CAPITOL VIEW
By Pat Nolan, NEWSCHANNEL5 Political Analyst
December 9, 2022
ON INSIDE POLITICS REPRESENTATIVE JIM COOPER GIVES AN EXIT INTERVIEW ON HIS 32 YEARS IN CONGRESS; BAD WEEK UPON BAD WEEK FOR FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP; THE MID-TERM ELECTIONS ARE FINALLY OVER; THE METRO COUNCIL CLASHES AGAIN OVER LICENSE PLATE READERS AS LEGISLATION ON THE NEW STADIUM INCHES FORWARD; NASHVILLE’S 2023 MAYOR’S RACE EXPANDS AND ADDS DIVERSITY; ON TENNESSEE’S CAPITOL HILL CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY; THE HILLSDALE CHARTER SCHOOL FIGHT IS SET TO CONTINUE; AND MORE PUBLIC RECORDS COULD BE CLOSED; KEN ROBERTS
ON INSIDE POLITICS REPRESENTATIVE JIM COOPER GIVES AN EXIT INTERVIEW ON HIS 32 YEARS IN CONGRESS
After two decades as Nashville’s congressman, Jim Cooper leaves Washington in just a few weeks.
He is stepping down, not because he was defeated for re-election, but because the Republican gerrymandering of Nashville into three districts, led him to retire after a total of 32 years in the House.
Those years in office, besides representing Nashville and the 5th District, come from Jim Cooper also serving 12 years in the old 4th District to the east of Nashville from 1983-1995.
Jim Cooper is our guest on INSIDE POLITICS this week to reflect one last time on the political scene and to look back on his distinguished career in public service.
Ever since I have been the host of INSIDE POLITICS, beginning 16 years ago in 2006, Congressman Cooper has been the elected official I have had most frequently as my guest on this program.
We thank him again for joining us for this exit interview on his 32 years on the Hill in Washington.
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BAD WEEK UPON BAD WEEK FOR FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
The bad news just keeps on coming for former President Donald Trump.
It began last weekend when he posted on social media that the U.S. Constitution should be suspended unless he is reinstated as President because the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Of course, there is absolutely no truth to that, and the former president will not get a re-do of the 2020 contest which he is also demanding.
As Mr. Trump continues to move towards going off the deep end after he announced he is running for president again in 2024, a growing number of Republican leaders, who have supported and enabled him over the years, are now seeking to put more and more distance between themselves and the political Frankenstein monster they’ve help create.
Suspending the Constitution along with the blowback from his infamous dinner with anti-semitic leaders has just furthered that exodus.
Believe it or not, things have gotten even worse for Donald Trump as this week has progressed. Another of his U.S. Senate candidates lost in Georgia (where Trump lost two such races in January 2021). Then his family business was found guilty of criminal tax fraud in New York State, where still more investigations are underway.
And on the federal level, there is more bad news for the former President. More secret classified documents have been found in West Palm Beach Florida in a Trump storage facility. The documents were found next to some “swords and wrestling belts.”
The Justice Department is already investigating the cache of top secret and other documents that Trump had taken to his Florida home. The special prosecutor, appointed by the Justice Department to oversee the myriad of probes now looking into the activities of the former President, is now seeking documents from election officials in multiple states concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Late in the week, former President Trump and his legal team announced they are dropping all legal appeals involving the recovery of hundreds of classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago home. But the Justice Department has now gone to court seeking to have Trump and his team found in contempt.
Nothing like this past week have ever occurred involving a former president. And who knows what next week holds? One new unprecedented development that looms is that the House January 6 select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol may issue its final report making a criminal referral against Mr. Trump and other associates to the Justice Department.
THE MID TERM ELECTIONS ARE FINALLY OVER
With Georgia Democratic Senator Rapheal Warnock earning a full six-year term by winning his runoff contest, Democrats have a clear majority in the upper chamber. That will help them more easily move legislation through committees as well as presidential nominees through the confirmation process.
The 51-49 majority will also end two years of a single Democratic senator (such as Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema) being able to single-handedly block passage of any legislation they don’t like. In fact, late this week Sinema announced she is leaving the Democratic Party and will become an Independent.
The mid term elections will bring divided government back to Congress as it remains unclear how the smaller-than-expected Republican majority will function as the GOP House Caucus is still struggling on who and how it will elect its Speaker of the House.
