Photo: Eric England



Bruce Griffey was spirited on the morning of Jan. 14 as he greeted his fellow Republican members of the state House of Representatives.

The Republican caucus, which holds 73 of the chamber’s 99 seats, gathered in the Cordell Hull Building’s legislative offices ahead of the first floor session of the new year. It felt a bit like the first day of school after summer break. The members were back in Nashville, shaking hands and slapping backs, sharing stories from their far-flung districts and plans for four-ish months of lawmaking, culture-warring, reception-attending and speech-making.

Griffey, a freshman from Henry County, stood in the back of the meeting room, a stack of papers cradled in his arms. He handed each Republican and member of the press who would accept it a copy of his latest bill, a response to Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s decision to participate in federal refugee resettlement.

Despite a wholly fruitless first year in office — combined with a summer spat with the governor’s office over Griffey’s wife’s failed application to an open judgeship — the conservative’s enthusiasm for the job was not tempered.

“We were elected to represent Tennesseans,” Griffey says of his bill, which would claw the authority to accept refugees back from the governor. “We weren’t elected to represent the best interests of refugees.”

In 2019, his first year in office, Griffey failed repeatedly while pushing a slate of anti-immigrant legislation, including one bill that would have taxed remittances to Mexico in order to pay for a border wall. That one landed him on Fox News, but it failed to even make it out of a House subcommittee.

“You ever take a wet piece of spaghetti and lay it down on a hard countertop?” Griffey asked. “Trying to get legislation done is like trying to push on the back of that wet piece of spaghetti and getting it to go in the opposite direction.”

Griffey’s failures belie his stance, at least on some issues, firmly within the mainstream of the majority caucus at the Capitol. Though House Speaker Cameron Sexton believes there are possible legal problems with Griffey’s challenge of Lee’s refugee decision, the new speaker is working on parallel proposals. Many other Republicans largely agree with Griffey’s general goal of reducing immigration.

Photo: Eric England







Later that day, the state Senate convened for its first floor session. Instead of the customary formalities that make up a typical first day back, Republican Sen. Paul Rose of West Tennessee forced his colleagues to take a stand on a divisive social issue. Last year, Rose authored a bill that would codify existing allowances for publicly funded adoption agencies that want to discriminate against certain adoptive parents, including same-sex couples. The bill passed in the House but was punted by the Senate.

Instead of letting it die, the freshman brought it back. Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) made the rare move of stepping down from his perch to speak against his Republican colleague’s bill. McNally said the legislation would duplicate existing policies. Others worried businesses might punish Tennessee for passing it, like when sporting events and others pulled out of North Carolina after that state’s Republican legislature passed a restrictive bathroom bill. Their worries seemed unfounded when, the same day the Senate passed the bill and Lee said he would sign it, Wall Street firm AllianceBernstein announced it would — incentivized by state grants — expand its new operations in Nashville. The same firm vaguely threatened conservatives in the legislature who were considering similar bills in 2019.

The day-one vote could prove predictive, with an election-year session full of attention-grabbing cultural battles waged at high volume. Lee’s signals that he would pursue criminal justice reform, about which Democrats were cautiously optimistic, were muted by an announcement late last week that the first-term governor would be pushing a wide-ranging anti-abortion bill. The legislation, which has not been filed or finalized but would include an abortion ban as early as six weeks after inception, would “be the most comprehensive law adopted by any state in the nation” and was designed as a challenge to Roe v. Wade, according to one Senate ally.

At the press conference announcing the plan, dozens of lawmakers flanked Lee, but only a few got to talk. One of them was Jonesborough Republican Micah Van Huss, who has failed — and sometimes frustrated Republican leadership — with his repeated attempts to pass a so-called heartbeat bill like the one he was now trumpeting arm-in-arm with the governor.

Van Huss, once a fringe actor, was now center stage.





Democrats decried the anti-abortion announcement alternatively as a dangerous restriction of women’s rights and a political stunt. It gave them yet another opportunity to zero in on their new favorite target: Lee himself.

