State and Local Politics Blog

Anyone living in a gerrymandered district and wondering why they don’t have a choice at the ballot box and how that happened needs to read this.  This is what the subversion of the democratic process looks like:  a memorandum from a brilliant cartographer to his billionaire patron. 

2020 will be a pivotal year for Tennessee politics and this is particularly true for the state House of Representatives.  These House seats are often overlooked, but in reality, that body plays a critical function in state government.  Moreover, because the Republicans don’t just control the House, but have a “supermajority,” there has been no check on the flow of horrible policy in the past sessions.  Future901 has a plan to change that.

About 1.4 million Tennesseans get their health coverage through Tennessee’s Medicaid offering in TennCare. That number is about 300,000 less than it would have been if Tennessee legislators had taken Medicaid expansion funds in 2014 when the Affordable Care Act offered Tennessee roughly $1.4 billion annually to expand coverage. Failing to do so has cost many Tennesseans access to health care through lack of insurance.

As Future901 supporters know, 2020 is a critical year to break the super majority in our State Legislature (aka General Assembly). Currently, Republicans hold 73 of the 99 (74%) House seats and 27 of the 33 (82%) Senate seats. Redistricting occurs after the decennial census, which means how many people live in Memphis and Shelby County will impact our representation between now and 2030. In short, this means if our residents are not counted in full, we will risk losing representation…

In November, 2016, I, Dwayne Thompson, was unexpectedly elected as the Tennessee State Representative in District 96 (Cordova, Germantown).  This article will give some insight into some of the aspects of learning to be a legislator outside of just passing bills.  I hope it will help others to understand some of the behind the scenes things that aid in becoming a successful office holder.

For Tennessee progressives in a red state, it can be difficult to find examples of good government with bipartisan support that positively impacts our fellow Tennesseeans, particularly in the education space as we saw this week with the V-word. This month, we look at the intersection of education and the juvenile justice system…

The Public Employee Political Freedom Act or PEPFA is currently under assault in the General Assembly.  PEPFA is a whistleblower law that protects the right of a state, county, or city employee to speak to his or her elected representatives about concerns they have in the workplace without fear of retaliation. 

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. The law had an immediate impact. By the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered, one-third by Federal examiners. By the end of 1966, only 4 out of the 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African Americans registered to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was readopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975, and 1982.

The first woman to vote in Tennessee was from West Tennessee and she prized her right to vote. Extensive organizing and hard work preceded her vote. The strategy to achieve woman suffrage was two-fold: work for partial suffrage in the states and press for a federal amendment. Once a state granted the franchise to women, which was usually limited, it made it more likely that the federal legislators would support the 19th Amendment which would grant all women the right to vote.

“We need more women in office.” It was a cold January day in 2017 when I sat in a corner of the old Booksellers café (now Libro in Novel) and heard this call to action at our first Pantsuit Mid-South (now Together We Will West Tennessee) meeting. So I stood up and said, “My name is Racquel Collins, and I’m going to run for office!” Forced out of my comfort zone, I spent the year learning how to run for office with newly formed Emerge Tennessee. In November, I announced my candidacy for Shelby County Commission District 1 and two months later, I received my first official endorsement…from Future901.