Tornado damage in North Nashville
Looking north from the balcony of the state Capitol, the flashing lights and cherry pickers of power crews dot the line of obvious destruction. To the east, more signs of the tornado that ran through Nashville early Tuesday morning are visible.
But at the legislature this week, it’s been more or less business as usual. Despite a delay to the work due Tuesday morning, House and Senate leaders decided to proceed with committee hearings for some of Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s most controversial proposals, including one that would further restrict abortion access in the state and another that would allow Tennesseans to carry guns without a permit.
Republican Lt. Gov. Randy McNally of Oak Ridge said Thursday that it was important to keep up committee business hours after the tornado passed through town because “it kind of shows that it’s Nashville Strong or Putnam County Strong, that we’re not going to let this event dictate our lives.” Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton of Crossville echoed the sentiment, emphasizing the importance of “not letting the tornado dictate how our lives are.”
The two leaders also stressed that lawmakers from affected areas were “excused” from legislative business.
Nashville Democratic Rep. Vincent Dixie is among the local lawmakers who has spent the week away from the Capitol working in areas affected by the storm. He says the decision to keep the legislature open was “insensitive” and “shows a lack of caring.”
“We should not have had session this week at all,” Dixie says. “We have a colleague, Rep. Love, whose district is in peril. It's been devastated. Let's all put on our boots and our jeans and grab some work gloves, and let's meet at our colleague’s church and go help his neighborhood. … This is a missed opportunity, and it saddens me that we would put political posturing over human decency.”
Harold Love’s district was among the hardest hit in the city, and the Nashville Democrat is helping coordinate recovery efforts from Lee Chapel A.M.E., where he is senior pastor. Sexton has been to visit the church and invited other lawmakers to attend church and volunteer there over the weekend.
Love did not make it to his legislative office until Thursday afternoon, and then he stopped by for just a few minutes. The decision to keep the legislature open concerned him too, but mostly because he worried about the safety of staff and representatives trying to make it to the office on Tuesday. Even so, he lamented missing state business.
“I know the business has to go on, but there are oftentimes concessions made to close committees when we have an emergency,” Love says before heading back to his church. “These are some critical votes we take in the legislature from time to time. Absent of some personal emergency, we all try to be here.”
Like others in the Nashville delegation, Democratic Rep. Bo Mitchell is now working through his second major tornado, after the 1998 storm that struck downtown and East Nashville. He witnessed that storm from Legislative Plaza, where he was a state Senate staffer at the time.
On Tuesday, he headed to East Nashville to help crews clearing streets of fallen trees before heading to Love’s church in North Nashville, where he returned Wednesday morning to continue recovery work.
“With the need and suffering within a stone's throw to the east and to the north of the Capitol, I wasn't coming in yesterday, and I hated to have to come in today,” Mitchell said Wednesday. “I had to leave helping people to come down here for this.”
