Following the Koch playbook, Tennessee keeps finding new ways to undermine the welfare of its citizens.NASHVILLE — The 111th General Assembly of Tennessee convened on Jan. 8, and it will disperse on April 26, not a moment too soon. Already, its Republican supermajority has introduced bills that would further weaken lax gun laws, increase campaign-donation limits and undermine a progressive Nashville law passed by public referendum, among other assaults on democracy and good sense. Tennesseans should get down on their knees and thank God for the citizen-legislator model of government, because there’s no telling how much damage these people could do if they met all year.
Fortunately, much of what happens in the General Assembly is pure political posturing. So far this year, Tennessee Republicans have introduced bills to amend the state constitution (they want it to insist that “liberties do not come from government but from Almighty God”), prohibit state officials from recognizing marriages between people of the same gender, deny birth certificates to babies born to undocumented parents and, most controversially, outlaw abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Heart cells begin beating so early in gestation that many women don’t yet know they’re pregnant.
None of these proposed laws would accomplish anything at all. God is already invoked three times in the constitution of Tennessee, and the United States Constitution has already established birthright citizenship for babies born in this country. The Supreme Court has made same-sex marriage the law of the land, and the “heartbeat bill” would run afoul of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protects a woman’s right to an abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee and Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and Northern Mississippi have already announced that they will challenge the law if it’s passed, and they will win in court.
Bills like this are red meat to the constituencies that elected the Republican supermajority in the first place. But this year, resistance to their efforts has come from surprising places: business and the religious right.
The fetal-heartbeat bill faces similar opposition from within a traditional Republican camp. All three of Tennessee’s Catholic bishops oppose the bill, and so does Tennessee Right to Life, the primary anti-abortion group in the state. That’s because a losing court battle would force the state to pay costly legal fees — its own and its opponents’ — as well as create a legal precedent that would dog future anti-abortion efforts. Nevertheless, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed the bill on a 65-21 vote.
It now goes to the State Senate for consideration.
It would be easy to dismiss — even laugh at — politicians so resolutely determined to shoot themselves in the foot. But from time to time they do manage to pass laws, and some of those laws cause immense pain to innocent people. In 2015, members of the Republican supermajority rejected a plan by their own Republican governor, Bill Haslam, to expand TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program and provide health insurance to hundreds of thousands of low-income Tennesseans not covered by the Affordable Care Act. Governor Haslam’s plan would have cost the state no additional funds, and it was supported by an overwhelming majority of Tennesseans. Adding insult to injury, the failure to expand Medicaid has caused the widespread closure of hospitals in this state — a dozen so far, with many others teetering on the verge of insolvency — and there have been many other predictable ramifications of leaving so many people without health insurance.
In 2018, the state legislature passed a law that required “able-bodied” Tennesseans who do qualify for TennCare to hold a job or go to school if they wanted to keep their health insurance. The state is currently seeking permission from the federal government to implement this requirement and will presumably get it. When that happens, 68,000 more Tennesseans will lose their health insurance — because they lack transportation, for example, or don’t have access to affordable or reliable child care. The requirements will also cost the state an additional $19 million in administrative costs, even taking into account the money saved by reducing TennCare rolls. Even if Republican lawmakers aren’t concerned about their uninsured fellow citizens, you’d think a figure like that might catch their attention.
Every morning I read Joel Ebert’s heroic statehouse reporting for The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper, and I wonder what in the world is going on. These are not stupid people. What possible explanation lies behind such stupid behavior?
Lately, though, I’ve been remembering the historian Nancy MacLean’s brilliant book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” The book is a history of the far right’s decades-long effort to take over statehouse governments and enact an extreme libertarian agenda at the local level and, by accrual, disrupt the normal workings of democracy at every level. The irrational behavior of the Tennessee General Assembly is completely coherent when viewed through the book’s lens.
According to Dr. MacLean, the Koch network’s goal — and the goal of all legislators in thrall to the Kochs’ PACs — is to weaken unions, suppress voter turnout, privatize public education, undercut climate science, roll back existing environmental protections, dismantle the social safety net and, of course, stack the courts with sympathetic judges. To enact that unpopular agenda, they’ve had to make common cause with the religious right.
Indeed, virtually every bill introduced in Tennessee’s General Assembly this legislative session is designed to outright the religious right (by, for example, introducing an anti-abortion bill that can’t possibly survive legal scrutiny), diminish the legislative power of blue cities, and, above all, demonize anyone who can be painted as a needy “other.”
We tend to focus our shock and outrage on the manifold travesties unfolding on the national stage, but it’s a mistake to tune out what’s happening in statehouses around the country, for Tennessee is far from alone in following the Koch playbook. Hours after Tennessee legislators passed the fetal-heartbeat bill, Georgia passed a nearly identical one, and in recent years similar bills have passed in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Ohio. Fifteen other states have added work requirements of some kind for Medicaid. Texas has already tried, and failed, to prevent the children born to undocumented parents from receiving birth certificates. The list goes on and on: the death of compassionate democracy by a thousand paper cuts.
Dr. MacLean notes that even Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court, has expressed profound concern about the current state of the body politic: “We are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions,” he said in a conversation she quotes in “Democracy in Chains.” He was talking to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
For all its often-empty swagger, the Tennessee General Assembly has made one thing very clear: If Americans don’t start paying closer attention to what’s happening in statehouses across the country, the republic may never recover.
Constant attention focused on those we elect is a necessity, unfortunately.
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