I have rarely been as outraged as I was when I awoke on January 30th to read in the Tennessean the new ethics proposal from Democratic Majority Leader Gary Odom. In place of the lobbyist gift ban, or “no cup of coffee law,” Odom proposed that each of the over 500 lobbyists in Tennessee be allowed to give legislators up to ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS in personal gifts per year! He was not talking about a lift on the ban on contributing to a campaign account, which goes for buying signs and mail pieces. He was talking about drinks, trips, jewelry, and even cash—and all this not even three years since the exposure of the Tennessee Waltz bribery scandal. Have we learned nothing at all? I, for one, was not about to see us slide back into that practice, so I filed an amendment which said that if the special ethics committee continued to meet, it could not discuss such an outrageous proposal. In fear of having to discuss or, heaven forbid, vote on my amendment, the House continued to postpone discussion of the resolution to extend the existence of the committee. The committee even went ahead and met illegally after the law had sunset its existence. In the end, however, I am happy to report that the committee never took up the issue again publicly, and the lobbyist gift ban remains intact. Killing bad legislation is often more important than passing good legislation.
I hope you enjoy reading below my further efforts on your behalf during the 2008 legislative session.
Scholarships
Budget Woes
Education Pays
Crime
Health Care
Abortion
Judicial “Elections”
No Investment in Iran
Racial Profiling
Self Protection
Cable
Conclusion
If you had asked me at the beginning of the year which one position of mine would get more attention than any other, I never would have guessed it would involve a vote on the lottery scholarships. But when all 92 members voting vote the other way, your vote gets noticed. I was the lone vote in the House for upholding the 3.0 grade point average required to keep HOPE lottery scholarships for college. When we are paying students up to $5000 per year to go to college, I think it is reasonable to expect a certain amount of academic success from those students. The lottery was sold to the public as a way to keep the “best and the brightest” students in Tennessee. If we had wanted a needs-based rather than a merit-based scholarship program, then we would have enacted a scholarship for everyone who gets accepted to college, based purely on financial need with no minimum GPA requirement at all. But that is not what the people of Tennessee voted for when they adopted the constitutional amendment permitting the lottery in 2002. The Republican-controlled Senate recognized this and agreed with my desire of keeping standards high to receive scholarship money. Ultimately, a compromise was reached with the Democratic-controlled House in which students may maintain a 2.75 GPA through their junior year and must earn a 3.0 each subsequent semester to keep their HOPE scholarships. This was yet another slide toward what our President has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
What a difference a year makes. Just last year we were awash in money in state government and spending it with reckless abandon. I am proud of my record in 2007 opposing pork spending in the form of giving individual legislators hundreds of thousands of dollars to dole out to pet nonprofit and government agencies in their districts in return for political loyalty. I think my position opposing such pork was proven correct when we went from a $500 million surplus in 2007 to a $500 million proposed budget shortfall this year. We ended up having to offer early retirement to 2000 state employees this year to cut down on spending. Tough times call for tough measures. I did not oppose this cutback, but I did oppose the hypocrisy of doing so while continuing other pork projects.
The most egregious pork project this year was a $20 million underground ballroom at the Governor’s mansion. The ballroom included such over-the-top expenditures as $265 soap dispensers and towel dispensers, and it was being built primarily for the governor to entertain legislators. The vast majority of the people of Tennessee will never see the inside of the ballroom, and they should not have to pay for it either. What started as a well-intentioned, less than $10 million project to renovate the residence paid for by private donations turned into a $20 million project for an underground ballroom funded primarily by taxpayer dollars. In an effort to subject the governor and the legislature to the same cutbacks as experienced in the rest of the budget, I offered an amendment to the budget that would have cut public funding for the ballroom. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, given the intense lobbying for the project by the governor and his wife, the amendment garnered only 37 votes, all but two of which were Republican. I hope that when the project is finished, all 6 million Tennesseans will demand to visit the opulence funded by their tax dollars.
The Education Pays Act has the potential to do more good in our state than any other bill I introduced this year. It would create a pilot program in four failing schools to pay students $100 each and their parents $50 for finishing in the top quarter of their class each semester. We already spend $8,000 each year per student on education, so another $300 a year is nothing in comparison. However, it could make a big difference in education outcomes, as many more affluent parents have already acknowledged when they give their kids rewards for good grades. Hopefully, the monetary valuing of education in the short run will lead students to see the value of education in the long run. Such has been the experience of students in Georgia, according to the testimony we received from my guest Jackie Cushman Gingrich, daughter of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A variation of the program has also now been implemented by Mayor Bloomberg in New York as part of his anti-poverty program and has been implemented in at least twelve other states. The Education Pays Act passed the House Education Committee with only one “no” vote but got lost in the Finance Committee due to lack of funding this year. In the Senate, which allows bills costing under $100,000 to bypass the Finance Committee, it passed 25 to 3 under the leadership of my Senate sponsor, Senator Dwayne Bunch (R-Cleveland). I will continue to work with private foundations to get this idea started in Tennessee as we continue to make progress in the legislature.
