Photo via Tennessee State Library and Archives

We've come to the time of year when our august legislators are introducing — or more correctly, fixing to introduce — their resolutions and bills for the upcoming session. Since the legislative agenda hasn't really been formally set, a lot of these Silly Season bills are utter nonsense, but if the Tennessee General Assembly wasn't passing utter nonsense, it wouldn't be passing much at all.

Anyway, Rep. Ron Gant — who was not a member of the great Atlanta Braves teams of 1990s and who was not yanked off first base by the scoundrel Kent Hrbek — has decided his pet project is going to be renaming the Cordell Hull Building (where our lawmakers have their offices and also pee on chairs, apparently) for former Gov. Winfield Dunn, who is still alive, but no longer practicing dentistry.

Now, it's obvious why Republicans — the party of not erasing history but also it's OK to dig up presidential graves — would want to honor Dunn. He was after all the first member of the GOP to be governor in 75 years when he took office in 1971, joining the select group of post-Civil War Republican governors including that asshole Parson Brownlow, whichever Taylor brother it was, prohibitionist Ben Hooper, and Dewitt Senter and Alvin Hawkins, both largely well-remembered for the great accomplishment of "not being Parson Brownlow."

And, of course, Gov. Dunn's term in office exemplified what today's Tennessee Republicans hold dearest: raising taxes, expanding the size of state government and fostering a spirit of bipartisanship.

Don't get me wrong, here. Dunn is, by all accounts, a true gentleman, and he really did cooperate with then-House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter. As Gant told WKRN in a series of fragments: “[Dunn] always brought people together. In our politics today we see such divisiveness. True statesmen. He reached out across party lines." Also Dunn was certainly better than his Democratic successor in office, in that the Good Doctor didn't, you know, sell pardons and have to be removed from office in a constitutionally suspect way.

We probably should name something for him! But renaming things is a zero-sum game. If they name for it Dunn, they necessarily have to stop naming it for Hull.

Perhaps Gant thinks Dunn's aforementioned accomplishments outweigh those of Hull, who, after all, didn't do anything except *checks notes* ...

Served as secretary of state during World War II

Built strong relations with Latin America, undermining nascent Nazi influence there

Wrote the United Nations Charter

Won the Nobel Peace Prize

And not for nothing, Hull — who was born in a literal log cabin in a place called Olympus to a father who probably killed someone in a blood feud — also served as a member of the General Assembly. Dunn lost his only bid for legislative office a decade or so before he ran for governor.

The point here is that it's not like Cordell Hull is some nobody no one remembers (or shouldn't remember), and given that he, you know, basically established the postwar world order of not-always-solving-our-problems-by-shooting-at-one-another, maybe we can concede that he should have an office building named for him.

Gant and his allies in this project, including House Majority Leader and failed Rascal Flatts cosplayer William Lamberth (who, interestingly enough, was one of the staunchest GOP opponents of the Polk Grave Robbery) will have some hoops to hop through if they want to bowdlerize Hull. The Tennessee Heritage Protection Act requires them to petition the state historical commission and so on and so forth, because, according to anyone with a brain, Hull qualifies as a "historic figure" under the THPA. While the THPA was clearly designed to protect memorials to people with such grand accomplishments as getting routed by the Union or being complicit in war crimes at Fort Pillow, it's written broadly enough to protect memorials to Tennesseans with other important historic accomplishments, like being the country's top diplomat during the greatest international crisis of all time.

Now, a cynic might suggest that Gant & Co. just want to do this because Dunn is a Republican and Hull was a Democrat, but let's be generous and concede that Gant was being sincere in wanting to call attention to Dunn's bipartisanship.

In that case, if they rename the Hull Building for Dunn, Metro should rename Fifth Avenue for another Tennessee Nobel Peace Prize winner, making lawmakers' mailing address 425 Al Gore Ave. N.