Stockard on the Stump: Products of privilege don’t understand civil rights

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - JULY 16: Gov. Bill Lee used his speech at the Republican National Convention to compare school vouchers to the civil rights struggle. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

If Gov. Bill Lee thinks “school choice” (code for private-school vouchers) is the “civil rights issue of our time,” he’s clearly never experienced discrimination. 

Desperate to pass the linch-pin bill of his administration, Lee took to the stage this week at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee claiming President Joe Biden “attacked parental rights” and Republican governors “fought back for a parent’s right to choose their own child’s education.” And, to think, we might have heard this speech in Nashville if the Metro Council had gone after the event.

“President Trump was right when he said that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time,” sai d Lee, who leads the Republican Governors Association.

That comes from the same person who discussed shooting protesters at the White House, then backed people who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 to stop the peaceful transition of power.

Products of privilege are hardly the ones to decide the greatest civil rights questions of our day. Their families never felt the horror of lynchings, police dogs or even the subtle rejection of a country club board.

In short, former President Donald Trump and Gov. Lee wouldn’t know a civil right if it jumped up and bit ’em in the butt. A lifetime of privilege leads to this sort of nonsense. If you told Thurgood Marshall he had to argue this instead of school desegregation he’d probably show you the door.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton, formerly an opponent of private-school vouchers, chimed in with his own inspirational words afterward, saying, “I completely agree with both the Governor and @realDonaldTrump when they say school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. We will make it happen here in Tennessee!”

Ah, the shifting sands of time, but these are the days of our lives.

House District 45 candidate Alison Beale, a Democrat, took Lee and Sexton to task, saying they’ve been trying to “tank” public schools and keep the state near the bottom nationally for funding and teacher pay “to make your privatization scam look more attractive? Except you didn’t even do that well because you couldn’t pass vouchers with a SUPERMAJORITY.”

Lee and other Republican leaders should be congratulated for adding more than $1 billion to K-12 funding. Better late than never. But they also want to spend hundreds of millions to enroll students in private schools, which will slowly but surely siphon money from public schools. 

Before leaping, maybe they should take a look at Arizona, where the state is facing a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, largely because of its voucher program.

Maybe our lawmakers are wiser than we think, although they’re usually pretty good at feeling the political winds.

Even with several expensive carrots such as more funding for long-sought teacher benefits and school construction money, the Republican-controlled House and Senate couldn’t reach a deal this year on vouchers. Both groups claimed the ultimate goal of “school choice,” but their failed talks and ensuing hand-wringing were just a ruse to avoid voting on the governor’s bill right before an election in which they’d get hammered at home. 

But back to this tone-deaf Lee comment.

The Senate Democratic Caucus issued a statement Wednesday saying the governor’s assertion is “misleading” and “deeply offensive.”

“Tennessee has a proud history of leading in the fight for civil rights – from the lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to school integration and labor rights. To label a policy that promotes segregation and inequality as a civil rights issue is a grave disservice to the legacy of those who fought for justice in our state,” their statement says.

The late Rep. John Lewis, for whom the street in front of the Cordell Hull Building is named, participated in those lunch counter sit-ins, just three blocks from the Capitol, as people spat on him and others who had the gall to ask for service at “whites only” restaurants such as Woolworth’s. 

Scenes from those events are hard to stomach, about as sickening as the recent Nazi rallies in downtown Nashville. Lee criticized those incidents recently and spoke against anti-Semitism. But Jews aren’t the only targets for Nazis. Anyone with a basic understanding of right and wrong knows that these modern-day KKKers are a threat to all American society. 

Products of privilege are hardly the ones to decide the greatest civil rights questions of our day. Their families never felt the horror of lynchings, police dogs or even the subtle rejection of a country club board.

Nor are the black robes in Washington, D.C., who wine and dine all over the world at the invitation of the elite, then make legal decisions based on political favoritism.

If Tennessee lawmakers want to experiment with private-school vouchers, they already have a program in Metro Nashville, Shelby County and Hamilton County schools, one questionably approved by a loaded Tennessee Supreme Court. Maybe they should see how well that works before gambling the state budget on a full-blown universal deal.

