A riveting drama of student protests, gallery arrests, floor insults and party infighting played out alongside the Tennessee General Assembly’s march toward conservative authoritarianism this year. The session’s highest-profile issues — guns, schools, guns in schools, the criminalization of abortion — dominated daily headlines, the nearly unilateral work of Tennessee’s Republican supermajority.
Talk to legislators on either side of the aisle for long enough and they’ll fixate on something as mundane as it is sinister: the descent into anti-democracy as communication and basic respect disintegrate in both chambers, the toxic byproduct of one-party rule.
“In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the controlling party can do whatever they want without Democratic votes,” Sen. Heidi Cambpell (D-Nashville) tells the Scene. “It’s part of living in a totalitarian state.”
House Bill 2968 arrived as a private act — Tennessee’s classification for narrow laws applicable to a single town, city or county that, with support from all local lawmakers, typically pass without discussion. The draft came to Rep. Bob Freeman (D-Nashville) in the House and Sen. Charlane Oliver (D-Nashville) in the Senate from Rep. Darren Jernigan (D-Nashville), a Davidson County official also serving as the city’s legislative liaison. Mayor Freddie O’Connell and Bob Mendes, the city’s East Bank deputy, sought state approval to establish a formal East Bank Development Authority. The administrative creation could assume certain quasi-governmental powers, like the ability to borrow money and issue bonds. The reorganization would make everyone’s life easier, O’Connell and Mendes told reporters in March. Freeman and Oliver, whose districts include the 550-acre swath, would carry it to their colleagues.
The bill hit barbed wire quickly. State Republicans passed a bill outlawing certain police reforms, including those passed locally in Memphis following the police killing of Tyre Nichols. Oliver, a first-term Black legislator, spoke up.
“You might as well stomp on the grave of Tyre Nichols,” Oliver said at a press conference on March 15. “Dr. King said riots are the language of the unheard. You ain’t seen nothing yet — if you keep silencing us, what do you think our districts are going to do?”
The MLK quote was enough to get her blacklisted. Nothing attached to Oliver would pass the House, Republicans told their Democratic colleagues. No matter how procedural.
Around the same time, Freeman’s bill was re-referred to the House Local Government Committee two days after easily clearing the review body. It stayed in limbo for more than a month. It became an open secret that House members, hoping to bring O’Connell to the negotiating table over last year’s doomed Fairgrounds Nashville NASCAR deal, saw the bill as leverage over O’Connell.
Oliver passed it off to Campbell in early April. Her public statement reads, in part: “Whether it’s political exclusion or hurt feelings or both, I don’t know what the truth is, but I know my integrity is not worth these political theatrics and power plays — especially for legislation that lacks input from the residents I represent in the Senate.”
Campbell carried it forward with tweaks from Republicans.
“The House made it pretty clear they would be punitive if Charlane was on it,” Campbell remembers. “It was ridiculous. I went to her and said I’d do what she wanted. I would’ve dropped it if she asked me to — it’s her district.”
Republicans secured two seats on the authority’s governing board and explicitly prevented the new body from exercising eminent domain, sufficient concessions to get the bill passed in the Senate with three senators voting no. Oliver abstained.
“I talked to almost every single member of the House,” says Freeman. (Freeman’s father Bill Freeman owns FW Publishing, the Scene’s parent company.) “That’s not the most common thing to do. Some of the ‘no’ votes were heartburn over [Nashville leaders refusing to host the Republican National Convention] and general dislike of the Metro Council, which is like their bogeyman. Half of what they say the council is doing or has done, it just hasn’t done. They call the council ‘socialist’ all the time to kill bills. I’ve explained that it’s playing a dangerous game; it layers on another level of hatred to the city, council and mayor. Suddenly you have a good percentage of the legislature voting against a private act.”
It passed the House 59-18 as the chamber’s last bill of 2024.
From the governor’s failed voucher plan to culture-war legislation and a whole lot more
