Is there anything funnier than watching national Republicans turn on our state Republicans for being corrupt good ol' boys? I’ve been watching this unfold, thinking, "Hmm, this is important and seems like something we should talk about," and not being able to come up with a response more coherent than laughing.
National Republicans are mad that Tennessee Republicans decided that Morgan Ortagus, Robby Starbuck and Baxter Lee aren’t qualified to run for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, one of the districts that now carves up Nashville. They're threatening to withhold the Republican National Convention from Nashville.
Lindsey Graham — yes, South Carolina's own — took to Twitter to complain: “If you are looking for Exhibit A of political corruption and Good ole Boy politics, you need to look no further than #TN-5. I can’t imagine having the 2024 Republican National Convention in a state that would allow this type of corrupt politics.”
If you haven’t been listening to the Murdaugh Murders podcast, I highly recommend it. It’s about a series of deaths associated with the Murdaughs, a prominent South Carolina family with members who have been lawyers in the state for more than a century. It's also about all the ways the South Carolina legal system has protected them from the consequences of their actions until, maybe, now, when there are millions of dollars missing, bodies piling up, and state legislators and judges all tied up in it. The scope of the corruption outlined in the podcast is just breathtaking.
If Graham were serious in his concern about corruption and good ol' boy politics, he could focus his outrage on his own home state. And I’m not eager to defend Tennessee Republicans, but I’m not sure how one argues with a straight face that not putting people who aren’t qualified on the ballot is somehow more corrupt than putting unqualified people on the ballot just because someone more powerful than you wants them there.
Graham and that great political mind, Donald Trump Jr., have both insinuated that the decision was based in antisemitism. And, again, I’m not thrilled about defending Tennessee Republicans, but bless ’em, in the history of Tennessee, have politicians ever hidden their racism or antisemitism if that’s what was at play? This is a group of people who all stood around like this was just business as usual while Frank Nicely recently encouraged homeless people to look to Hitler for inspiration. This is also a state where people trying to oust Steve Cohen from office send out mailers to remind his voters that he’s a Jew. We’ve got antisemites all across the political spectrum, and they don’t seem to have any shame about it. If Tennessee Republicans were keeping Morgan Ortagus off the ballot because she’s Jewish, I think they’d just say so.
Say whatever else you want about Tennessee, but we put a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in our state Capitol and then pitched a multidecade teenage-angst-ish “But we love him and you just don’t understand him” tantrum when people started questioning why we’d put a — if not the — Ku Klux Klan leader in a place of honor. (And let me be clear: They started this defensive posturing the second that bust went up.)
Shit, how many prominent Tennesseans belonged to the Belle Meade Country Club back in the day when the only active members were white dudes? And none of them seemed to feel even the least bit of shame about that.
I could go on, but the point is that no one here has any reason to hide their bigoted opinions. They pay no political price for holding them. It is gross and it’s wrong, but it’s blatant and out in the open.
The other thing that’s interesting to me is that Tennessee is, by any objective metric, a grand Republican success. The GOP has turned a state with a 200-year tradition of Democratic power into a solidly Republican state. They’ve even managed to carve up the few liberal strongholds and dilute their power. We have fewer than five abortion clinics in the whole state. Conservative groups are dictating what books Tennessee children can read. Public schooling as we know it is about to be over. And so on, and so on.
Tennessee Republicans have done the work. They have enacted their agenda. Their actions speak for themselves.
But because the whole Republican party is so twisted into moral pretzels, actually doing the things Republicans say they want to do doesn’t count. The Tennessee GOP doesn’t go along with one incredibly stupid notion — that national Republicans should just be able to place whomever they want, wherever they’re from, in office here — and now national Republicans are accusing our Republicans of wrongdoing.
I truly hope that Tennessee Republicans take this lesson to heart — the death cult in charge of the GOP right now has no moral center. You did everything they asked you to do, except this one stupid thing, and they’re mad because having power was always more important to them than the values they claimed to be promoting.
