Rep. Andy Ogles
Andy Ogles does have an office in Tennessee, but it’s locked. No signs indicate that the U.S. representative for 708,000 Tennesseeans resides in suite No. 5 on the second floor of 22 Public Square in downtown Columbia, where — in our fourth attempt at contacting the Ogles office — the Scene handed a business card to Ogles aide James Amundsen through the partially cracked door.
Ogles’ campaign site lists another address in downtown Columbia: 29 Public Square, home to a law firm a few doors down.
“This is just where his mail comes,” says Madison Ausbrooks, who works the desk at Whatley & Ricci. “I think his office is somewhere on the square, but I honestly don’t know where you can find him. If I knew, I would tell you.”
Ogles has lots of reasons to hide. Shortly after gerrymandering by Tennessee’s Republican supermajority carved Nashville into three odd-looking new districts, Ogles won the Republican primary with a 36.9 percent plurality — about where polls put the size of the Trump base in Tennessee. He beat out Beth Harwell, a former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Kurt Winstead, a retired brigadier general in the National Guard, both of whom Ogles attacked as insufficiently conservative. “Liberals, we’re coming for you,” he told the crowd on the night of his primary victory, before cruising to a 13-point victory over state Sen. Heidi Campbell in the general election.
His first week in Washington, Ogles earned his far-right bona fides by opposing Kevin McCarthy through 11 ballots in Republicans’ embarrassing and very public battle to choose a speaker for their slim majority in the U.S. House. He found his people in Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and, most of all, Jim Jordan, whom Ogles appears to idolize. He quickly joined them in the House Freedom Caucus, the ideological successor to the Tea Party Movement of the 2010s.
Pretty soon after Ogles pissed off his party in January, a string of stories from NewsChannel 5 reporter Phil Williams blew holes in his reputation at home. In the heat of a national controversy over the fabricated résumé of first-term GOP U.S. Rep. George Santos of New York, Williams found a pattern of exaggerated and inconsistent biographical details in the stories Ogles told voters during his campaign. Questions followed about the confusing paper trail related to $25,000 that Ogles collected in a GoFundMe. Ogles has engaged with allegations only to blast Williams’ reporting as specious political attacks.
Since being elected, Ogles has rarely appeared in public and favored friendly environments. He has become an occasional guest on Fox News, where Laura Ingraham lets him rail against Democrats. His riskiest move was an interview with C-SPAN days after he made news for holding up McCarthy’s nomination, where host John McCardle focused on the speaker vote rather than Ogles’ positions. He headlined Republicans’ First Tuesday social club in March, focusing his speech on so-called woke banking and his desire to find mismanagement in government departments and fire large quantities of employees.
“Congress has delegated much of its authority to unelected bureaucrats,” he told the room at Ludlow & Prime in Brentwood. “The top brass lawyers up and stalls, so you have to work your way down — the totem pole, if you will — to find employees who can’t necessarily afford attorneys. These folks are gonna get hauled before Congress. I’ll defer to [House Oversight Committee] Chairman [James] Comer and Jim Jordan on what that process looks like. They want to get to the bottom of this too.”
Weeks later, Ogles’ office hosted a public conference call, which they advertised as a town hall, putting the U.S. rep on the mic for a half-hour before taking screened questions.
A panel of government officials stood up behind Mayor John Cooper and first lady Jill Biden on March 30 at Public Square Park when the city held a vigil for victims of the mass shooting at the Covenant School, which sits just inside Ogles’ district. He was not there. In the days following the shooting, Ogles made national news for a 2021 Christmas card, in which the then-Maury County mayor and his family pose in front of a Christmas tree brandishing assault weapons.
“Check the disclosures in July,” says one source, who spent a career in the Beltway. “I’ll bet he fundraised big off of that.”
Guns, abortion, gender identity, critical race theory — Ogles’ playbook energizes the activist right, but it’s falling out of fashion among national GOP leadership. After Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, a result that Ogles dismissed as fraudulent, Republicans across the country significantly underperformed in the 2022 midterms. To keep the GOP’s weak grasp on the House through 2024, Kevin McCarthy cares about five seats decided by swing voters in upstate New York, inland California and suburban Arizona. In recent weeks, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel has told major news outlets that the party’s internal autopsy report blames Trump and the party’s hard line against abortion for GOP losses in 2022. Republicans have begun a national messaging effort to walk back the rhetoric of the far right, seemingly beginning to realize that viciously attacking transgender people, slashing popular government programs and fear-baiting about fentanyl and China do not woo swing voters; Trump-backed candidates lost competitive races in key states, and voters proved they care about abortion protections rolled back by the conservative Supreme Court last year. Last month, Gov. Bill Lee shocked both sides of the aisle by cautiously advancing a watered-down form of gun control, despite pushback and reticence from House lawmakers. Last week, Lee signed a bill granting narrow abortion exceptions.
