It used to be that we had a few months of breathing easier when that ruby red group of extremists, the Tennessee Legislature supermajority, was out of session.
No more.
Now the leaders of the vitriol caucus, House Majority Leader Cameron Sexton and Speaker of the Senate Randy McNally, use the down months between sessions to cajole, threaten, and grandstand to elevate their statewide name recognition by attacking the blue city of Memphis.
Aided and abetted by State Senator Brent Taylor of Shelby County, it’s the latest chapter of Jim Crow 2.0 as the White partisans do everything they can to keep Memphians in their place. It’s the plantation mentality in which Black voters are told that White politicians know best and they should simply do what they are told.
But Memphis is not alone.
The same egomaniacal Republicans also are doing everything they can to erode Nashville’s self-governance – from gerrymandering a district to eliminate a Democratic Congressman to undoing a city charter referendum about the Fairgrounds racetrack demolition and trying to take control of Nashville’s Airport Authority and Sports Authority boards.
In response, Nashville has filed four lawsuits against State of Tennessee.
Begin Anyway
It’s why the Memphis City Council’s lawsuit against Shelby County Election Commission about the city’s right to hold a referendum on gun control is no different. In retrospect, city government should have been filing lawsuits in response to state actions for years.
There are local influentials who summon up memories of Neville Chamberlain by contending that Memphis should just accept the constant interference from State of Tennessee and do nothing to stand up for itself. They say the best course of action is to build stronger relationships with state right wing leaders because fighting battles you can’t win only hurts Memphis.
As Atticus Finch said in To Kill A Mockingbird, “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” At this point, it hardly matters if City of Memphis can prevail in the lawsuit against the Election Commission, it matters that it sends a message that the days of taking it lying down are over.
There are those business leaders who say city government leaders should simply bow to the state’s power and instead go to Nashville on an errand to ingratiate ourselves with the Lee Administration and the legislators in hopes of benefiting from their largesse.
That would be a fool’s errand. State government has clearly communicated what it thinks about Memphis and its leadership. Anyone who believes that kissing the state’s ring would engender a change in Republican legislators’ attitude toward Memphis seem to be living in a parallel universe.
Bullies Don’t Change
More to the point, appeasing bullies never seems to change their behavior. It just encourages them to do more.
Business leaders and others calling for Memphis City Council to withdraw its lawsuit think that way because they are the people who get their calls to Nashville returned and who stand to benefit from legislators’ actions, whether in funding decisions about sports facilities or new tax policies that will benefit them to the tune of $7.4 billion over 10 years.
Meanwhile, the majority of Memphians who are urged to go along to get along are the victims of state policies, whether it is the refusal to access greater Medicaid payments, the proliferation of guns on city streets and gun-related crimes, one of the country’s most regressive tax systems, undermining public schools, interfering in local school decisions, and so much more.
More than anything, it is testament to the two worlds that exist in Memphis and residents’ views between the haves and the have-nots. If you want to see who Tennessee legislative leaders care about, just look at their financial disclosure reports for Memphians who dole out campaign checks to them.
Election Commissioners Serve Nashville
Put directly, what exactly does the average Memphian lose in a lawsuit against the Election Commission which is doing the bidding of state officials? After all, so far, the Shelby County Election Commission has does nothing to represent the right of Memphians to express their opinions through referenda.
We shouldn’t be surprised, because their loyalty flows to Nashville. The five commissioners are appointed by the state election commission with three members from the majority party in the Legislature and two from the minority party. The state election commission appoints members after consulting with Shelby County legislators.
Brent Taylor served on the Election Commission from 2019 to 2022. Today, the Republican members are former Juvenile Court Clerk and Cordova resident Steve Stamson, who has been on the commission for 14 years, Germantown resident and former Germantown alderman Frank Uhlhorn, and former Shelby County Mayor and Collierville resident Mark Luttrell.
In other words, only one member of the Republican majority is from Memphis. Faced with the choice of whether to genuflect to their Nashville godfathers or make the case to state election officials why Memphians have the right to hold referendums, they bowed to their state rulers.
Sadly, even someone like Mr. Luttrell, who had a reputation as a fair-minded Republican, even agreed with state election officials who told the local board they could not put the referendum on the November ballot.
Just Say Thank You
Here’s the thing: all in all, the edict by leaders of the Tennessee Legislature is merely the latest chapter in the annual competition for who can take the most partisan shots at their favorite targets, Memphis and Nashville.
Rather than threats and insults, the more appropriate pronouncement from these legislators to their state’s major cities would be “thank you.” That’s because Memphis and Nashville generate about one-half of Tennessee’s GDP and slightly more than half of all state jobs.
Memphis and Nashville drive the Tennessee economy. They prop up the economies of the rural towns where so many legislators come from. They send the taxes that prop up state government’s budget, including the salaries of the legislators who spend so much time in turn denigrating them.
So exactly how does the legislative supermajority show its gratitude to Memphis and Nashville for keeping Tennessee’s economy afloat and revenues flowing to state government?
What Memphis and Nashville get are obsessions about drag shows which legislators have never seen, interfering in the freedom of families they’ve never met to make their own decisions about their children, they agonize over a trans athlete although they’ve never met one, they squeal about diversity and inclusion training that teach respect for all races although they have never attended it, they agonize over White kids who might be uncomfortable learning accurate American history, they vilify teachers as groomers although they can’t find one, and they push “classical education” they can’t explain in hopes of injecting their political and religious beliefs into our public school classrooms.
They interfere in urban government decisions, they dumb down our school systems, they prevent a fairer criminal justice system, they gerrymander our Congressional districts, they erode our cities’ home rule authority, they threaten our health and diminish our individual liberties, they fuel our crime rate and make every public space unsafe with the proliferation of guns, they threaten the independence of our prosecutors and courts, they block Black students from learning their own history, they ban books that require students to think, and they decide women can’t be trusted with making decisions about their own bodies.
Simple: Just Act Right
The sad part is these right wing extremists are proud of their churlish, ignorant, and pandering behavior and the ignorance at the heart of the spiteful laws that flow from legislative actions.
Because of it, we are living in George Orwell’s world: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, fascism is freedom. The Tennessee Legislature is Big Brother.
Meanwhile, while they engage in the politics of distraction, among the 50 states, Tennessee is #43 in happiness, #36 in child well-being, #39 in health, #40 in family and community, #43 in preparedness to compete in innovation-driven economy, #45 in healthiest state, #50 in academic investment, #49 in school class size, #40 in maternal mortality, and myriad other indicators that are symptoms of a state government focused on the wrong priorities and concentrating on the wrong laws.
If residents of Tennessee’s two largest cities need relief, it is from their own state government, and if City of Memphis City Council members are willing to confront it with a lawsuit, more power to them.
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