Any legislative season that starts with a $400 million school-voucher con and ends with efforts to kick migrant children out of public schools can hardly be considered good government.
But, as always, I take heart in the wing nut proposals that somehow managed not to pass, like that spiteful migrant-children legislation. (A 1982 Supreme Court decision found such efforts unconstitutional, but since when does the Republican legislative supermajority care about the Constitution?) Among other failures to celebrate:
• A resolution by Sen. Bo Watson encouraging state teachers to use the Trump-decreed terms Gulf of America and Mount McKinley was D.O.A. in the Senate Finance, Ways & Means Committee.
• Ditto for the annual effort for the Restoring State Sovereignty Through Nullification Act, which posits that the state has the authority to invalidate federal laws and edicts that it finds objectionable. (I say again: It does not.) Sen. Janice Bowling and Rep. Bud Hulsey were behind the effort. No surprise.
• A resolution by Rep. Gino Bulso that would have defined a “person” to include “every human being from fertilization to natural death” was deferred in committee several times before being returned to the clerk’s desk.
• Companion bills by Sen. Paul Rose and Rep. Mark Cochran to codify as state policy that “there are only two (2) sexes, a biological male and a biological female,” sailed through a couple of committee votes but then stalled. I suspect we haven’t seen the last of this.
• A resolution by Rep. Gabby Salinas to limit House and Senate members to no more than 12 consecutive years got no love at all. Good. We already have term limits; they are enforced at the ballot box. (Salinas is the only Democrat listed in this category.)
As ever, some measures that deserved passage fell short. They included one proposing a constitutional amendment to guarantee equal rights regardless of sex, another calling for an amendment to allow residents to propose state laws by initiative and a bill to prohibit anyone from holding a local office and a state office at the same time. That last one at least won passage in the House; I have hope that double-dipping might eventually be outlawed.
And then there’s this last category, which I present without comment pro or con. It involves the effort to create yet another official state song.
The tune in question was, appropriately enough, titled “Tennessee,” by a group called Arrested Development. In presenting the bill to the House Naming and Designating Committee, Rep. Antonio Parkinson noted that “it would be the first hip-hop song ever adopted as a state song in the entire country.”
The song, released in 1992, won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group in 1993 and would “bring a positive spotlight on the state,” Parkinson said. As it happens, there is also a video with the song, a video that committee member Rep. Rush Bricken said he found “mean-spirited.” Rep. Vince Dixie defended the song and the video.
“It wasn’t anything that had people hanging from trees,” Dixie said, “and even if it did, it’s a part of our history of Tennessee.”
Fact check: The video does indeed include images of lynching victims. Dixie’s defense was based on broadening the range of state-honored songs.
“I’ve never seen a song or something that has some kind of origination from something other than white culture brought to us to put in the Tennessee code,” he said. “We’re all one people, and we have to start to live as one.”
Both Parkinson and Dixie are Democrats and Black. But the song also had a Republican and white defender, Rep. Jody Barrett, who called attention to a song previously green-lighted by legislators.
“Last year or the year before,” Barrett said, “we passed a resolution adopting a song that was written by a guy from Texas who has a lifelong problem with drugs, who’s been married multiple times in abusive relationships that wrote a song about white counterculture running alcohol in Prohibition and raising marijuana in the hills of East Tennessee, and we adopted that song without any problems.”
That song was “Copperhead Road” by new Grand Ole Opry inductee Steve Earle, one of 15 – 15! – official state songs. And that doesn’t include an official state holiday song, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and an official state bicentennial rap song, the unimaginatively titled “Tennessee Bicentennial Rap: 1796-1996.”
“Tennessee” did win a recommendation from the Naming and Designating Committee, but later failed in the State and Local Government Committee 11 to 9 without any discussion. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it return at some point. I would be surprised to see it pass.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.