts that the Republicans have the numbers to confirm Trump’s nomination of Barrett, and no one doubts her determination, along with five GOP-appointed colleagues, to slash away at ACA, Roe, and any number of other Democratically inspired legal landmarks having to do, say, with labor relations, voting rights, and firearms issues.

The sky, say many, is falling, while those of more conservative persuasions cry, “Let it fall!” But who is this Amy Coney Barrett, this imagined scourge of things as they are and harbinger of a vastly different constitutional future?

As it turns out, there are those among us who shared turf and air with her when she was a student at Rhodes College in the early 1990s, and at least one somewhat younger Memphian, current City Councilman Worth Morgan, for whom Barrett once served as a babysitter. Former Councilman Shea Flinn was at Rhodes when Barrett was, and remembers her as “an attractive KD” (member of the Kappa Delta sorority), but that’s about it.

My son Justin Baker, another Rhodesian, remembers her similarly, but has no personal memories, nor does Kemp Conrad, yet another council member who was aware of her presence on campus: “Rhodes was small. You could notice people without knowing them.”

But Chris Gilreath, a transplant from Knoxville, lawyer, and Rhodes Class of ’94 grad, like Barrett, not only remembers the young, ultra-serious student from New Orleans, he seems to have faith in her sense of fairness. In a statement on his Facebook page, he put it this way:

“I went to Rhodes with Amy Coney Barrett. We’re both in the Class of 1994. I dated one of her sorority sisters. Amy was friendly and personable, just as she is now. Rhodes challenged us to think critically about big issues and wrestle with them, arriving at enlightened answers after vigorous debate.

“I’m liberal-minded and a Democrat. I oppose several of the perspectives and conclusions Amy draws on significant legal issues. But she’s a really good person.”

Gilreath was aware that his classmate was a serious Catholic (a fact that all her biographies make clear) and one clearly prone to rely on the elements of her faith. As a student, she was “strictly the academic type” but friendly enough. Rhodes, then as now, had active Democratic and Republican cadres on campus, but Gilreath does not remember that she took part in any activity.

“We can disagree without tearing others down,” says Gilreath. “I’ve never personally known a Supreme Court pick until now. For her sake, I hope the debate is about her philosophy and politics, not about who she is” — the “who she is” aspect reflected in the generally favorable viewpoints others have had of her.

“I regret that Amy has to live through the coming circus. She deserves better — and so do we,” says Gilreath.

Meanwhile, how much of the sky is really falling? Yes, the high court is scheduled to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in mid-December, and, yes, it is highly possible Barrett will be ensconced as a Justice by then and will tip the balance against the ACA. What then? Should the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they would then have the impetus to vote in one of the several Medicare-for-All measures they discussed during their primary debates earlier this year.

Roe v. Wade is a chancier circumstance. Famously, there has so far been no middle ground between proponents and opponents of legalized abortion. Perhaps it is not impossible that a conservative SCOTUS under the institutional-minded John Roberts, and including Barrett, could find one. Stranger things have happened.

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News News Blog

City Council Could Shake up Citizen Law Enforcement Review Board

The Memphis City Council is considering an overhaul of the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB).

Councilmen Kemp Conrad and Worth Morgan introduced an ordinance Tuesday that would change the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Review Board to the Council Law Enforcement Review Board, replacing the board’s current nine members with the 13 city council members.

Currently, per city ordinance, CLERB consists of the chairperson of the city council’s public safety committee, chairperson of the Shelby County Commission’s law enforcement committee, two law enforcement officers or member with experience in criminal justice, a medical officer, a clergy member, an attorney, and two citizens at-large.

But, Morgan told a city council committee Tuesday that he believes the purpose of CLERB is more safely placed in the hands of the city council.

CLERB, tasked with investigating allegations of misconduct by the Memphis Police Department, was first established by city ordinance in 1994, but was inactive between 2001 and 2015.

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Morgan said the goal of the board is a “good one, great one,” but CLERB has been “stuck in no-man’s land” over the past four years.

“It was a temporary solution to a long-term problem,” Morgan said. “We are a board of 13 civilians. We have subpoena power, tools, and relationships for when a serious incident comes up.”

Morgan noted that after the officer-involved shooting of Martavious Banks last year, the council’s discussions surrounding MPD policy and body cams were “more productive than CLERB’s in the past four years.”

Changing up the personnel on the board is primarily meant to make CLERB more affordable, Morgan said, citing the near $1 million that has been budgeted for the board over the past four years. The councilman did not specify how exactly the switch would save money.

Morgan said he hopes “people aren’t attached” to the civilian piece of CLERB, but instead to the goals and intentions of the board, which ultimately is an extra layer of oversight.

Virginia Wilson, administrator for CLERB, disagreed saying that CLERB doesn’t have an “absorbent budget” and she believes the make-up should remain the same.

“I think citizens would like to see CLERB continue to operate in the manner that it is,” Wilson said “We are working tirelessly.”

The committee’s discussion of the ordinance was cut short due to time constraints, but the council will return to it at its next meeting on November 19th.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

CREDIT: JB

A consistent problem in Shelby County elections has been the distribution of sample ballots by political entrepreneurs who charge candidates for appearing on them.

Candidate John Marek, a well-known Democratic activist  JB

John Marek

who is running for the District 5 City Council seat in the October 3 city election, was outraged when he saw one being mailed and passed out under the auspices of the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club,” a shell organization operated by entrpreneur Greg Grant that exists mainly to issue sample ballots.

Compounding Marek’s sense of injury was that his opponent, Worth Morgan, is a known Republican, as are three other candidates endorsed on the ballot. All four are official endorsees of the Shelby County Republican Party. A further issue is that the ballot employed several facsimiles of the official City of Memphis seal, a possible violation of both city and state codes.

Backed by the Shelby County Democratic Party and represented by civil liberties attorney Bruce Kramer, Marek undertook to get a Temporary Restraining Order against further distribution of the ballot in Chancery Court on Thursday. The plaintiffs were stymied. How?

Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins confessed that he would need to recuse himself because he had bought onto a previous election ballot distributed by Grant as well as one by another ballot entrepreneur, M. LaTroy Alexandria-Williams, also cited in the suit. The plaintiffs hope to seek redress from another judge in another court on Friday.

Marek said that the unexpected snafu was yet another instance of why the pay-for-play ballots should be restricted or banned.