And then, just as quickly, it slammed shut: Louisiana’s attorney general and the leading candidate in the race for governor, Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit against the Board of Pardons and Parole, seeking to disqualify the petitions; he then fired the lawyer the Board hired to represent it in the suit, and instead installed an attorney who has represented him in the past. What followed over the next few months, as Edwards’s days in office dwindled to zero, has amounted to an agonizing bureaucratic back-and-forth: the Board, following Landry’s suit, has repeatedly declined to grant the prisoners full clemency hearings, instead scheduling brief administrative reviews for fewer than half of them. 

One of the prisoners, Henri Broadway, has maintained his innocence in the 1993 murder of police officer Betty Smothers. During his review, his defense team was cut off early, while the opposition received 10 extra minutes to speak. “It’s very, very discouraging,” Broadway’s lawyer, Sarah Ottinger, told Bolts. “Henri Broadway is innocent.” 

“It was headed towards fair and full consideration of these cases,” said Cecelia Kappel, whose organization, the Capital Appeals Project, coordinated the petitions. “It took, I think, a huge effort by Jeff Landry and the DAs association to stop this.” Ultimately, not a single person was granted clemency—or even a full hearing. 

In November, after a dismal voter turnout, Landry won the election. His inauguration as governor earlier this week marked a stark transition for the state.

For the people who fight to change Louisiana’s penal system—historically brutal, harsh, and deadly even compared to the rest of the US—the past eight years under Edwards were a time of cautious optimism. A rare Democratic leader in the Deep South, he worked to pass landmark, bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in 2017, expanded Medicaid to prisoners, vetoed harsh criminal justice laws passed by the Republican-dominated legislature, and ramped up commutations, especially over the last year. With Edwards as a “backstop,” Promise of Justice Initiative organizer Katie Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts, “it felt for a while that Louisiana had been protected from some of the more extreme actions being taken across the country.”

Landry, meanwhile, has signaled that he will be a very different sort of leader—a return to Louisiana’s harsh status quo on criminal justice, but with a heightened level of bombast. A Trump ally and product of the Tea Party, he embodies the new Republican party’s commitment to the culture war and antipathy toward compromise. He has repeatedly targeted the state’s majority Black cities, supported harsher criminal laws, and indicated his intention to roll back Edwards’ landmark reforms. Empowered with a GOP supermajority in both houses of the legislature, Landry is likely to be able to carry out his agenda without much resistance. “Louisiana will continue to stay at the top of the prison incarceration list, and we will not be any safer or any more prosperous for it,” said Sarah Omojola, the director of Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office.

But advocates are refusing despair, opting instead to view this as a signal to redouble their organizing efforts, especially to communities that aren’t already mobilized but might recoil from the hard-line policies that Landry is poised to enact. “These [low voter] turnouts were a wake up call,” said Reverend Alexis Anderson, the co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, which works to shed light on the local jail death crisis. 

Anderson told Bolts she views this moment as an opportunity—nowhere to go but up. “If we don’t, and we basically go hide in a corner somewhere, then we’re ceding something that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We are always one election away from changing things.”

A moderate operating amidst a sea of red, outgoing governor Edwards at times moved too carefully for some onlookers, a frustration recently on display after his refusal to use his power to unilaterally direct the Board of Pardons to hold full hearings for the death row petitioners. But his reforms have made a difference: Louisiana may still be the “prison capital of the world,” with the highest per capita rate of incarceration on the entire planet, but its incarcerated population has gone down some 24 percent during Edwards’s time in office. 

These improvements are largely owing to the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a landmark package of 10 criminal justice bills that Edwards and the legislature worked to pass in 2017. In the six years since its passage, the reforms have reduced the number of people convicted of nonviolent crimes in prison, funded victims’ support and reentry services that reduce recidivism, and shrunk the parole and probation population. But advocates now worry this progress could be undone under the new governor. Last year, Landry supported the creation of a task force on violent crime designed to review the effects of the reform package, as well as another 2016 law that moved 17 year olds back into the juvenile justice system. He has already announced a special legislative session on crime, where it is widely assumed he will support repealing the laws that made up the justice initiative. The special session could convene as soon as February.