I introduced another economic incentive bill this year to reduce welfare payments to parents whose kids skip school. I firmly believe that people respond to such economic incentives. We just have to ensure that the right incentives are in place to reward good behavior.
The greatest travesty of the year was that we did virtually nothing to solve the crime problem in Tennessee. Protecting the lives of its citizens is the first duty of government. While we did pass half of the “Crooks with Guns Bill” in 2007 to increase sentences for felonies committed with firearms, we still did not include such basic felonies as aggravated burglary. We owe it to the citizens of Shelby County and to the entire state to pass the full “Crooks with Guns Bill” and to hire more assistant district attorneys to prosecute the vast number of criminals moving through our criminal justice system. In 2007 only two of the thirty-two prosecutors we funded were assigned to Shelby County, even though the county accounts for twenty percent of the state population and has its worst crime problem. If this problem is not addressed soon, people will continue to move away from our community.
While the general public thinks that we fixed TennCare three years ago, we really only stopped the problem from getting worse. We failed to address the underlying problem: we are still number two among states in the percentage of our citizens receiving Medicaid and number three among states in the percentage of our budget spent on Medicaid. We are, however, nowhere near the top three in overall health, where we deserve to be. It is for that reason that I introduced a bill this term to allow individuals receiving Medicaid to shift from traditional insurance coverage to a personal health account to be spent on the medical services and private health insurance plans of each recipient’s choice. The accounts would be funded each quarter by the state, and any unspent funds would roll over into the next quarter’s personal account. I am proud that this plan, originally introduced by Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, was backed by the House Republican Caucus as our official plan for Medicaid reform.
Tennessee took a step in the right direction this year in passing the long term care bill to allow seniors and other disabled persons on Medicaid to receive their care in-home, when appropriate, rather than having to go to a nursing home. I applaud Governor Bredesen for finally lending his support to this initiative that many House and Senate Republicans have been pushing for years.
I doubt that health care costs will go down with the watered down version of medical malpractice reform that was passed this year, but at least it was a step in the right direction. More than 80% of lawsuits filed against medical providers in Tennessee are found to end in no payment whatsoever from the providers. Yet, when medical providers have to pay lawyers to defend these meritless claims, it raises the cost of health care for all of us. The medical malpractice bill we passed this year begins to address the problem by requiring a medical expert to declare that there is a good faith basis to file the lawsuit. Republicans in the Senate and the House had hoped to rein in the amount of damages that plaintiffs could receive beyond their actual economic losses, but Democrats in the House continue to block such legislation.
Did you know that conservative Tennessee has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country? That is the case because four of the five unelected Supreme Court justices divined in 2000 that the Tennessee constitution, which makes no mention of abortion, protects the practice even more so than does the U.S. Constitution as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. For the second session in a row, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a constitutional amendment to return the power to regulate abortion to the people through their elected representatives in the legislature. And for the second year in a row, the Democratic House leadership refused to allow the issue to come to a vote. The resolution was killed on a party-line vote in the Public Health Subcommittee. The Democratic House leadership uses the six members of that subcommittee, who represent constituencies in which it is politically acceptable to be pro-abortion, to prevent the amendment from coming to a vote on the House floor. If the amendment were to come to a vote on the House floor, a number of moderate Democratic members would be forced with the choice of either voting pro-abortion, in which case they would likely be defeated in the next election, or voting their consciences, in which case the amendment would pass. But House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh (D-Covington) cannot allow the amendment to pass for fear of alienating his supporters among the liberal, urban Democratic legislators. As long as both liberal and moderate legislators vote for a Democratic Speaker of the House, this issue will continue to be kept out of the hands of the people. It will take four more Republican seats in the House for the people to finally have a voice on the issue.
The state constitution states very clearly that the Supreme Court justices “shall be elected by the qualified voters of the state.” This is the same language used to describe the special election of legislators to vacated seats. Yet we continue to allow a group of fourteen lawyers and three nonlawyers to select a list of three nominees from which the governor picks one judge, who later stands for a “yes/no” retention decision. As former Democratic gubernatorial nominee John Jay Hooker says, only a lawyer could perform the mental gymnastics required to reason that such a system follows the constitution. Specifically, the system was held constitutional by five lawyers appointed by the governor to hear a case years ago after the actual Supreme Court justices had recused themselves from hearing the case because they had been placed in office by the very system that was in question. According to Mr. Hooker, the real reason behind the plan was that after Republicans had swept the statewide elected offices on the ballot in 1970, Democratic leaders instituted the plan to avoid losing the upcoming judicial elections as well. The Republican-controlled Senate this year refused to continue the charade that a “yes/no” retention decision is an election “by the qualified voters of the state.” The Senate refused to pass a routine bill that would have extended the judicial selection commission for another year. The commission now has to be extended in 2009 or it will cease to exist. With Republican gains in the Senate almost guaranteed in the November elections, it is encouraging to think about the possibility of returning the state Supreme Court to the Jacksonian electoral system of accountability with which it was designed.
