overreach

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a tried and true talking point for the members of the Tennessee Legislature camped out on the extremist right wing of the Republican Party.  It’s “overreach.”

They oppose Insure Memphis because of the “overreach” of Obamacare.

They oppose Common Core because of the “overreach” of the U.S. Department of Education.

They oppose common sense gun laws because of the “overreach” conspiracies about the Obama Administration.

They invite a narrow-minded Christian minister to open the Senate session with a prayer focused on the “overreach” of the tyrannical federal government.

And on and on it goes.

Reaching Over Into Local Affairs

While it’s certain that the Tennessee Legislature will never be confused with a meeting of Mensa, it’s not intelligence that they lack so much as self-awareness and logic.  Too often, it’s situational political positions driven more by personalities than sound policies that drive them.  (Essentially, if President Obama says up, they say down, and if he presents a plan that says down, they suddenly say up.) In this political cauldron of ego and pandering to a narrow base, hypocrisy is the order of the day and playing to the lowest common denominator is an obsession.

All of this focus on overreach fades away, however, when the Legislature gets the opportunity to reach over into the affairs of local governments in Tennessee.

Forget all the talking points about small government.

Forget the talk about the best government being the one closest to the people it serves.

Forget the gripes about big government mandates and interference in state decision-making.

When it comes to an opportunity to interfere and to deliver decrees to local urban governments, the Tennessee Legislature has all of the self-control and humility of Kanye West at the Grammys.

Sources Of Our Problems

Case in point: after their constant carping about the overreach of the federal government, legislators in the super majority see no inconsistency in their regular injections of their own political narcissism into the self-determination of Tennessee’s urban centers.

The breathtaking interference in the rights of citizens to make their own local decisions runs the gamut from public education to living wage to employee unions to guns in parks to classrooms to bus rapid transit and more.  That so much of the anti-urban animus generally and the anti-Memphis hostility specifically stem from legislators sent from this community to act in its long-term best interests is the saddest commentary of all.

Legislators from other parts of Tennessee latch onto the negative comments from Shelby County legislators as permission to translate that attitude into law.  For example, it’s been said by legislators from other parts of Tennessee that Senator Brian Kelsey has told them not to waste their time asking him to do anything that would benefit Memphis.  While we are hoping that the story is apocryphal, it’s impossible to discount it in the midst of his barrage of legislative bills and political rhetoric that seem to have Memphis as the targets.

There are times when we wish that Mr. Kelsey would just come out of the closet along with other members of the Legislature and say openly that they hate Memphis, they have only disdain for its elected officials, and they will do anything to damage its future.

At least then we could acknowledge them for forthrightness and straightforwardness.  Today, the bias and prejudice wrapped up delicately and hidden behind so many code words and in so many dog whistles to the reactionary right are merely maddening.

Looking for Logic

We’d like to think that the reality that about 80% of the residents outside Memphis drive into the city to work and 100% have to drive into Memphis if they want to enjoy professional sports, college sports, most cultural events, the zoo, art museums, and riverfront festivals would be persuasive enough for suburban legislators to embrace the fact that the future of Memphis is in effect the future of their suburbs.

The silly oft-heard comments in the municipalities that they don’t need Memphis should be contradicted by leaders who need their constituents to understand that we are in truth all in this together.  While we abhor comparisons in the ‘burbs that frequently connect Memphis and Detroit, we could tolerate them if suburbanites here came to grips with the reality that Detroit’s suburbs came face to face with.

As the city at the core of that Michigan MSA, Detroit’s decline slapped its suburbs with a dose of reality: if the city collapsed, it would be impossible for the cities in the region to remain strong.  That’s why eventually the suburban cities joined in plans and programs to strengthen the city around which they orbited.  Now, there is less temptation to use Detroit as a punch line and a punching bag, and at this point, we’d take even that position of enlightened self-interest as a modest indication of progress here.

Sadly, we don’t seem yet to have reached that place, and as a result, we find ourselves faced with the admonition about the height of frustrating is reached when we try to be logical with illogical people or reasonable with unreasonable people.

Fitting In Too Well

Not to be outdone by the overreach of his Nashville colleagues, newly-minted state senator Lee Harris, Memphis, is already fitting in with his proposed bill that takes aim at the City of Memphis Fairgrounds redevelopment but hits every city and county in Tennessee in the process. As a member of Memphis City Council, he had the reputation for impulsiveness and casting votes based on personalities that seemed to be contrary to his district’s best interest.

His latest is a bill to require voter approval when a Tennessee city or county issues bonds totaling at least 10 percent of their annual operating budgets.  Mr. Harris justified the bill as a reflection of the concern by some of his constituents about city government’s debt load.

The gaping hole in the facts is that even if the Fairgrounds proposal moves ahead, it does not increase city government’s debt load, because it’s funded with revenue bonds, City of Memphis doesn’t issue the bonds, and the bond debt does not accrue to city government.

More to the point, Mr. Harris should get acquainted with the Tennessee law that already gives voters the right to call for referenda on the issuance of general obligation bonds with a petition signed by at least 10% of the registered voters.  In fact, there is a historic example here when Heidi, Shafer, now a Shelby County Commissioner, led just such a fight opposing the FedExForum construction.

If It’s Really About Debt Load…

It was part of the two-front war on the new arena.  There was a lawsuit challenging the bond issuance on the basis that it was conveying public benefit to a private purpose, but that attack was dismissed in a court ruling.  There was also the referendum movement, which in the end also failed.  That said, Ms. Shafer can claim a semblance of a victory, because the threat of a referendum resulted in the elimination of any general obligation bonds from the new arena’s financing.

In other words, there is already a Tennessee law on the books (Tenn. Code Ann. § 9-21-207) that gives voters the right to address the precise concerns about the debt of local governments that Mr. Harris claims to be concerned about.   What the Harris bill would do is give government by referendum a deeper foothold in our state, and it’s a policy that’s already been proven wanting in Western states known for it.  More to the point, voters have the ultimate referendum at the ballot box every time an elected official comes up for election.

Then, again, as Mr. Harris proved, even for someone who’s only been a state senator for a few weeks, it’s just hard to resist the overreach into the affairs of city and county governments.