Taking her leave
NASHVILLE – Memphis Democrat Ophelia Ford, who was sworn in as the apparent 13-vote winner in a special election in state Senate District 29 last September, became an ex-senator Wednesday afternoon when her colleagues voted 26-6 to void that election result as “incurably uncertain,” but promised, in a last speech delivered from her Senate desk, to return after the general election in November.
The Republican contender in that election
(as well as the one last year), Terry Roland, was in the Senate
gallery as the historic ouster vote occurred and proposed afterward that public
hearings be held before the Shelby County Commission meets, presumably next
week, to vote on an interim successor.
There was no debate prior to
the Senate vote, which ratified a 5-1 recommendation by a special Senate
investigating committee that fraud and other unresolved irregularities made last
year’s outcome “incurably uncertain.” But Memphis senator Steve Cohen spoke at
length in opposition to the ouster, suggesting that conditions mandated last
January by federal Judge Bernice Donald had not been properly met. (Donald
herself had declined to issue an injunction in a second hearing on Tuesday.)
And at the end, after what
everybody conceded was a dignified final address, in which Ford expressed
gratitude for the opportunity to serve thus far, she became the center of an
organized hugfest on the Senate floor, one that involved members of both parties
and voters on either side of the issue.
Through it all, she kept smiling, but it was hard not to
imagine Ophelia’s pain. Not only had she known, when she entered the Senate
chamber Wednesday afternoon, that she was Dead Man Walking, she had to rise on
her feet and do Smiling and Clapping, too, as various visitors from this or that
part of the Volunteer State were cited by their home senators and asked to stand
in the overhead gallery. It was the usual light-hearted
let’s-pretend-we’re-having-fun run-up to a session, only more of it and more
intense than usual.
Capping it all was the Memphis Tiger celebration in the
chamber arranged by state Representative Joe Towns, chairman of the Shelby delegatgion, and presided over in the
Senate by longtime Tiger booster Cohen. Involving Coach Tommy West,
University of Memphis president Shirley Raines, and a group of U of M footballers, this one had various senators decked out in numbered blue-and-gray Tiger
jerseys, including Cohen and the antique Senate speaker himself, Lt. Governor
John Wilder.
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Kathryn Bowers, the indicted Memphian who has her own
Tennessee-Waltz ordeal coming just around the bend, was given one of the
jerseys, and, as a fellow Shelby Countian, so was Ophelia. Afterward, she was
commended here and there for having had the grace not to don it and go goofy like the others.
Nor did she distance herself altogether from the general merriment. What she did
was drape the garment around her shoulders for a prolonged spell as a gesture of
solidarity. It was the kind of thing the British call a nice distinction.
Bowers commiserates
Ultimately, all of that was over, people were back in their
workaday garbs, and Wilder was banging his gavel to usher in the real business.
Micheal Williams, chairman of the special Senate investigating committee that
had been digging into the District 29 matter from way back in January, announced
that the committee had duly made a determination – by that vote of 5-1, including
two Democrats, one of them the Senate’s Democratic leader, Jim Kyle of Memphis.
The upshot was that last year’s special election — dogged by irregularities both suspected and real (two dead “voters”)– was found to have been “incurably
uncertain.” Williams thereupon asked for a favorable vote on the panel’s
findings to void the election.
It was a judicious and dignified-sounding statement in keeping with
Williams’ general conduct of the matter — although, to be even-handed about it, some of
his Republican brethren, notably GOP Senate leader Ron Ramsey, a committee
member and a prime mover for voiding the election, thought Williams had been
dogging it over the past few months, playing up to nominal Democrat Wilder, who had never, it was widely understood, wanted the
issue to come around.
But Wilder had not held on the speakership of the Senate
for so long as he had without being a realist, and now, with the result
pre-ordained and with federal judge Bernice Donald of Memphis having declined to
issue an injunction against Senate action on Tuesday, he dutifully called for
the vote.
That was when Cohen had his moment as the lone and last
stay against getting the process over with. “Is there not going to be a
debate?” he asked. The senator would say later that he hadn’t premeditated
anything other than to explain his reasons for voting against voiding the
election.