With a tailored district and a base of conservative activists, Ogles lives in his own kind of echo chamber, largely insulated from the fragile dynamics of the national GOP that is slowly turning against him. Fresh off of a national debacle in the Tennessee House, state Republicans are stuck with a right wing whose brazen and embarrassing abuses of power have enabled a destructive new brand of conservatism. Meanwhile, the party’s concerned center — still a majority at the ballot box by many measures — whispers about a challenger to Ogles who could peel enough Democratic votes to win in Tennessee’s open primaries. As pressure mounts in the coming years, Ogles’ natural response would be to go harder against RINOs and establishment conservatives, clinging to his seat while he forces his party into shambles.
The state’s Republican supermajority redrew Tennessee’s congressional districts last year, slicing Nashville’s seat into thirds and setting up GOP advantages for incumbent Reps. Mark Green (Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District) and John Rose (Tennessee’s 6th). Tennessee’s 5th District, historically the whole of blue Davidson County, had been represented for 20 years by Democrat Jim Cooper. It got the third slice, an awkward vestigial lump that covers Belle Meade and Oak Hill, meanders into Mt. Juliet, then turns back south, picking up a major chunk of its population near Franklin and Columbia in Williamson and Maury counties.
“I think people just voted for him because they saw the ‘R’ next to the name,” says Angie Jones, who lives a few blocks from downtown Columbia. “They don’t know who he is or what he represents.”
Ogles was elected to his first government office in 2018 as Maury County mayor, as opposed to Columbia’s city mayor, a seat held by popular politician Chaz Molder. Molder has supported mask policies and defended the city’s LGBTQ community, and he handily won a second term in November. Ogles and Molder sparred constantly in 2020 and 2021, most notably when Ogles fought to host a “Mule Fest” — his own version of Columbia’s historic Mule Day parade and celebration, which had been shelved because of the pandemic.
“He got crossways with the mayor, with the Maury County Bridle & Saddle Club, with the whole city over that,” remembers Jones, who serves on the Columbia Arts Council. “He wanted to make a point.”
Ogles’ contrarian populism coincides with a larger shift in conservative politics in Middle Tennessee that’s matured over the past decade. Ogles, who lives outside of Columbia in Culleoka, explicitly identifies as a “Williamson and Maury county native” in campaign literature, correctly identifying that the two have strong ideological overlaps and represent strong bases of power for politics. The region’s new guard identifies with the far-right ideologies of Moms for Liberty, Tennessee Stands and Williamson Families, groups with active followings in Williamson and Maury counties that have attacked mask-wearing, Black history and discussions of gender and sexuality, much of it under the label of “parental rights.” They are a powerful minority that has targeted fellow Republicans and civic leaders in Maury and Williamson counties.
In August, Gary Humble, a relative newcomer to Franklin who describes his ideological wing of conservatism as a “force of nature,” came within 800 votes of taking down state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson in the Republican primary. Johnson has been one of the most powerful Republicans in the state for a decade. Humble’s résumé bounces around between speculative business ventures and far-right propaganda outlets, matching Ogles’ pretty closely.
In October, Columbia’s library director resigned after parents attacked the library’s LGBTQ material as “filth” and compared the library’s Pride Month display to “Nazi-world domination.” After opposing masking policies, banning books related to race, sexuality and gender identity has been a central obsession for Williamson County Republicans, particularly Moms for Liberty. In April, more than 600 Williamson County Republicans packed into the Factory at Franklin for a bloodless coup. The party swept out incumbents and installed a cast of further-right leadership led by new chair Tracy Miller, who has waded through political scandals for a decade. Officials on the county party’s Contest and Credentials Committee resigned in protest “out of concern for the integrity of this election process,” alleging “fraud, self-dealing and manipulation” from fellow members Steve Allbrooks and Cyndi Miller, wife of Tracy Miller. Ousted county party chair Cheryl Brown called it a hijacking.
The activist right has been Ogles’ home since before it was winning elections. Before the national Tea Party backlash in 2010 — and then Trump — muscled many of the flank’s positions into the GOP mainstream, far-right tax zealots struggled to win governing power in Tennessee. Current U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn — then a state senator — laid valuable groundwork for Ogles in 2001, parlaying popular resentment against income tax legislation into an economic tenet that now defines conservative politics in Tennessee. Ogles lost Republican primaries for Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District in 2002 and the state’s 23rd Senate District in 2006. He aimed at incumbent Bob Corker from the right in the 2017 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate before conceding his bid to Blackburn.
Ogles’ embattled résumé picks up around 2010, when he was in his early 40s. He hopped between a few nonprofits before serving as the first director of Tennessee’s Americans for Prosperity chapter, a political advocacy organization funded by the Koch family that argues for corporate power and lobbies against government regulation. He briefly worked at the Laffer Center, a think tank advocating for now-discredited economic ideas about trickle-down prosperity popularized by the Reagan administration. Ogles gestures to this background when he describes himself as an economist, which he does a lot. On C-SPAN in January, he managed to say, “I’m an economist,” twice in one minute. Public appearances reliably return to his takes on economics. His takes on economics reliably return to his ideological bedrock: that the government should not exist, and he must shrink it to nothing.
Rep. Andy Ogles (left) and Ted Cruz
Six months before Williamson County Republicans killed off their old guard, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz hosted a campaign event for Andy Ogles in the same airy event space in Franklin. Ogles attacked the government he hoped to join.
