Bad Politics As everyone in Tennessee surely knows by now, the various tax reform proposals made during 1999 by Governor Don Sundquist have generated veritable hailstorms of protest — via the Internet, via radio talk shows, via phone and letter, etc., etc., by whatever means humanity has learned to communicate, in fact. Unless we are to imagine that the governor belongs to some rare breed of masochist, we must take him at his word that he has ventured into the face of this reaction in order to do, as he sees it, his duty by the people of Tennessee. Increasingly, the governor has come under fire from within his own Republican party, where, in the characterization of one local partymate, he is rapidly developing a negative profile akin to that of Bill Clinton. Because, in the course of two abortive special legislative sessions this year, Sundquist has successively proposed several different kinds of business tax, followed by his version of a “flat” state income tax, he has been snubbed, ignored, or even vilified by increasing numbers of his former comrades. Many of the Republicans who have chosen to speak out against Sundquist have maintained, understandably enough, that he has gone against the grain of the “less-government/low-tax” philosophy that the GOP of our time holds dear. Fair enough — though few of these critics have hazarded an explanation of how Tennessee, with business-tax revenues declining and the state sales tax having long since reached an almost obscenely regressive level, is to meet its long-term needs, including acute ones relating to education and health care. (A favorite target of the anti-tax lobby is the supposedly spendthrift TennCare, although it has been conclusively demonstrated over and over that this state-run insurance program for the indigent and the uninsurable is far less expensive to the state than would be Medicaid, the federal system which is its only available alternative.) Insult to Sundquist has now become injury to the rest of us as some of the governor’s Republican critics have chosen to profit politically from his predicament. Over the weekend, some 33 GOP members of the legislature — including both diehard tax opponents and, conceivably, some timid or opportunistic types — signed a statement demanding that their party formally repudiate the governor’s stated tax program. Give them credit for this: They didn’t even attempt to be disingenuous, stating outright that the tax furor gave them what they thought was a stick to beat the Democrats with. In the process of signing that wholly self-serving statement, these 33 tribunes of the people endorsed another statement as their “model of action.” This was a recent manifesto of the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women, which explicitly condemns three alleged boondoggles: a new state office building, several new golf courses, and — “$48 million for new buildings at the University of Memphis.” Question: Why are four Shelby Countians — Sen. Tom Leatherwood and State Reps. Larry Scroggs, Tre Hargett, and W.C. “Bubba” Pleasant — to be found among the signatories who so callously scoff at the needs of our own local hard-pressed and historically cash-starved state university? What answer could they give to university president V. Lane Rawlins, or to the larger community that depends so greatly on the health and solvency of the university? We would like these four worthies to show us why this isn’t just a case of bad politics. Meanwhile, we rather like the statement of House Republican Leader Steve McDaniel of Lexington, who declined to sign the weekend manifesto and said, “I don’t represent the Republican Party at the legislature. I represent the people of the 72nd District.” Would that our guys had answered likewise!