Anderson said she’s especially troubled by the thought that Landry might roll back Louisiana’s scant juvenile justice reforms. (Last year, he vigorously supported a bill that would have made teenagers’ criminal records public, but only for teenagers who lived in three of the state’s majority-Black parishes, including East Baton Rouge.) “Primarily African American boys are going to be put into harm’s way in the worst kind of way,” Anderson said. “You just can’t unring that bell, the harm that’s going to be done.” 

Meanwhile, Landry has already assembled a special committee on New Orleans, an unusual move. It’s an indication that he might seek to use his new office to preempt local control and try to ramp up law enforcement presence in the city, both things he also did as Attorney General. 

In response to Landry’s proposals, Omojola told Bolts that Vera will be going back to the coalition that succeeded in winning those landmark 2017 reforms in the first place— “reconvening that dream team of people to figure out, how do we both protect the progress we’ve made and also continue to move forward?” she said. “Those reforms were just a first step. Much, much more needs to be done.” 

While Louisiana’s GOP trifecta and a Republican supermajority in the legislature will make it difficult for organizers to stop new bills from becoming law, they hope that they can get people into the streets and continue to organize on the local level as well. “The race to the bottom isn’t just at the governor’s mansion. It’s in the legislature but it’s also in some of these localized policymakers,” said Anderson, highlighting the need for advocates in Louisiana’s cities to organize with rural populations as well. 

Omojola stressed the importance of national organizations like Vera partnering with local membership groups like Louisiana Survivors for Reform, which Hunter-Lowrey coordinates. The coalition’s work organizing with people who might not already be inclined towards criminal justice transformation could be a useful strategic template. This year, for example, they’ve worked with family members of victims in two of the death row cases. “So often, this tough-on-crime legislation is passed in the name of victims and survivors. But for the past few years, [the Louisiana Survivors for Reform coalition] has showed that there are survivors who are saying, ‘Actually, that’s not for me,’” Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts. “The work that we’re doing to provide a non-judgmental space for survivors and victims’ families where advocacy is explicitly part of our healing—it has made a difference.” 

“It’s going to continue to take some time, but I think that path that we’re laying brick by brick is still the right one,” she added.

Hunter-Lowrey’s colleague at Promise of Justice Initiative, Michael Cahoon, has been organizing with faith leaders across the state for several years, most recently around the campaign to ask for mercy for those on death row. “We activated a lot of folks who hadn’t been active,” he said. “We’re definitely hoping to continue that sense of urgency and that sense of moral imperative in the next year.” 

“As we move forward into a new political reality,” Cahoon went on, “It’s also about presenting an affirmative vision for what safety looks like, beyond our over-reliance on mass incarceration. “And I think that’s going to be the work of the next year, four years, eight years, 10 years.” 

For Anderson, it all comes down to voter mobilization. “There are things that any governor can do that can be problematic,” she told Bolts. “When the voters simply do not show up, do not flood the legislature, do not call, there’s no accountability.” She pointed to the raft of elections coming up this year. In 2024, Louisiana will select a new state supreme court justice and nine intermediate appellate court judges, send six representatives to the U.S. House, and choose a public services commissioner. The state’s three biggest parishes will hold school board elections. Even party elections can make a difference: Norris Henderson, a formerly incarcerated organizer, is running for Democratic State Central Committee. 

The Louisiana Parole Project has a practice of posting to social media each time a client’s sentence is commuted. Most of the photos depict older Black men, smiling broadly, with Angola’s gates blurred in the background. This year, the images have proliferated: despite his reluctance to move on the death row clemency petitions, Edwards did commute the sentences of at least 123 prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers. Though that’s just a small percentage of those serving life sentences in the state, it’s still the highest number of commutations of any governor since the 1980s. “For a lot of those families, the only way they would have seen their loved one was in a box when they sent him home,” Anderson said. 

But if Landry is anything like his Republican predecessor, relief will be scarce in the coming years: Bobby Jindal commuted just three people’s sentences during his entire eight years in office.

