opinion

Republican supermajority has failed Tennessee

Re: "Tennesseans elected GOP-led legislature for a reason," by Rep. Glen Casada, July 14.

I read with interest my distinguished colleague House Republican Caucus Chairman Glen Casada’s column touting the supposed achievements of the Republican majority in the Tennessee legislature. Casada has performed his duty to his party by attempting to gloss over the extraordinary failures of Republican leadership, but the facts speak for themselves.

Failure: Insure Tennessee

Gov. Bill Haslam has observed that the support for his Insure Tennessee plan, which would bring health care to over a quarter-million Tennesseans at no cost to the taxpayers, is “overwhelming.”

In fact, whether you talk to business leaders, health care experts or just citizens who want the most for their tax dollars, it’s hard to find someone who is against Insure Tennessee other than the extreme Republican leaders who are blocking the governor’s plan in the Tennessee House and Senate.

Failure: disabled veterans

Far from helping disabled veterans, the Republican leadership this year chose to dramatically cut local tax relief that Tennessee has historically provided veterans who are 100 percent disabled.

These are veterans who are paralyzed or suffer from highly debilitating injuries such as the traumatic brain injuries that plague so many who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The practical result of this Republican plan has been to double the taxes paid by these veterans during a year when the state rainy-day fund contained over half a billion dollars. That Republican leaders tout this as success speaks volumes about their priorities.

Failure: virtual school waste

The Tennessee virtual school bill was the Republican majority’s lead education reform, passed in 2010 over strong Democratic opposition.

The bill was designed to hand millions of dollars to K-12 Inc., an online school company founded by convicted felon Michael Milken, for “virtual” classes that can be delivered on the cheap.

The result has been a predictable disaster, with the school among the lowest performing in the state year after year. Yet Republican leaders have killed legislation that would bring their failed experiment to an end.

Failure: rape and incest exception

Whether pro-choice or pro-life, Tennesseans overwhelmingly believe that when a woman has been a victim of rape or incest, she should not be forced by the state to bear the burden of a resulting pregnancy.

Yet this year the extreme Republican leadership successfully led the charge to oppose exceptions for rape and incest in our reproductive rights laws.

Failure: minimum wage

Once again this year, Republican leaders killed multiple bills that would have done nothing more than raise the minimum wage for Tennessee’s lowest-paid workers.

Meanwhile, House Republicans tout legislation that gutted Tennessee’s estate and gift taxes, a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits a handful of Tennessee’s wealthiest citizens while punching a multimillion-dollar hole in our budgets year after year.

These are just a few of the most obvious Republican failures.

Casada gamely seeks to excuse poor leadership by noting that our state economy improved over the past seven years.

But voters will not be fooled by this tricky arithmetic — seven years ago was 2008, the year of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

You don’t have to be an economist to know that every state is doing well financially compared to 2008. The Republican “supermajority” has at best been along for the ride.

Thankfully, there are many individual Republican legislators who have opposed many bad policies promoted by their leadership.

Over time, our great democratic system will work and Tennessee will return to the sensible policies toward schools, veterans, health care and the like that Tennesseans could take for granted before the Republican “supermajority” arrived.

Rep. Mike Stewart, D-Nashville, is the Tennessee House of Representatives Democratic Caucus chairman.