Indivisible Memphis, the local advocacy group that organized the well-attended No Kings rally on Saturday, now finds itself at the center of a highly divisive flap stemming from the fact that 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen was not allowed to speak at the anti-Trump event, while his declared Democratic primary opponent, state Representative Justin J. Pearson, was.
Literally thousands of words have by now been expended by Cohen, by spokespersons for Indivisible, and by numerous other commenters as an online war of words has been waged over the matter.
“I was not asked to speak,” said Cohen in one of several Facebook posts — even after he specifically implored Indivisible Memphis for the opportunity. He said he knew “some of their leaders are supporting my opponent,” Pearson, who, Cohen said, was listed as the chief of seven speakers, “all the way down to the general sessions clerk and another former intern who’s not an office holder.”
When Cohen “saw Justin Pearson on MSNBC saying he was gonna speak,” he decided it was only proper that he should speak as well. He said he called Indivisible eight days in advance, “and I never got a return phone call. … That’s the full story and then when I was there, they could’ve had me on as the general sessions clerk [Tami Sawyer] decided not to come” for security reasons. “They had a spot open [and] had plenty of time and they didn’t start till late and they could’ve called on me [but] they didn’t. … They didn’t even recognize that I was there, which is kind of customary [for a] public official and the congressman involved with trying to impeach Trump the king.”
(This last was a reference to numerous previous actions of Cohen in offering serious concrete resistance to actions of the Trump administration.)
In responding, Indivisible has countered that, among other things, Cohen had declined several previous invitations from the group to address its events.
The congressman has denied that, saying there had been only one prior invitation from Indivisible, which he had been unable to accept because of pending government business.
In any event, whether by intended snub or by inadvertence or accident, the resultant uproar is bound to have an impact on how local Democrats decide on whom to support in what will henceforth be an even more closely followed primary race than before.
• Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor and U.S. Senator who also served a term as U.S. secretary of education, has weighed in against President Donald Trump’s push for a higher education compact with the federal government.
“I have always believed that the Republican Party exists to stop such Washington meddling,” Alexander, a Republican, wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “[T]he federal government shouldn’t try to manage the nation’s 6,000 colleges and universities.” Alexander serves as a trustee of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, one of nine universities that recently received an offer to accept the compact by the Trump administration.
The proposal would require schools to remove factors like sex and ethnicity from admissions and to define gender “according to reproductive function and biological processes.” It would also commit the schools to do away with “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
Alexander said Republicans “should remember what it means to be Reagan’s heirs and stop acting like Democrats whose mission is to tell everyone what to do from Washington. … One day Democrats will be back in charge and Republicans won’t like what they tell colleges to do.”