In a press conference after the first week back in Nashville, Democratic leaders pointed out unspent federal funds for needy families, an audit showing problems at the Department of Correction, trouble by the Department of Safety producing driver’s licenses and widespread turnover at the Department of Education.

“If we have one department that is failing under one particular department head, as we saw early in the Haslam administration, then your problem is your commissioner, and you replace the commissioner,” said House Democratic Caucus Chair Mike Stewart of Nashville. “When you have multiple failures in multiple departments involving the most fundamental duties of the government, obviously the problem is a broader one that goes to the Lee administration itself. We’re raising questions about the Lee administration’s ability to fundamentally administer this government.”

Stewart’s message denotes a marked shift from last year. During the 2019 session, the minority was often preoccupied with then-House Speaker Glen Casada and his efforts to force legislation through the chamber and to protect fellow Republican Rep. David Byrd, accused by former students of sexual abuse.

“We’re kicking it to Gov. Lee,” said Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Raumesh Akbari of Memphis. “These are his commissioners, this is his administration, and we’re saying, ‘Look, let’s get our house in order.’ ... We’re one year in, and now we have to be held accountable for those that are appointed by us.”

Lee defends Penny Schwinn, his pick to lead the education department, in the face of the continued turnover. In fact, he holds up the change as a virtue.

“Frankly, I think when you are a governor who has advocated for challenging the status quo,” says Lee, “then it’s a good thing when you have departments with new people and fresh ideas and people from outside that department.”

But much as Lee does, his predecessor as governor, fellow Republican Bill Haslam, also supported school-choice policies.





Photo: Eric England



The session will feature more than partisan fighting. Democrats hope to back at least some of Lee’s mostly unspecified criminal justice reform package, and lawmakers from both parties will once again push a medical marijuana bill.

Cosby Republican Rep. Jeremy Faison, newly elected House GOP caucus chair, is not letting his new leadership position undermine his independent streak. That streak caused problems for him in 2019, when he was among the first Republicans to call for Casada’s ouster and broke with his GOP colleagues by criticizing a bill that targeted Nashville’s new police oversight board.

Faison says that even though he has been “taken out of the basement and put into the top tiers of leadership,” he will continue his yearslong medical marijuana push, despite opposition from Sexton and Lee.

“I’m hoping to sit down with the governor in the next few weeks,” Faison says. “He’s never heard my perspective.”

That conversation will be just one of many between Lee and legislative leadership.

Casada’s replacement Sexton predicts “growing pains” as he develops a relationship with Lee. Sexton and McNally, his counterpart in the Senate, go back decades: Sexton’s first job in politics was for McNally. But that’s a “luxury” Sexton says he doesn’t have with the governor.

Sexton, joined by McNally, questioned Lee’s refugee decision. Sexton was one of the Republicans to vote against Lee’s signature education savings account bill, and he has been tepid so far in his enthusiasm for supporting the program. But Sexton disputes that the two are on the outs.

“I wouldn’t expect him to agree with everything I want to do,” Sexton says. “It’s not chilly. It’s good. We’re still learning, and we’re still working. He’s been here one year, so he’s having to change how he communicates because I probably communicate a little differently than my predecessor.”

Lee adds that the refugee dispute “won’t be the last time that there’s disagreement.”

“We’ve worked together on a lot of things, and when we occasionally disagree, we agree to disagree and move forward,” Lee says.

House members on both sides of the aisle are largely cheered by the prospect of Sexton’s leadership. Knoxville Democrat Gloria Johnson, one of Casada’s fiercest critics, says she takes it as a sign of good faith from Sexton that he assigned her to the education committee after Casada refused to do so.

Even so, “I’m going to need to see more,” she adds.

Faison, glad to be promoted from “the basement,” is more enthusiastic.

“I’m encouraged this year is going to be far better than last year,” he says. “Cameron is going to do a great job. Some of the stuff Glen was doing was almost in a clandestine fashion, and you’re not going to see that this year.”

Faison’s new role as caucus chair includes a lot of political work, like protecting incumbents faced with primary or general election challenges. And he isn’t shy about using the levers of government to protect the super-majority.