The current House this week did finally give final congressional approval to the historic Respect for Marriage Act. The bill now goes to President Biden for his signature. The legislation received bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate, although the number of Republicans voting yes in the House fell from 47 in the first House vote in July compared to 39 on Thursday. All the Democrats in the House and Senate voted yes. That includes Congressmen Jim Cooper and Steve Cohen of Tennessee. All seven of Tennessee’s Republican representatives, and the state’s two senators, voted no.
The mid-term results also brought fairly widespread rejection by voters, on both the national and state level, of “election deniers” who mimic the false election claims of Donald Trump. There may have been more potential good news in that regard this week as the justices on the Supreme Court heard a case from North Carolina that sought to argue that state legislatures had election powers that overrode the courts, gubernatorial vetoes and even who the voters in their state choose as president.
While it has often been risky to predict the questions and comments of justices during oral arguments as signs of how the High Court will ultimately rule, it did appear the nine justices this week were potentially split towards not being sympathetic to this “independent state legislature theory.”
THE METRO COUNCIL CLASHES AGAIN OVER LICENSE PLATE READERS AS LEGISLATION ON THE NEW STADIUM INCHES FORWARD
One thing I have noticed these last three-plus years, as I have returned to be the host for the live TV coverage of the Metro Council meetings, is that what divides the community divides our city’s 40- member legislative body.
It’s true whether the issue is scooters and party buses downtown or the role and regulation of short-term rentals.
Tuesday the Council continued its divided discussion on whether it is good to use license plate readers (LPRs) as a crime-fighting tool. After months of debate the Council decided to try a 6 months trial program to test LPRs.
The next step was approval of resolution to implement the test. A public hearing was also required adding to the discussion.
On the proponent’s side one speaker said there is no such thing as privacy anymore and that only criminals need to be worried that law enforcement can read your car’s license plate numbers. Pushing back, opponents of LPRs said they are not reliable and often are used against the immigrant community and black and brown people.
Even Metro government officials were divided. Police Chief John Drake and District Attorney Glen Funk both argued that if LPRs had been place recent murders, thefts and other crimes might not have occurred or been solved more easily. But representatives of the city’s Community Oversight Board and the Metro Human Relations Commission urged city leaders not to proceed with LPRs.
In the end, the Council approved moving ahead with the 6 months trial use of license plate readers. The resolution passed 22-13-1. The one abstention came from At-Large Councilmember Shaon Hurt who this week announced as a candidate for mayor (more on that later in the column)
Resolutions don’t require 21 votes for approval, only a simple majority of those voting, so despite some media reports, the passage of the license plate reader measure was not a narrow one.
After the 6- months trial is complete, the Council will review the data and other findings, before deciding whether to continue the use of LPRs permanently. You can also expect another argument about it in the Council when that time comes in 2023.
The other major project before the Council these past few weeks is the proposal by Mayor John Cooper and the Tennessee Titans to build a new $2.1 billion roofed football and events facility to replace the present Nissan Stadium on the city’s East Bank.
Tuesday, the Council approved on second reading an ordinance that would increase the city’s hotel=motel room tax by 1% to provide some of the funding for the project. The Council did amend the bill to delete a February date to begin collecting the tax until a final term sheet of all the conditions and agreements surrounding the project are in place.
Right now that term sheet is in a resolution before the Council in a non-binding form. The Council has been leery of this non-binding document as members have been studying the stadium proposal in committee for weeks while holding public hearings across the county to gather citizen reaction.
Those public hearings won’t be complete until later this month so the resolution was deferred again Tuesday night. However when the Council meets again on December 20, it seems possible both the hotel-motel tax bill and the non-binding term sheet could be approved together including an additional amendment to the term sheet making it even more clear it is non-binding.
The Council held 45 different public hearings during its nearly 6 hour meeting Tuesday night. Another one was held in the Council chamber Thursday concerning the next major project coming before the Council in 2023.
Plans to renovate the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway is supported by Mayor John Cooper and others as a major plus for Nashville and the Fairgrounds area. But, based on the hearing, some residents remain to be convinced.
NASHVILLE’S 2023 MAYOR’S RACE EXPANDS AND ADDS DIVERSITY
I have written before I thought it odd that our city’s still developing mayoral contest set for next August, consisted entirely of white male candidates.
