George Walker IV/AP Photo
Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, one of the “Tennessee Three,” delivers remarks outside the state Capitol, April 10, 2023, in Nashville.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Shelby County Board of Commissioners sent Memphis Rep. Justin Pearson back to the snake pit otherwise known as the Tennessee legislature. He rejoins his two colleagues, fellow expellee Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville and Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, the white woman who was allowed to keep her seat. That the Tennessee Three could fight the power is something to marvel at in this Southern epicenter of “small d” democratic disintegration. Their triumph, however, points to even more rot, in the form of preemption that Tennessee is using to bulldoze local autonomy and decision-making right into the Mississippi.
The Metropolitan Nashville Council, the body that unanimously sent Jones back to the statehouse, also scored a comparatively quiet victory this week. A Tennessee trial court panel granted a temporary injunction against a new state law that capped the size of all metro councils at 20 members. Metro Nashville, with its 40-member council, would be the only metro council affected, a goal that a few state lawmakers even owned up to, according to citations in the panel’s rulings.
Over the past decade, a state that liked to pride itself on the politics of getting along has exploded into partisan rancor. The departure of the last Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, in 2011 ushered in a Republican governing trifecta, amid growing racial intolerance and gender discrimination. The GOP currently has a supermajority, which has emboldened them to come up with extreme responses to local lawmaking that they view as out of step with their far-right political aims.
“We used to really be known for a lot of bipartisanship and more moderate-centrist lawmakers,” says Feroza Freeland, the Southern office policy manager for A Better Balance, a national worker advocacy organization. But preemption “creates this culture of fear almost for local officials.”
The Metro Nashville council conflict reflects historic long-standing tensions between Tennessee’s capital city and the state, as well as the acceleration of legislative tensions in other blue-dot cities. The new election law would have also required the city to redraw legislative districts before early-August balloting, inflicting more chaos on a city reeling from the Covenant School gun massacre and ongoing protests.
Most recently, the council blocked a bid to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, a goal near and dear to Republican lawmakers. This sent them looking for serious political payback against a diverse, progressive-minded body where women, African Americans, and LGBTQ people were well represented, representation that would have been compromised with a smaller council.
In the lawsuit, the metro area government alleged that the changes violated provisions of the state constitution and were “sure to cause chaos in the election machinery, as well as confusion and distrust among voters.” Pandemic-delayed redistricting had finally been completed just last year, and had its own set of snafus. Reducing the number of council members would have put election administration officials on a shortened timeline, with just six weeks, the court estimated, to pull together the August vote. It would have upended fundraising and campaigning that already commenced based on the current district boundaries, all leading to a kind of voter confusion similar to what the city experienced during the 2022 midterms. The August election will proceed as originally planned, but the case could be headed toward appeals and possibly to the more conversative state supreme court.
Over the past decade, a state that liked to pride itself on the politics of getting along has exploded into partisan rancor.
The Trump administration helped speed up the pace of preemption, and state lawmakers ramped up their restrictions on local decision-making with the advent of anti-sanctuary cities laws in places like Shelby County (Memphis is the county seat), requiring local law enforcement to comply with ICE policies to detain and expel undocumented people.
During the current legislative session, Republicans brought down the hammer even harder. Lawmakers have proposed doing away with the special district created to fund the Nashville conventions center’s construction debt payments. They proposed to slash the number of seats that the mayor can fill on the board that oversees Nashville International Airport, and replace police oversight boards (eliminating them entirely in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville) with independent “police advisory and review committees” that would make recommendations—within 72 hours—to a police department’s internal affairs division. Meanwhile, state Senate and representative districts have been gerrymandered to disadvantage lawmakers like Rep. Johnson.
“I think [the council reduction plan] was primarily for the purpose of sowing chaos and to create some type of diversion,” says Carrie Russell, a Vanderbilt University political science professor. “And so all of those pieces of legislation were rolled up in this same legislative session.”
Then there are the pure expressions of racism, designed to show Black residents, who make up about 30 percent of the metro area population, who is really in charge. A furor erupted in Nashville when Republicans proposed renaming a section of a downtown Nashville street dedicated to the late Rep. John Lewis as “President Donald Trump Boulevard.” Rep. Jones called it a “white supremacist attack on Black history.” Russell had her students look into the issue, and they discovered that because the route is technically a state highway, lawmakers could make the change. “It’s just such a perfect example of this tension and this disrespect in many ways that the state revels in highlighting toward the people of Nashville,” says Russell. (The bill, co-sponsored by the same lawmaker who suggested using “hanging from a tree” as a form of capital punishment, withdrew the plan.)
On the climate front, the legislature, determined to protect fossil fuel production, has prevented localities from implementing health and safety restrictions on energy projects, including pipeline construction and oil, methane, and propane storage facilities. The 2022 legislation was a reaction to the successful fight against the Byhalia Pipeline, a proposed connection linking points north and west and running under an aquifer in Black Memphis neighborhoods and wetlands to the Gulf Coast. The pipeline companies had called the route through Black communities “the path of least resistance.” The successful battle to stop the project featured Pearson, a co-founder of one of the anti-pipeline community groups, who won his seat in the legislature after a January special election.
According to Freeland, though the preemption in Tennessee often gets framed as a state vs. Nashville and Memphis combat, suburban and rural communities are beginning to understand that they, too, can be targeted by state officials on issues they care about.
For example, Tennessee is one of the few states that prohibits local governments from requiring contractors to set minimum paid leave standards for their employees. According to Freeland of A Better Balance, a bill that would have returned that option to local communities has been opposed by powerful business lobbies like the National Federation of Independent Business. Growing suburban communities in the Middle Tennessee region around Nashville that want to raise property taxes for school construction and other infrastructure projects have also had their funding efforts thwarted by state interference.
Separately, a decade-old law passed at the request of private telecom firms stipulating that electric utilities can only offer fiber-optic broadband within city limits prevents conservative rural towns from accessing Chattanooga’s internet service, which is among the fastest in the world. Last year, the state awarded $450 million in grants to finally expand broadband access to more rural areas.
Freeland, who is Memphis-born and raised, believes that a tipping point has been reached. After the expulsion of the Justins, she says, “folks around the state are seeing that the legislature is starting to take things too far.”