Landry’s election has not only dashed hopes of commutation for prisoners on death row or anywhere else—it has also raised the very real possibility that executions will resume in the state. Louisiana last put a man to death in 2010, only after he waived his right to keep fighting his case and asked the state to end his life; there have been no contested executions in the state since 2002. But Landry has long defended capital punishment. In 2018, he criticized Edwards for not doing more to resume executions and argued that the state should consider older methods of execution, like hanging and firing squads.

Cecelia Kappel, the capital defense lawyer, is worried that the new governor might try to do what he can to jumpstart executions. But she’s also motivated by how the clemency battle exposed deep flaws in the way Louisiana doles out death sentences and by how much the public’s support for capital punishment has eroded in recent years. In August, she succeeded in getting one of her clients an entirely new trial. “We’re just going to keep moving forward,” she told Bolts. “And we shall see what the future brings, but I think that we will see more exonerations and we will certainly see more reversals in the next few years.”

The post Louisiana Organizers Brace for Landry appeared first on Bolts.

Soon after Tyre Nichols’s brutal killing by Memphis police officers in January, the chairman of the city’s civilian review board, James Kirkwood, appealed to the city council to strengthen its oversight of police. “If you slap someone on the wrist for something they’ve done wrong, then covered it up and left it alone, they’re going to do it again,” Kirkwood, a pastor and former police officer, told the council, requesting more money, more staff, and more power to conduct independent investigations. 

Instead, what little power the board did have may soon vanish, as the Tennessee legislature draws closer to gutting civilian oversight over police in Memphis and other cities in the state.

Introduced in late January by GOP lawmakers, just weeks after Nichols’s death, Senate Bill 591 and House Bill 764 would dissolve community-led oversight boards in Memphis and Nashville, ending their ongoing investigations by the close of July and precluding the possibility of other cities establishing boards with similar powers. 

“This bill essentially strips away police accountability in our state, at the height of a police killing that was so tragic and brutal,” said Jill Fitcheard, the director of Nashville’s Civilian Oversight Board. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability and dwindle it down until it’s nothing.”

The Republican legislature’s latest assault on Memphis and Nashville, the state’s two most populous cities, comes just weeks after its headline-grabbing expulsion of two young Black lawmakers, Memphis’s Justin Pearson and Nashville’s Justin Jones, for leading a gun control protest on the House floor. The state government has engaged in a series of other maneuvers in recent months to interfere with self-governance in Tennessee’s bluer and more diverse cities. 

The new bills would still allow local governments to set up what they call “police advisory review committees,” but local advocates and the Memphis and Nashville boards’ leaders—both former law enforcement officials—denounce these replacements as impotent. They would not be able to conduct independent investigations or take quick action on misconduct, and their members would no longer be appointed by community groups. 

“The new law takes away robust investigative power from the committee and sends it back to internal affairs and the respective local governments,” said Sekou Franklin, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. “So the police would basically investigate themselves.”

The timing of this legislation stings particularly in Memphis, where advocates had hoped that the national spotlight after Nichols’s killing would spur long-needed changes to the way the city polices and prosecutes its residents, including to the city’s decades-old civilian review process. And it threatens to erase hard-won gains in Nashville, where years of struggle and coalition building led to a successful 2018 voter referendum establishing a board made up primarily of community-nominated members with the ability to issue policy recommendations. 

“This is what the people want,” said Sheila Clemmons Lee, the mother of Jocques Clemmons, whose killing at the hands of a Nashville officer sparked the movement for community oversight there. “If you go back and look, see how many people came out to vote on this, plus the signatures that we had gathered for it—[this new legislation] is just saying that our voices don’t matter.”

In Memphis, renewed attention to police oversight after Tyre Nichols’s murder

Memphis’s Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) has been around since 1994, but it has often been condemned as underfunded and ineffective. In that, it’s hardly an outlier—many civilian review boards across the country, even those with more enumerated powers, struggle to achieve effective oversight of police. Barry Friedman, an attorney and scholar who published a 2022 report on civilian oversight boards, told Bolts in January that most boards are more symbolic than effective. All but six boards lack disciplinary authority. 