Black and female candidates have done very well in being elected in Davidson County in recent election cycles, it only stood to reason those demographic should be reflected in the field of those running for Nashville’s highest office.
Now there is a mayoral candidate of diversity.
It’s Sharon Hurt, a highly regarded, long-time African American community activist now finishing her second term as an At-Large member of the Metro Council.
She told me privately a few months back she was being urged to run and this week she announced her candidacy.
Here is NASHVILLE BANNER/ NASHVILLE POST article and interview that gives you more on her background and the kind of issues that will be central to her campaign.
Even though she has run and won two countywide campaigns, running (and raising money) for mayor, compared to running for one of the 5 At-Large seats in the Council, is the difference of being in the big leagues in baseball compared to AAA in the minor leagues. You have to prove you can do it.
With incumbent John Cooper likely seeking re-election (although he still hasn’t made a definite announcement), along with Germantown district Councilman Freddie O’Connell and Matt Wilshire, a former Metro economic development and affordable housing official, the field continues to look like a runoff election will be required. That would pit the top two vote-getters against each other when no one receives a 50% plus one vote majority.
Assuming Mayor Cooper begins as the better-known candidate, the first goal for the others is to come in second and create an opportunity to win in a head-on-head contest with the incumbent. That means raising enough money to run two races if necessary.
It is hard to say how many votes a candidate will need to make the runoff, especially since the field of candidates may still grow. Jim Gingrich, the former CEO of Alliance Berstein (which recently moved to Nashville) has reportedly been mulling a mayoral race and State Representative Bob Freeman also continues to be mentioned as a candidate.
ON TENNESSEE’S CAPITOL HILL CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY; THE HILLSDALE CHARTER SCHOOL FIGHT IS SET TO CONTINUE: AND MORE PUBLIC RECORDS COULD BE CLOSED
After a compensation study has been completed, THE TENNESSEE JOURNAL reports the Lee administration is announcing pay raises for most executive branch employees beginning as next week (December 15).
Looking ahead to the new year, efforts to open more charter schools in Tennessee linked the controversial Hillsdale College in Michigan are in the pipeline for approval. The new schools would be in counties surrounding Nashville.
Among the new bills being filed for the next session of the Tennessee General Assembly, set to begin next month, include one to close all state death records involving investigations. The bill is sponsored by powerful Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson of Williamson County. He reportedly became involved at the request of the family of Naomi Judd, the late country music star, who recently took her own life.
IT’S GOING AROUND
It started last month and it’s still bad.
In fact, Tennessee still leads the nation in flu activity. And the level of the flu nationwide is the worst in a decade.
Get a clue. If you don’t want to get sick, get a flu shot.
It’s not too late.
Along with the flu, the RSV virus and Covid are still around and contagious. It’s creating what called a “tridemic.”
It is a refrain everybody got tired of during the depths of the pandemic, but health officials are again urging everyone to stay safe and wear a mask indoors or in crowds such as in public transit.
Covid vaccine mandates for the military have been another hot-button issue. It appears Republicans in Congress are demanding the mandate be dropped as a condition for their support of a defense appropriations bill that must be approved by Congress this month.
One of the Republicans leading the fight is Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn although there are unanswered questions about what exactly she is claiming about the covid vaccine shots.
KEN ROBERTS
This week the nation’s observed the 81st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged America into World War II.
The day reminds us again how few of our Greatest Generation who won that war are still with us.
In a different way, Nashville is seeing its Greatest Generation pass on this week with death of civic leader and former First American bank president Ken Roberts.
The breath and depth of Robert’s community involvement can be seen in his obituary that was published in THE TENNESSEAN. It took up well more than a half page in the print edition.
Roberts will perhaps be best remembered for his work in founding and guiding the Frist Art Museum for the past two decades. The Museum has been around so long, and been so successful, it is hard to remember how the community struggled for some years before the old downtown post office on Broadway became available and civic leaders such as Ken Roberts made it happen.
As Nashville remains concerned about the loss of our historic built environment, we also need to remember the "secret sauce” of Nashville is its people and its leadership. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s until today, it has been Nashville’s community leaders like Ken Roberts who were our local Greatest Generation helping to create and facilitate the wonderful Nashville we have today.
As we mourn the passing of that special group with each passing year, let us hope and pray that the great wealth of Nashville’s leadership and civic involvement never runs dry.
