Photo: Daniel Meigs

Does the Tennessee House of Representatives conduct a foreign policy — and have a budget on hand for that purpose?

Alternatively, is the House the beneficiary of hitherto-unrevealed funding from a foreign nation or its supporters?

And is the legislature mixing church and state in a manner that would be questionable according to the Constitution?

A fourth, even more remote possibility: Is Speaker of the House Glen Casada able to spend upwards of a quarter-of-a-million of his own money to send a legislative delegation to the state of Israel in September in order to present a resolution of support for that nation?

All these and other questions are relevant to an offer Casada dispatched to each member of the House in legislative mail this week. The kernel of the offer is expressed in the following printed invitation:

And the resolution of support, passed earlier this month, can be seen here. A call put in to Casada's office has not yet been returned.

We’ll keep you posted (no pun intended) on how this matter develops.

Update, 5:34 p.m.: Late on Friday, Cade Cothern, Casada’s chief of staff, called to say his boss was not the organizer of the trip. Cothern says a third party was, and that the trip itself was being offered to legislators as a “state trip,” the one such discounted annual trip that was customary for House members to take during a given year. Cothern said Casada himself had limited information on the Israel trip and will probably not go himself.