At the caucus meeting on the first day of session, Faison told members facing re-election challenges to invite supposedly apolitical constitutional officers like the secretary of state and comptroller to their district so that they could “be with them on the front page of the paper.” For Terri Lynn Weaver, a Lancaster Republican facing a primary challenge, Faison said he would spend part of the legislative session “identifying things that she can do, places to go help her, making sure whatever she needs from my office standpoint to help her.”

Though lawmakers sometimes talk about Casada as though he’s dead and gone, he isn’t. Now relegated to back-bencher status, the former speaker is the newly appointed vice chair of the far-from-estimable Naming, Designating and Private Acts Committee. (Sexton says Casada was the only non-freshman he could have appointed to the role without reconfiguring other committees.)

The Franklin Republican’s 2020 priority is passing a bill tightening DUI laws in Tennessee, and he’s open to supporting medical marijuana legislation. Casada hasn’t decided whether he will seek re-election to his House seat, but he did raise eyebrows when he said he was considering seeking a newly open leadership post as Republican whip. (He ultimately decided not to run for the caucus job.)

“That skill set that helped me rise up in leadership will be focused on being committed to helping Tennessee fully, and that’s where my attention will be, helping the conservatives and Republicans and helping my county,” Casada says. “I am a firm believer that wherever God put you, you’ve got to be content, and he’s put me now in this spot of being a rank-and-file member, and I’m proud to be there.”





Photo: Eric England



While lawmakers are looking ahead to the 2020 legislative session and the elections that will follow, 2019 isn’t going away yet. Some of the signature accomplishments from last year’s session aren’t as final as their backers would like them to be.

Lee’s education savings accounts are already the subject of a repeal effort, to which Democrats and Griffey, a Republican, have signed on. With an opponent of ESAs as House speaker, its tiny margin of passage in the House last year, high turnover in the department tasked with setting the system up, and threatened legal action by the two school districts affected by the bill, it remains unclear whether Lee’s accelerated implementation timeline is feasible.

When asked whether school choice initiatives like Lee’s would be a priority in the House in 2020, Sexton pivots, offering just the sort of read-between-the-lines counter to the governor that has become common since he took over in August.

“The top priority for me is making sure that every student inside of Tennessee has the same opportunity for success in education, and that starts with public schools, and that’s what we’re going to try to focus on,” Sexton says.

Another Lee victory remains up in the air. An adamant opponent of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Lee has instead proposed seeking a block grant from the federal government for all of the state’s billions of dollars in funding for indigent health care. The governor and his allies contend that the state could more efficiently spend Medicaid funds, thus boosting the number of people who could be covered.

The legislature instructed Lee to submit a proposal, which would be the first of its kind, to the federal government. His office did so late last year. Though Lee says he expects an answer this summer, the federal government has offered no timeline for when it might respond or much suggestion of what it might say. Even Lee allows that there’s been “no clarity” from the federal government since the state submitted its proposal, but he’s basing his optimism on instruction that they shouldn’t expect an answer before spring.

If the process outlasts the Trump presidency, Lee’s dream of a Medicaid block grant could die on the vine. If not, whatever deal his team strikes would still require legislative approval, setting up another legislative fight — this time over a radical overhaul of the program that provides health care for more than 20 percent of the state’s population rather than a theoretical exercise.

“If it happens, we all will be glad for that,” Lee says.









Griffey’s 2020 won’t end at trying to block refugee resettlement in Tennessee. He has another bill that would force schools to make students participate in sports based on the gender listed on their original birth certificate (though he can’t name a case in Tennessee where that has been a problem). He also wants to chemically castrate sex criminals. He in part blames his inability to pass legislation last year on both inexperience due to being a freshman and the relative dearth of “resources” available to brand-new members.

“I’m not trying to create waves or friction for the governor or anybody up here,” Griffey says. “I’m just trying to argue my positions. … I got a couple hot-button ones that got people worked up. If someone’s not going to bring it up, I’ll probably bring it up if it needs to be addressed.”

Photo: Eric England