In 2020, then-law professor Steve Mulroy wrote an article in Memphis Lawyer urging the mayor to issue an executive order requiring the Memphis Police Department to cooperate with CLERB and ultimately comply with its directives. His recommendations weren’t followed. Two years later, Mulroy was elected district attorney of Shelby County, ousting the incumbent prosecutor on promises of reform, and he now finds himself tasked with dealing with a department whose deep-rooted problems have been exposed to the entire nation. The Department of Justice recently announced a review of Memphis’s policing practices, and they may be considering a comprehensive “pattern and practice” investigation as well.

Mulroy’s office swiftly moved to prosecute the Memphis police officers responsible for Nichols’s death, and he has continued to call for stronger civilian oversight, telling Bolts in February, “we need comprehensive CLERB reform.”

Cardell Orrin, executive director of the Tennessee branch of Stand For Children, has also criticized CLERB for its many shortcomings. He believes many people who file lawsuits against the Memphis police department aren’t even bothering to take their case to CLERB, given its low number of yearly investigations (Memphis looked into just five cases in 2022, to Nashville’s 102.) “Of course, all of that is moot if the state takes away any ability even to have citizen oversight of police departments,” he told Bolts. 

The introduction of the legislation that would abolish existing community review boards had shifted the goalposts: now, instead of pushing for stronger CLERB powers, advocates are left pleading for the preservation of any oversight at all. 

“It’s better to have the structure in place,” Orrin said, noting that CLERB could look very different under a mayor who was more willing to implement policies like the ones Mulroy had proposed. “If you get rid of it you don’t even have the option.” 

“It’s a walk in the wrong direction,” Kirkwood, who spent three decades in the Memphis Police Department before his retirement in 2017, told Bolts of the legislation. If only CLERB were adequately staffed, funded, and empowered to investigate and recommend changes to the department’s practices, “we could really do a whole lot,” he said. “I think our city deserves that.” 

“You give a lot of authority to these men and women when you put this badge on,” Kirkwood reflected. “And they can take freedom, they can take life, they can take peace from individuals. They can cause a lot of harm with the authority that you’ve given them—and that authority needs to always be in a place where it can be checked. Not just by police but also by the citizens.” 

In Nashville, a hard-won civilian oversight board under threat

Before Nashville’s civilian oversight board was established, all complaints about police conduct were routed through the Nashville police department’s Office of Professional Accountability, akin to an Internal Affairs department. Clemmons Lee told Bolts that hundreds of allegations of misconduct and brutality went unaddressed every year, with the office ruling against the vast majority of complainants. “All of these incidents was just scooted to the side,” she said. “You know, it is what it is. It’s just the police. No, it’s not. These are lives we’re talking about.”

In 2017, the death of Clemmons Lee’s son Jocques at the hands of a white police officer renewed long-standing calls for civilian oversight in Nashville. “It was a very brutal fight,” recalled Franklin, who was closely involved. “Our city council didn’t want it…two mayors opposed it. We had to build coalitions with veterans groups, immigrant groups, human rights groups, Jewish groups, Muslim groups.”

As the resulting group, Community Oversight Now, organized, the fatal shooting of another black man—Daniel Hambrick—by another white officer further galvanized the effort. “We knocked on doors, we held town halls and meetings trying to educate people about the Community Oversight Board,” Clemmons Lee told Bolts. “And the people listened.” After a successful petition drive, a measure to establish a civilian oversight board was put on the ballot, and on November 6, 2018, it passed with 59 percent of the vote. 

The result: a robust board with 11 members, seven of whom must be nominated by community organizations or grassroots petitions—one of the most important components of effective civilian oversight boards, according to a 2016 paper by Udi Ofer, who then led the ACLU of New Jersey. The COB also enjoys a number of other qualities that Ofer highlights as critical to the success of such boards, including independent investigatory powers, and the ability to conduct audits and make policy recommendations, many of which the police department has accepted. 

The board lacks some important powers, such as the ability to discipline officers, and it still has its work cut out for it. “Even with all of that taking place we’ve had a slew of police shootings and killings in Nashville, but the COB has probably prevented more police violence,” said Franklin. “A lot of that could be undone.” 

