Keel Hunt

As our state legislature stumbles to adjournment this week, we can now take the full measure of what this gang on the hill considered important and the laughingstock their choices have made of Tennessee.

The smug Republican supermajority’s most towering achievement — the one its leaders feel proudest of — has been the shameful slow-motion train wreck of Insure Tennessee. It has been a policy disaster for regular folks.

History will note that Insure Tennessee came from their own governor. It was Gov. Bill Haslam’s humanitarian proposal to extend Medicaid coverage to more than a quarter-million uninsured Tennesseans. What he got back, on a platter, was a miserable insult that unfolded shamefully over the two-year session.

Last year the defiant Republican-led Senate marched the prisoner down to the dungeon. Last week, the Republican House speaker threw away the key, turning the matter over to a new “task force” — all white, all male, all Republican. RIP, Insure Tennessee.

Left grieving on the sidelines, once again, are those thousands of uninsured folks from Memphis to Mountain City. Forget that the costs would be covered by federal dollars already set aside but spurned by your legislature. As Nashville Congressman Jim Cooper tweeted after the funeral:

“Tennesseans waited 2 years while Gov. Haslam negotiated a plan with the federal gov’t. ... Now we have to wait at least another year? Cancer patients don’t have that kind of time.”

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What the General Assembly did find enthusiasm for were the so-called “bathroom bill” with its callous ridicule of human beings, and also the loony “Bible bill” to make it our official state book (Editor's note: Governor Haslam vetoed the Bible bill on Thursday) . Turns out that one has hidden costs that nobody thought about until Attorney General Herbert Slatery pointed out conflicts with Title IX. I only hope his news conference was a setup for a veto.

These are lousy laws. Responsible leaders, in whatever days remain in this sorry session, should walk them back to committee. That would be a fine use of a “task force” (read, graveyard) study. Failing that, both are worthy of the governor’s veto.

Add to all that the legislature’s failure to embrace a modern highway program and its disruptive meddling in Nashville’s affordable housing policy and the stability of annexation progress in Memphis.

What all these miseries have in common is this: They are the price we pay for legislative pandering to an array of special interests — ranging from government-hating think tanks to well-heeled developers to extremists who dislike anyone unlike themselves.

What the rest of us get is national ridicule and the outsized costs, both human and economic, of unintended consequences.

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Look to our east, where North Carolina is now reaping the whirlwind for its version of the lamebrain “bathroom bill” — all thanks to legislators there who likewise cannot say “no” to meanness and extremism. Corporations, tourism leaders and high-grossing entertainers alike are now saying “no” to North Carolina. Is Tennessee next?

Sometimes elected officials, because they are so buffered at Legislative Plaza, confuse the glad-handing of their colleagues in the corridor for the approval of citizens back home. These are not the same thing, of course, and the legislature’s rejection of Insure Tennessee demonstrates this point.

Actual polling, as recently as last week, has shown a majority of Tennesseans favor expanding Medicaid. Regular folks understand it is not Obamacare, and in any case they do not value political games over the needs of families and hospitals.

But this is what one-party government gets you: peevish politics, slavish pandering to the loudest screamers, no backbone, no courage, just small-gauged thinking, and they call it good policy.

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Among the legislature’s 132 members, there are indeed a handful of heroes who push back against this darkness, but they are isolated in this angry age. When our legislature is in session anymore, its gerrymandered majorities live in a comfort zone of no consequences, avoidance of accountability, and prideful politics with no thought of the price.

Accountability will not come in the vaulted chambers of the state House and Senate. It will not come at all until August and November, when the next elections come.

That is when you and I — and the thousands of Tennesseans who were left uninsured, who are in fact not powerless — will have our say about the job performance of dunces.

Keel Hunt is a Tennessean columnist and the author of "Coup: The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor." Reach him at Keel@TSGNashville.com.