In the end he did more, sounding like the lawyer he is as he
recapped (or spontaneously re-created))some of the arguments that Ford’s attorneys David Cocke and Steve
Mulroy had made on her behalf before Judge Donald on Tuesday.
Cohen on the warpath
And he did more, eventually summoning assistant state
Attorney General Janet Kleinfelter and former judge Ben Cantrell, the special
Senate committee’s lawyer, onto the floor of the chamber to explain — awkwardly, as it turned out — the reasons
for voiding the election.
It all came back to that issue of incurable uncertainty,
though – as Cohen pointed out – neither Kleinfelter nor Cantrell was able to
make the case for more than twelve suspect votes, one less than the margin by
which Ford was certified the winner by the Shelby County Election Commission
last year.
All in all, it was a spirited performance by the senator – at least as effective as the one made in court Tuesday by Cocke and Mulroy and
one, incidentally, that will do Cohen no harm politically in his current
campaign for Congress in the majority-black 9th District, in which
two of a numerous field of opponents, one Democrat and one independent, happen
to have the last name of Ford.
But in the end only six Democrats voted no against
the resolution. Besides Cohen and Ford herself, the nay-voters were Bowers, Ward Crutchfield, the Chattanooga Democrat who himself faces trial in the
Tennessee Waltz scandal, Democrat Thelma Harper of Nashville, and Joe Haynes,
also of Nashville, the Senate Democratic caucus leader.
Haynes had also been the lone member of the special Senate
committee to vote against the resolution eventually presented and acted on.
Asked on Thursday why he had voted the other way, Kyle said that due process had, in his opinion and in that of most of his colleagues, been followed and that the legal advice they’d received was clear and unambiguous. He made a point of saying the
vote was not intended as any kind of criticism of Ford herself.
“I expect to see her back after November,” the party leader
said. “She’s been an effective senator.” Kyle was careful to make one
distinction. “A lot of the media has referred to this as an ‘ouster,” he noted.
“It’s anything but. Ophelia’s done nothing wrong.”
Who had? he was asked. “The whole election system,” he
said. “The election commission and county government both have something to
answer for. And why haven’t [District Attorney] Bill Gibbons and the T.B.I.
[Tennessee Bureau of Investigation] come up with legal recommendations. Somebody
has done something wrong, and they need to be identified and dealt with.”
As for whether the county commission should or shouldn’t
appoint an interim successor for the last few weeks of the session, Kyle said,
“I won’t presume to advise them, but I would hope they wouldn’t take the risk of
sending somebody up there whose presence would be volatile.”
Since he’d made a point of saying, “If you’ll notice, Roland never has claimed that he won,” Kyle’s meaning was clear.
As if the Republican Partyยs conservatives were not divided enough by the dual presence of former congressmen Van Hilleary and Ed Bryant in this yearยs Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, another fissure has developed in the ranks. Angelo Cobrasci, head of the Shelby County Conservative Republican Club, said this week he had decided to endorse former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, widely perceived as something of a moderate.
Corker and Cobrasci last week in Memphis
Apprised of this on Wednesday after a Nashville forum appearance alongside Bryant, Corker, and Democrat Harold Ford Jr., Hilleary shrugged and said the reason was probably his quick endorsement of the GOP gubernatorial candidacy state Senator Jim Bryson of Franklin. (Cobrasci was campaign manager for Carl ยTwo Feathersย Whitaker, the state Minuteman head who switched his own bid from the Republican primary to independent status when Bryson announced.)
ยYou will notice Iยm the only Senate candidate who has endorsed Bryson. Corker and Bryant havenยt,ย Hilleary contended, maintaining that all his GOP rivals had done was welcome the entry of Bryson, who was strongly urged to run by ranking state Republicans.
Several observers at Wednesdayยs forum, held at Nashvilleยs Hermitage Hotel, noted that Ford, whom they credited with an effective and somewhat aggressive performance, delivered his own closing remarks and then upstaged Hillearyยs, either intentionally or otherwise, by exiting early, conspicuously shaking hands and making conversation with various attendees as he left during the former 4th District congressmanยs attempts to sum up.
