Ky. is a lot like Tennessee. What happened there should be a wake-up call for us. | Opinion
In the midst of the enormous ruckus over Senate Bill 150 — the shouting, the crying, the debates, the protests, the double-dealing, the final Frankenstein product — I received a very interesting letter from a long-time reader.
She wrote about how she disagrees with me most of the time, but did it in such a polite and sincere way that I felt compelled to respond. She wondered how we could ever begin to address issues in a more constructive way.
I was going to write about how we did find some common ground on SB 150, with Sen. Danny Carroll’s compromise, one that sadly was jettisoned by some last-minute dirty politics. I was going to say that most people lean toward the middle in all things, and that with better discussion and better political process, we can get to understanding.
Then on Thursday night, I followed the Tennessee House of Representatives’ expulsion of two Black Democratic members and all those Pollyanna sentiments dissolved into smoke. They lost their seats for interrupting proceedings with discussions that Republicans didn’t want to have.
Because it could happen here so very easily. The casual racism, the heavy-handed authoritarianism of supermajorities who don’t want to hear dissent even after a school shooting. The gerrymandering that has accentuated our urban-rural divide, silencing hundreds of thousands of people in urban areas who are tired of seeing children get slaughtered in schools, tired of hearing that books about gay kids are more dangerous than active shooter drills.
Here, we’ve made it a habit to keep the public locked out of proceedings, whether it’s last minute amendments, last minute meetings or shell bills that obscure the real intent of a bill. In one of the most shameful examples of that kind of governing, Rep. Savannah Maddox turned a shell bill on “workforce development” into a last minute attempt to allow guns on college campuses. Luckily it failed.
The deceit over SB 150, the last minute unannounced meeting that killed Carroll’s compromise, was shameful. That is not the Democratic process. After all, if you have the supermajority, the result is preordained. There’s no need for that kind of secrecy and double-dealing.
State Police arrested people who shouted in the House Gallery during discussion of Senate Bill 150, something that has hardly ever been done in the history of Kentucky. We punish those who disagree by stripping them of committee assignments, just like in Nashville. Now, to be fair, in our case it was Republicans punishing more extreme Republicans, but the model is there.
Tennessee showed its drawers to the world on Thursday. Republican lawmakers didn’t like the way two young Black men made them pay attention to a school shooting just down the street, and made their displeasure very clear. Especially when they allowed the white woman member of the Tennessee Three to remain.
We can do better and we have to. We need to talk with people of good faith, even and especially when we disagree with them. And we need to vote because no party, whether Republican or Democratic, should have that much control.
Many consider the very idea of “common ground” naive; on the other hand, think tanks and civic groups hold conferences on the idea that we have to sit down and talk about these divisions, especially in states like ours where the rural/urban divides are so extreme. The media is part of the problem — I’m guilty of generalization and name-calling. But I am always willing to listen to people, and in the words of my correspondent, I’m certainly willing to have “some real debates where there is opportunity for knowledgeable people on both sides to point out differences without pronouncing motives.”
Sadly, I don’t think the halls of our General Assembly or many others are where good-faith debates happen much any more. So we have to do it by email and in opinion pieces and in conversations, one at a time. Tennessee may have more money, more people, more tourism and better music. But we can still do better and we have to.
This story was originally published April 7, 2023 at 9:30 AM.