How would you feel if you knew your pension funds were helping support the fundamentalist Islamic government of Iran, the same nation that is actively seeking nuclear weapons and whose President has vowed to “wipe Israel off the face of the Earth?” If you are a state employee, that is exactly what is happening. I partnered with Representative Steve McManus (R-Cordova) and Senator Beverly Marrero (D-Memphis) to introduce the “No Investment in Iran Act” to end investment of state pension funds in companies that support Iran. Iran is sitting on the third largest proven oil reserves in the world, but it cannot retrieve this oil and profit from it without significant foreign investment. At least twenty-three other states have now passed similar legislation. State Treasurer, Dale Sims, however, opposed the legislation and legislation to end investments in companies that invest in genocide-stricken Sudan. We ultimately passed legislation simply directing the Treasurer to compile a list of state holdings in companies that invest in nations which sponsor terrorism. With the list in hand, we will have to try again next year to pass the “No Investment in Iran Act.”
It is rare that Rep. Ulysses Jones (D-Memphis) and I end up on the same side of a controversial issue, but I happily supported his bill this year requiring police and sheriff’s departments to develop policies to prohibit racial profiling. There is a wide disparity among the perceptions of different racial groups as to the extent to which racial profiling occurs, but we should all agree that if it occurs even once, that is one time too many. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we long for the day that our children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I certainly do not claim to be responsible for passing this bill, but in co-sponsoring and speaking in favor of it on the House floor, I do think I played an integral role in its passing the House unanimously, and that is an effort for which I am proud. Racial division continues to be the greatest sin plaguing Memphis and Shelby County, and we will only realize our full potential as a community if we continue to work together to address the issue.
House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh (D-Covington) continued his personal crusade against the right to bear arms this year by making a special appearance in the Criminal Practice Subcommittee to vote against and kill three bills that would have allowed law-abiding citizens with permits to carry firearms in state parks, restaurants which serve alcohol, and university campuses, respectively. I will never forget hearing law students at Appalachian School of Law recount to me when I was a law student the untold story of how two student heroes went to their trucks and retrieved their firearms to bring to his knees a maniacal shooter who had killed three people and was holding the law school campus hostage. A campus ban on firearms would not have fazed that killer nor did it faze the Virginia Tech killer of last year. Unfortunately, the Virginia Tech tragedy did occur on a state school campus which banned firearms, and there were no heroes to be found. The law-abiding heroes that could have saved the day were hamstrung by the laws that they were abiding. I hope we never find ourselves in this situation in Tennessee, but we remain open to the possibility as long as Jimmy Naifeh remains Speaker of the House.
One bill that did pass this year after years of opposition was an expansion of the castle doctrine law. The castle doctrine law says that a person may use deadly force in self defense if a criminal has invaded his home. The bill this year included a person’s business as well as his home. It is a mystery to me why this bill, which caused so much consternation in years past, passed this year by a vote of 97 to 0. I can only venture to guess the difference was that it had a Democratic sponsor this year instead of a Republican sponsor last year. Such petty partisanship seems that it should be beneath grown men and women, but, sadly, it is quite common in the House. I only hope that it will not continue when we have a Republican majority.
The statewide cable franchising bill passed this year by a vote of 93 to 2, so you will now have another choice for your cable service if you are not happy with your current local cable provider. Local municipalities supported the compromise bill this year because it protected their control over public rights of way and protected funding by cable companies for such community access channels as Germantown High School TV.
In Conclusion
It has been an honor to serve you once again in the legislature. It is an opportunity that I cherish and hope no public servant, including myself, ever takes for granted. On vacation this year I had pleasure of reading Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, and it reminded me of the immense sacrifices that our Founding Fathers made to ensure liberty to themselves and their posterity. As I mentioned in my very first campaign speech four years ago, my favorite painting in the U.S. Capitol rotunda is of George Washington resigning his commission as Commander of the Continental Army. To turn over the reigns of power back to the people and their elected representatives after defeating the greatest military power on Earth was an act of great humility. Washington could have made himself king for life, and very few Americans would have objected. Yet he chose to sacrifice his personal good for the good of the people. What I had failed to pay attention to until reading Founding Brothers was that Washington made this sacrifice twice. After his second term as President of the United States, had he chosen to run again, he would have been elected in a landslide. And had he died in office, he would have set a terrible precedent that the chief executive was an office to be held for life. Yet he chose to retire to the grounds of Mt. Vernon and let the next generation assume the reigns of power. It is the knowledge of this spirit of sacrifice which inspires me to serve our generation.
Whenever I feel frustrated by the actions of the House, I am reminded of the words of Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” It is in this spirit that I want to thank you once again for re-electing me to serve you for two more years. As usual, I would like to think no one is running against me this year because of the good job I am doing though I suspect that there was simply no one in my district willing to travel back and forth to Nashville for so little pay. Either way, it has been a pleasure, and I look forward to two more years of representing you