“Once this oversight board is eliminated and [if] there’s no legal action—It will probably take decades to do something significant around police reform in the city of Nashville,” he added.

The Tennessee legislature continues to target its major cities

Nashville’s board has been under threat since before it was established. The city’s police union first took issue with the number of signatures on the petition, then sued to overturn the 2018 referendum’s results, in a case that they appealed all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. They lost each time.

“We faced so many different hurdles,” Franklin said. “And then—the one avenue that they have access to that we don’t have is state lawmakers.” 

In 2019, the Tennessee legislature took up the fight, removing subpoena powers from the board. (Now, only the city council can compel witnesses to testify on behalf of the boards). In 2021, it required board members to complete a police academy course or risk losing their voting power. Pretty much since its inception, Fitcheard said, Nashville’s board has been “plagued with this cloud of legislation takeover.”

The new bills’ sponsors, Republican Representative Elaine Davis and Republican Senator Mark Pody, neither of whom represent either Memphis or Nashville, have said they want to standardize oversight procedures across the state. But Pody has also said that police feel like they are “under a microscope” under the current system. And both Pody and another supporter have made vague claims about oversight board members abusing their power but have not provided specifics. In a recent senate committee hearing, Senator Richard Briggs, a Republican from Knoxville, alleged that Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) Director David Rausch had told him that board members were interfering with crime scenes and that the bill would allow the TBI to “gather all the evidence without it being interfered with or contaminated by these outside boards.” 

“It startled me,” Fitcheard told Bolts, to hear these allegations repeated by multiple sources given that no one had ever contacted her about them. “It was just fabricated, it’s not true.” Her lawyer reached out to Rausch asking for specifics, but received no response. 

Bolts reached out to Pody, Briggs, and TBI Director Rausch to inquire about these allegations and request any available evidence that the events described took place. Pody and Briggs’ offices did not respond. Rausch’s office confirmed that a conversation between Briggs and Rausch took place, but would neither confirm the content of the conversation nor offer a response to any of Bolts’ other questions. 

This legislation is progressing through a legislature that has been especially zealous in intervening in the local governance of its major cities, actions that one Nashville lawmaker called an “attack on democracy” in an interview with Bolts last month. This move comes on top of a recently-passed bill cutting the size of Nashville’s metro council by half, and a tabled bill that would have ended runoffs in local elections, which could have hampered Democratic candidates in the majority-liberal Nashville and Memphis. 

“How far can a state body go before it clearly starts to infringe upon the rights of the citizenry in localities?” Orrin asked. “And, you know, that’s a question at some point for the courts to decide.” (Nashville is currently suing over the attempt to halve its council). 

This state-level preemption of local governments isn’t unique to Tennessee. The Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization that aims to strengthen local democracy, has tallied over 600 preemptive bills across all 50 states that it deems “abusive”—instances of states using their power to overrule local governments and shut down legislation around such issues as abortion, housing, voting rights, and now, police oversight. LSSC attributes much of this push to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing group of lobbyists and legislators known for replicating identical legislation in states across the country. (ALEC, for instance, is behind many of the country’s critical infrastructure laws, which Bolts reported on earlier this month.) 

The Tennessee legislature’s actions also appear to be largely retaliatory. The expulsion of Pearson and Jones, the lawmaker duo dubbed “The Justins,” came after the two young lawmakers led a gun control protest in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. Nashville politicians have complained that the bill targeting the council is a response to local lawmakers’ refusal to host the 2024 Republican convention. To Orrin, the timing of the civilian oversight legislation, introduced so soon after Tyre Nichols’s death, felt like a deliberate attempt to shut down the police accountability that Memphis residents were demanding. “Clearly it was because of the questions that were raised,” he said. 

The bill that would abolish civilian oversight of police is now on the verge of becoming law. It has already passed the Senate 26-5 and is currently moving through House committees. If the bill passes the House, where Republicans enjoy a large majority, it would head to the desk of Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, who has signed the bills weakening the state’s oversight boards in past sessions.