But whatever course they take, don’t call private-school vouchers a “civil rights issue.” That’s a slap in the face to people such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Emmett Till and many others who lost their lives in a real civil rights disaster.

Education or intimidation?

It’s a bit corn-fusing, to say the least.

For the past few years, some Republican lawmakers have tried to close primary elections, claiming Democrats are sticking their noses where they don’t belong, trying to sway the vote.

The best they could do, though, was pass a bill in 2019 requiring people to select a statewide political party affiliation when registering to vote and stating those who fail to do so won’t be eligible to vote in primaries.

The League of Women Voters and a group of plaintiffs challenged the law and refiled their suit in May after a federal judge dismissed the first complaint for lack of standing.

Now comes the Williamson County Republican Party with a mailer to people who voted as Republicans in the March presidential primary election telling them it’s a violation of state law and “punishable as a crime” for a person to vote in a political party’s primary “without being a bona fide member of or affiliated with that political party, or to declare allegiance to that party without the intent to affiliate with that party.”

Part of the problem is that the mailer makes it appear this is the state law verbatim. It is not.

Instead, it’s a combo platter — not quite as good as a Captain D’s fish and shrimp plate — of unclear state laws designed to put a question mark in people’s minds. 

Critics say the mailer belongs in the trash, even though the Williamson County GOP claims it is just trying to educate voters.

State Rep. Sam Whitson, a Franklin Republican who’s stepping away from the Legislature, says he had several friends contact him worried about the mailer.

“I told them we have an open primary system in this state and if they get any pushback from voting, call me and I’ll go down there and take care of it,” Whitson says.

He contends the mailer’s intent is to “make sure there’s no crossover voting in this election” but notes voters don’t have to belong to a party to cast a primary ballot over the next two weeks.

Gabe Hart, a columnist for the Lookout and plaintiff in the case, calls the Williamson mailers a case of “voter intimidation.”

Doug Kufner, spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, reportedly said independent voters wouldn’t participate in Republican or Democratic primaries, based on the legal description.

Instead, independents would wait until after primaries are over and vote in the general election, Kufner said.

Williamson County Republican Party Chairman Tracy Miller defends them, saying the mailer was “a good faith effort to raise awareness of this issue and help educate the community about the law as it pertains to crossover voting as a tactic to help or hurt a candidate that one does not actually support,” according to a NewsChannel5 report.

Did anyone really expect him to say they made a mistake? No, because they had every intention of misleading voters, and it worked. 

Part of the problem is the lack of a mechanism to enforce the anti-cross-over law. Thus the confusion.

But if this move kept just one person from the polls, that’s a form of disenfranchisement. They ought to be penalized, not those who want to cast a ballot.

Nevermind …

The Tennessee Secretary of State’s Office is opting against booting 14,375 people off the voting rolls for failing to respond to letters requesting proof of citizenship.

The office sent that letter out three weeks ago putting a scare into folks, then followed up with a semi-apology letter. Thousands of people who received the letter were put on the list after Department of Safety and Homeland Security data showed they weren’t citizens when they initially applied for driver’s licenses or some other state ID several years ago.

The American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the state, claiming it violated the National Voter Registration Act, Voting Rights Act and 14th and 15th amendments and saying state officials wrongfully went after “naturalized citizens in a discriminatory manner.”

Elections Coordinator Mark Goins told the Associated Press the first letter only gave people “the option to update their records” and didn’t “threaten” to remove them from the rolls. 

Surely they’re not admitting a boneheaded move. That would be so unlike Goins and Secretary of State Tre Hargett, who says he only wants to ensure registered voters are U.S. citizens.

Speaking of voting, other than human bondage, it’s been through some of the greatest civil rights violations in American history.

Maybe the governor should concentrate on voting rights instead of risking the state budget to prop up private schools. Descendants of those who ran into poll taxes, literacy tests and outright prohibitions through American history could tell him the story. But he probably wouldn’t hear much about it in Williamson County.

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