There's one sure way you can tell when you're in a cutting-edge situation, one in which the usual political remedies -- legislative compromise, executive action -- don't apply. It's when a pivotal situation is in the courts, and everybody recognizes with relief that it's there because it has to be resolved and the courts and only the courts can resolve it.
So it was with racial desegregation in the U.S.A. in a previous generation, and so it is with the pressing issues of urban annexation and suburban incorporation in Tennessee, circa 1997. The chief executives of both the state and Shelby County are keeping their distance, for political reasons (as, for that matter, is the Tennessee's entire legislative delegation in Washington), while Willie Herenton -- mayor of Memphis, clearly the state's most affected city -- has had to confront the issue virtually single-handed.
To be sure, the state's legislature, having created the current problem with a piece of stealth legislation, is proceeding -- slowly, much too slowly -- to address it. A joint committee of Tennessee's two houses began hearings this week on the problem, but these deliberations can't begin to bear fruit until the General Assembly convenes in January of next year, and so it's almost as if a joint committee of crew and passengers had been deputized aboard the Titanic, one chilly April night in 1912, to investigate the physics of ice floes.
The fact is that six Shelby County suburban communities are now slated to vote, come December 9th, on whether they will henceforth be independent cities -- just like Memphis, Germantown, Collierville, Millington, Bartlett, Arlington, and Lakeland -- the Seven Sisters of Shelby County, as Collierville county commissioner Mark Norris -- who represents them all -- has been wont to call them. "Maybe they'll stop at 17," jested an alliteration-conscious Norris recently about the proliferation of would-be New Towns in Shelby County.
But then again, maybe they'll stop at seven. That outcome suddenly became possible last week when Special Chancellor F. Lloyd Tatum in Fayette County declared the unconstitutionality of Chapter 98, the law which started it all last April, ostensibly only to enable the well-heeled hamlet of Hickory Wythe to escape being annexed by the nearby town of Oakland.
With what seems elementary logic, Judge Tatum cited a portion of the state constitution which expressly prohibits a "caption" (or brief published summary) from mischaracterizing the legislation it purportedly describes. No one disputes that this was the case with Chapter 98, which was rushed through a distracted General Assembly with minimal -- and misleading -- explanation from either Lt. Gov. John Wilder, the wily Senate president who had taken a personal interest in urbanizing little Hickory Wythe, or his co-sponsors in either house.
Because a contrary ruling upholding the law (though without a justifying opinion) was issued earlier by a Nashville judge, the legal issues remain unresolved. With a month to go before the scheduled Shelby County votes, only the state Supreme Court can resolve the impasse.
The court has a clear duty to "reach down" and take the case of Chapter 98 -- including several pending appeals based on the Shelby County cases. And it must act now. Otherwise, the December 9th votes could intervene, and we could then find ourselves having to confront the truly messy political problem of how to put the toothpaste back in the tube.