“They’ll continue to get away with murder”

Activists don’t have to look far for evidence of what may soon change with the bill’s passage. The legislation would authorize cities to retain some police committees—whether they choose to convert their existing stronger boards within 90 days to fit the bill’s far weaker requirements, or create a new body later on. And its sponsors say that they are modeling these new bodies off of Knoxville’s existing police review committee.

Kirkwood and Fitcheard both said that Knoxville’s model, which was established in 1998, is outdated and insufficient to the task. “Policing has changed greatly since then,” said Fitcheard. Moreover, she said, “They haven’t been funded well.” She added, “Up until the last few years, it just had one person reviewing complaints. So how effective is that?” (Nashville’s board receives over $2 million annually and has several full-time staff). 

According to the bill’s most recent version, the new boards would need to have members who are appointed by the mayor rather than community residents. They would not be allowed to investigate any incidents that occurred before Jan. 1, 2023, meaning that some currently open cases would never receive any conclusion or closure. And even for incidents after that date, obstacles to accountability would accumulate. 

The committees would be prohibited from taking up cases before all other avenues—Internal Affairs investigations, civil suits, and criminal cases—were completed. Given the yearslong delay this would entail, Kirkwood told Bolts, “a complainant probably would walk away.”

And when a committee does complete an investigation, it would boomerang back to the local police department’s Internal Affairs. In Nashville, the office is run by a woman who, in her previous job as an assistant DA in Nashville, failed to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence in a murder case against a teenager—in this case, that a central witness for the prosecution was arrested with the murder weapon in his possession. 

Clemmons Lee contemplated a future Nashville without its civilian oversight board. “It’s gonna get worse,” she said. “They’ll continue to get away with murder after murder after murder after murder.”

The post “Our Voices Don’t Matter”: Tennessee Moves to Gut Police Oversight appeared first on Bolts.

The conservative politicians in charge of Tennessee’s state government have relentlessly aimed in the last year to diminish the political power of the state’s most populous and liberal-leaning city by curtailing Nashville’s representation in Congress, shrinking the size of its Metro Council, investigating the operations of its district attorney, and now attempting to interfere in its electoral processes.   

Most recently, Republican state Representative Jason Zachary and Senator Brent Taylor proposed a bill that would, if passed, ban runoffs in all municipal elections within the state. 

For solidly-liberal Nashville, the bill’s passage could have meant an upheaval for the upcoming mayoral election this August. The city’s elections are nominally nonpartisan, but Democrats have consistently won the mayor’s office for decades. Runoffs are common in the city’s mayoral elections, where the vote is often split between several Democrats and a few Republicans. Traditionally, after a consolidated voting bloc emerges following eliminations in a first round, a Democrat carries the mayoral election handily. The elimination of runoffs in Nashville’s mayoral elections would have opened the door for a Republican to win the position based on a plurality, even if the majority of votes go to Democrats.

Senate Bill 1527 was initially filed with placeholder language, but just before a hearing in the Senate’s State and Local Government Committee on March 14, Taylor brought two amendments explicitly banning local runoff elections. The entire bill was tabled before the amendments were approved and it has been deferred to the committee’s first 2024 convening, where it’s likely to resurface.  

But even though this year’s election remains unaffected by this proposed change, candidates for mayor, Democratic legislators, and local activists within Nashville have been loud in their opposition to the measure, and remain wary of similar moves being made in the 2024 session and beyond.

They point to the proposal as part of an alarming trend of conservative legislative attacks that threaten Nashville’s ability to be represented earnestly, and demonstrate a new approach for red states to skirt the voting rights of resistant communities in blue localities. They warn that this pattern, which has begun to reverberate throughout the region, signals a new era for voter suppression in the Deep South.

“This is not an isolated incident. This is an abuse of power,” said Senator Charlane Oliver, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Nashville. “This is about control.”

Before it was delayed, SB 1527 had amassed significant support among Tennessee Republicans, including vocal backing from state party chair Scott Golden, who claimed that the bill’s passage would “get local races in line with the rest of the state.” Taylor, one of the bill’s sponsors, had pointed to the state’s troubled history as a reason for advancing the legislation. “Runoffs are a relic of the Jim Crow South. They were designed to prevent minorities from winning elections,” Taylor told the Nashville Banner.

