Photo: Daniel Meigs

If there's one fundamental difference between the current Speaker of the state House, Glen Casada of Franklin, and his predecessor, Beth Harwell of Nashville, it surely is in the fact that Harwell could, even while taking firm action, be discreet in the extreme. Discreet to the point that she had difficulty gaining visibility in her race last year for governor, in fact. Casada, on the other hand, is a veritable lightning rod for notoriety.

This past week alone, Speaker Casada has pulled off a two-fer on the gaffe scale:

He managed to provide cover for Rep. David Byrd, accused of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct and freshly under fire for allegedly violating the First Amendment rights of students from his district visiting the Capitol. On top of that, Casada was involved in a shoving incident with a protester of the continued presence in the Capitol of a bust of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest — pre-Civil War slave-trader, accused architect of a battlefield massacre, and supposed Ku Klux KIan founder.

Actually, you could probably make that a three-fer: Casada was at the very least complicit, after the second incident, in the shielding by state troopers of his getaway from media members seeking him for comment following an intervening event in the Old Supreme Court Chambers.

Apropos this latter point, Casada was an official representative of state government at the recent convention of the Tennessee Press Association at the Doubletree Hotel, where he welcomed the assembled journalists with an expression of gratitude and encouragement for their commitment to an “open and free” press.

The degree of Casada’s devotion to free inquiry by the media was further clarified in a portion of his odd, Trump-like response in a front-page comment to The Tennessean regarding the Byrd affair, wherein he said, “Unfortunately, the media has irresponsibly taken it upon itself to reinforce the self-inflicted designation of ‘fake news’ while displaying a complete lack of journalistic integrity when needed most.”

That comment would surely apply as well to the presence of a CNN crew conspicuously situated for hours outside a House hearing room on the second floor of the Cordell Hull Building on Wednesday — lying in wait, as it were, for an elusive Casada.

As it happens, Casada had already indirectly — perhaps unwittingly — made himself available on a cellphone video recorded by one Justin Kanew, a former Democratic candidate for Congress in the 7th District. Kanew pressed Casada on his resistance to allegations of sexual misconduct against Byrd from several women, who were juveniles at the time, during his service as a teacher and coach in Waynesboro.

Though, as Kanew noted, other Republican office-holders had called for Byrd’s resignation, Casada defended the District 71 legislator (whom he called “David”) against the women’s charges, which he described as “fake news." He also expressed his continued confidence in his own appointment of Byrd as chairman of the House Education Administration Subcommittee.

Most notably, Casada said in a double non-sequitur which would become infamous: “If I was raped, I would move. And hell would have no fury.”

Casada had all the fury he could ask for this week. And it ain’t over yet. The Byrd affair has been reignited bigtime, and the shoving incident with the Forrest protester is still reverberating, to the point that Capitol observers are openly speculating as to what the next chapter in the Casada saga could be.