“This woke administration has weaponized the FBI and IRS,” Ogles told the crowd. “To the IRS agents — 87,000 — you better freshen up your résumé, because you’re fired.”
Like his ideological peers in Congress — Gaetz, Greene and, most of all, Jordan — Ogles is concerned with destroying things. The House Freedom Caucus has pushed libertarian anarchy, a natural successor to conservatives’ attacks on government programs in the 1980s and 1990s, by attacking major government pillars like the the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Education. Earlier this month, fellow U.S. Rep. Mark Green (of Tennessee’s 7th) privately assured donors he would pursue impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the fact that people continue to immigrate to the U.S. Broadly, Ogles has joined a debt-ceiling battle that threatens to plunge the country into a recession because it fits nicely into Republican crusades against government spending.
On his April 12 constituent conference call, Ogles boasted that he had “the most productive freshman office in the House.” Since arriving in the House, Ogles has sponsored or co-sponsored 107 bills. Two — a resolution ending COVID’s designation as a national emergency and a bipartisan repeal of a D.C. crime bill, which had 47 co-sponsors — have been signed. Two more have been vetoed. The other 103 are dead or stuck in committee. He has multiple pieces of legislation meant to legally dissolve the existence of transgender identity and more that sanctify gun ownership and seek to arm teachers. Several bills seek to abolish aspects of the government, like the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On April 19, Ogles, along with fellow Freedom Caucus member Randy Weber (of Texas’ 13th), introduced an amendment to fiddle with the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act. Stuck in committee, it would restrict the president’s ability to send aid to Ukraine, hamstringing the country’s ability to repel the full-scale land invasion launched by Russia in February of last year. Such a move to weaken America’s military capability would be indefensible for a Republican less than a decade ago.
When Jim Cooper announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2022, he said the new-look 5th Congressional District was “unwinnable” for a Democrat. Polling data and political analysts agree that, barring a major realignment in Tennessee politics, Nashville’s 20,000-vote Democratic advantage gets drowned out by healthy Republican margins in Wilson, Williamson and Maury counties. That’s the way it was drawn.
Tennessee Republicans have two paths forward for Tennessee’s 5th. The first and simplest is to do nothing and stick with Ogles. He will continue to parrot talking points he sees in right-wing media and soak up attention from fellow hardliners in the losing wing of his party, where his positions enjoy narrow but enthusiastic appeal.
“When Andy Ogles won the primary, he disappeared,” says Chip Forrester, former chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party and an adviser to state Sen. Heidi Campbell when she faced Ogles in the fall. “He put no ads on TV, and he didn’t campaign at all. Probably from the perspective that he had an R+11 district: ‘Now that you’re the nominee, keep your head down, because by talking, and people seeing you, they might realize how much of an idiot you are.’ I’m glad to go on the record with that.”
The second option would be to address Ogles, confront the party’s extreme right and build a political identity that can better ensure its own long-term survival and tackle predictable governing crises. Ogles is not a pugilist like Jim Jordan or Lauren Boebert, not a media mascot like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene (none of whom, for what it’s worth, seems concerned with governing or delivering for their home district). Most have safe seats that exist outside the political calculus of the national GOP. Instead, they’ve become addicted to the attention from national media and used culturally divisive issues like guns, abortion, trans people and immigration to become media stars. Ogles clearly aspires to do the same.
After two years of stunt legislation in D.C., he will likely be weaker against a primary challenge, and a presidential cycle will bring out more voters. It doesn’t seem like the Tennessee Democratic Party has a serious plan to challenge him (nor Green or Rose, Nashville’s other reps, or for that matter Reps. Chuck Fleischmann, Diana Harshbarger, David Kustoff, Tim Burchett or Scott DesJarlais). Republican elders don’t seem to care about the destruction of their party either. Senior statesmen like Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, who were Tennessee’s ranking Republicans just seven or eight years ago, have turned away from weighing in on the fractures within their party.
Despite once winning huge majorities of Tennesseans as pensive legislators and measured diplomats, neither Corker nor Alexander seems to have shown interest in building bridges within their own party, perhaps because they once spoke more softly to many of the same reactionary impulses now exploited by Ogles and the MAGA base.
Last week, UT scholar Nathan Kelly spoke to the Scene about democracy, fascism and authoritarianism in Tennessee. He said, in part: “Democracies die a slow death by 1,000 cuts. And so, while I think we do have to be careful with our rhetoric and we don’t want to be overly alarmist, at the same time, any move away from democracy is a move toward authoritarianism. And if one doesn’t raise the alarm on initial steps away from democracy, you pretty soon find yourself 20 or 30 steps closer to authoritarianism.”
Early polls for 2024 favor Biden over Trump, the parties’ two likely nominees, but predict another close race. Ogles has explicitly indicated that, if given the chance, he will contest another presidential election.
“We can never allow what happened to Trump to happen to anyone else ever again,” he says on the “Issues” page of his website. On the campaign trail, he called for the president to pardon those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
If we can trust his résumé, Ogles has a habit of showing up when it’s time to destroy things.