Taylor is right in pointing out this history—runoffs were initially introduced in Southern states as a way to prevent Black voters from winning elections based upon pluralities, with the runoff stage therefore allowing white majorities to consolidate behind a single, often anti-civil rights, candidate. However, scholars have pointed to Black voters’ integration into the political system to argue that the era’s context matters, and that in most contemporary elections—and in Tennessee’s in particular—this runoff disadvantage no longer seems to occur. Runoffs today are common in local elections throughout the state, especially in its three largest cities of Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. All three cities currently have Democratic mayors.

Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat who represents Nashville in the legislature—and who recently announced his candidacy for mayor—sees this bill as undermining the city’s elections, especially considering that Nashville is Tennessee’s most racially diverse city. “The problem with this bill, like so many election bills in recent years, is that there’s an attempt to change the outcomes of local elections, as opposed to changing the process,” he told Bolts. “This bill seems aimed at achieving partisan ends more so than democracy.”

“Any bill that is designed to eliminate an entire election procedure, by design, is voter suppression,” said Oliver. She recently won her seat in the state senate after a notable career as a voting rights and racial justice activist, co-leading The Equity Alliance. In the legislature, her experience as an organizer has shaped her perspective. “These efforts to stifle opposition and silence voices are an attack on democracy.”

SB 1527 comes on the heels of a number of legislative measures that would increase the state government’s authority over Nashville’s local proceedings and hamstring the city’s ability to elect officials that align with the city’s political makeup. 

In the 2020 presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden got nearly twice as many votes as Republican Donald Trump in Davidson County, which contains Nashville. Shortly after, in the 2020 redistricting cycle, Tennessee Republicans eliminated Nashville’s congressional seat, splintering the city into three new congressional districts, all favoring the more conservative rural communities outside of the city. The 5th District, which contains the largest chunk of the city, is currently represented by U.S. Representative Andy Ogles, who is the first Republican to represent Nashville in Congress since 1875. 

In early March, Governor Bill Lee signed into law a reduction of Nashville’s city council size, cutting the council in half from 40 members, to 20. The measure, which sped through the legislature, does not name Nashville explicitly, but was still designed to target the city, which is the only one that currently has more than 20 members. It also overrides a 2015 referendum in which Nashville residents voted overwhelmingly to maintain the size of the Metro Council. The city government immediately sued to have it blocked, but if it is allowed to stand, it will impact the upcoming city council elections, also taking place this August. 

Additional bills currently moving through the legislature would eliminate funding for Nashville’s convention center and offer authority to state officials to oversee the Nashville airport. 

At the same time, state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Glenn Funk, the Democratic District Attorney of Davidson County over whether his team violated state wiretapping laws with cameras that were placed around the office. This investigation comes months after Funk said that he would not prosecute abortion after Tennessee’s abortion ban took effect in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

“This is a coordinated attack,” said Oliver. “We have to sound the alarm. And this isn’t just an attack on Nashville—if you can do it to Nashville, who’s next? Memphis?” 

The actions of Tennessee politicians follow a pattern of other states with conservative legislatures using their authority to exert control over the policies of growing liberal cities and counties. This happens by way of preemption, a doctrine that allows state governments to restrict or overrule the powers of local governments. Preemption has at times been used to maintain equality and uniformity of application of environmental or labor laws, for instance. But states have more recently wielded preemption as a political tool to strip municipalities of their autonomy and representation—blocking local ordinances dealing with everything from housing and minimum wage to immigration and, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion access and reproductive rights.

“Unfortunately, what Nashville is facing is not unique,” said Marissa Roy, the legal team lead at the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization working to strengthen local democracy and combat abuse of preemption. “Increasingly, state preemption has aimed at ideological outcomes without considering the long-term consequences for local governance.” Roy points to a bill being considered in Florida that would allow companies to sue local governments over measures they disagree with, and another in Texas that would wrest away local governments’ regulatory powers over agriculture, labor, and other areas. 

“Preemption is both bad governance and anti-democratic. Laws that reduce the size of the Nashville City Council, for example, impede more community-based representation,” she added. “Ultimately, these laws undermine the will of voters, who should be the ones to choose their representatives and vote for the policy platforms they support, without the risk of state reversal through preemption.”

In southern states in particular, preemptive legislation has taken aim at voting and criminal legal systems. In Mississippi, the legislature is considering a bill to create a separate court system for the city of Jackson, empowering white state officials to oversee criminal proceedings in a city that boasts one of the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. In Missouri, conservative legislators are attempting to strip St. Louis’s control of their metro police force, instead shifting authority to the state’s governor. 

“The playbook has always been there,” said Oliver. “The Southern strategy never left.”

In Nashville, these legislative attacks on enfranchisement and political autonomy go hand in hand with efforts to change local identity, and have tangible impacts within the community. In early March, following the governor’s signature on a bill banning public drag performances and gender-affirming healthcare for minors, white supremacists unfurled a banner in Nashville’s city center displaying a swastika and transphobic slurs, explicitly thanking Lee for “[securing] a future for white children.” 

Sharon Hurt, an at-large council member for the city of Nashville, and current candidate for mayor, traces the city’s current tension in its relationship with the state, back to the Nashville Metro Council’s decision last year to reject state GOP officials’ bid to have Nashville host the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

“They’re using their power because they’re upset that we did not vote to bring the Republican National Convention here,” said Hurt. “They felt like Democrats were denying Republicans from coming [to Nashville]. They’re now attacking us to show the power that they have.”

As Nashville continues to grow both in population and in national profile, the tension surrounding efforts to court the 2024 Republican National Convention highlights both the state’s interest in shaping Nashville’s image as a major conservative urban center, and local leaders’ and activists’ united resistance against this portrayal. Nashville has a history of being a locus of progressive activism in the South—going back to John Lewis and Diane Nash’s infamous 1960 lunch counter sit-ins. 

“Cities develop their own political cultures,” Yarbro said, “and Nashville is conditioned to have these wide-open debates that ultimately turn into coalition-building exercises… That’s really conducive to good politics and the kind of coalition-building that a mayor needs, not just to win a runoff election, but to lead a city. [However], there’s a dangerous national trend to advance minoritarian politics, where a cohesive minority can achieve disproportionate political power and control.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming mayoral election, recently spared from the threat of eliminated runoffs, Hurt sees the time between now and 2024’s legislative session—the period in which SB 1527 could resurface—as an opportunity to convince the legislature to change course. 

“It gives us time to change their perspective,” said Hurt, emphasizing that the change will only occur if the Nashville community puts up a fierce fight between now and then. “One thing that I love about Nashville is that in the most catastrophic and challenging times, is when the best of our city comes out. This bill may be a divisive move, but it is not our destiny. There is hope. I don’t care how bleak it looks.”  

Nashville’s representatives fear that more hits may be coming but say they’ll keep speaking loudly against these moves by the state government, urging organizing efforts, and looking for allies in the court system. 

“When you’re outnumbered [in the legislature], there’s really not much you can do other than speak out in hopes that the courts will step in,” said Oliver, who is one of only six Democrats in the 33-member Senate. Oliver and other Senate Democrats are vocal on social media about these bills—often posting direct clips and videos from committee hearings to emphasize the state of play. 

“We have to begin to really start to talk to one another and strategize together to fight these bills off from a selfless place,” she said, “because if it’s not me tomorrow, it’s you today.”

The post How the Tennessee GOP is Trying to Mute Music City appeared first on Bolts.

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

Ayala on Thursday denounced the new move as antidemocratic. Warren “was elected and entrusted by the people—not once but twice—and it is the job of the elected state attorney to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the community they serve,” she said. “The suggestion that there was malfeasance or a dereliction of duty by the Hillsborough State Attorney Office is a dictatorial response and attack on the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, the organization behind nationwide prosecutors’ joint statements on transgender rights and abortion rights that DeSantis cited in his order, pointed out that many prosecutors, including some conservatives, choose to not charge certain misdemeanors, a practice DeSantis assailed today. “There’s a potential for a legal challenge over the erosion of voter choice,” she told Bolts.

Ayala echoed that point in her statement. “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?”

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