January in Nashville welcomes in two sources of disorder: irregular weather and crazy lawmakers. Both are extraordinarily disruptive. Neither is now surprising.

Mark Twain’s classic joke about the weather in New England, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes,” applies to the entire country in the era of climate change. But even if storms and snow occur on the same day, irregular weather is simpler to deal with than the Republican Party. The weather, unlike humans, is not expected to be sensible.

Neither, it appears, are Republicans, at least not any more, and a blue city that serves as the capital of a red state should prepare for the legislature’s arrival. When the Tennessee General Assembly reconvenes, nothing nice ever happens, but any Nashville resident who was paying attention knew that this time the typical assaults would be particularly awful.

Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News, said that retaliation was widely expected following the Metro Council’s vote last year not to back the state’s candidature for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Now we know what form retaliation will take: On the first day of the new legislative session in Tennessee, Republicans submitted legislation that would halve the size of the Metropolitan Council. (The bills are ostensibly applicable to all local governments with legislative bodies larger than twenty members, but only Nashville is affected.) The proposal, if implemented, would overrule not only 60 years of history, but also the 2015 vote of the people of Nashville to maintain its 40-member council.

According to the chair of the Democratic caucus in the House, John Ray Clemmons, the new legislation sets a “dangerous precedent.” Mr. Clemmons told The Tennessean that it is disturbing that the G.O.P. supermajority continues to interfere in local matters and usurp the decision-making ability of local leaders in order to consolidate more and more power at the state level. In the end, Nashville families know what is best for the city.

Nashville’s Metro Council is larger than the legislative bodies of all American cities except Chicago and New York, which dwarf the metropolis. There are compelling arguments for reducing its size, which is the product of compromises made in 1962 when Davidson County people opted to become a metropolitan government, but that is a different issue. What concerns is that Tennessee is once again interfering with the autonomy of the blue city that runs the economic engine of the entire red state. And state legislators are acting in this manner out of pure malice.

Obviously, Tennessee has a lengthy history of legislative preemption. This strategy is also employed by legislatures controlled by Democrats, but it is particularly offensive in Southern states run by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker in Tennessee submitted a bill that would prohibit municipal governments from assisting residents in financing out-of-state abortions – a provision that Nashville’s city council has already approved.

It should come as no surprise that the party responsible for voter suppression and disenfranchisement is also responsible for weakening local governance. This year, however, it is worse, or at least it feels worse, because Nashville voters cannot rely on representation at the national level.

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Continue reading the primary narrative
Historically, the South was the home of Yellow Dog Democrats, who voted a straight Democratic ticket even if the Democratic candidate was a yellow dog. However, those days are long gone. There are still vast numbers of Democrats and an increasing number of people on the far left of the Democratic Party in the South, but they are concentrated in college towns and developing cities like Nashville, where they live and work alongside old-school conservatives and ardent Donald Trump supporters. Joe Biden received about 65 percent of the vote in Nashville.

This year, however, we did not send to Washington a moderate Democrat who could adequately represent the concerns of both liberals and conservatives in Nashville due to a viciously gerrymandered electoral map. Instead, the freshly disfigured city of Nashville is represented by three of the state’s most radical right-wing political officials.

This particular injustice is probably meaningless to anyone who does not reside in this area. Even the complete disenfranchisement of an entire American city is difficult to get worked up about in the context of so many other political injustices in a nation swiftly sliding toward minority control.

However, you should be upset about it. You should be protesting in the streets because what is occurring in Tennessee and so many other states run by Republican supermajorities explains much of what is occurring in the United States Congress.

Andy Ogles, for instance, is the newly elected representative from Tennessee’s redesigned Fifth Congressional District, a seat previously held for two decades by Rep. Jim Cooper when the district covered all of Nashville. Mr. Ogles instantly aligned himself with the nihilist element of the Republican Party upon his arrival in Washington, voting eleven times against Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the position of speaker. Thus, in Nashville, we have transitioned from being represented by a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats to being represented by a founding member of what is arguably the Dead Dog Caucus. What else should we call politicians who have no desire to legislate?

In other words, by dividing Nashville into three Republican voting districts, the Tennessee General Assembly simply succeeded to nationalise its own brand of turmoil. And perhaps that was the point.

Mark E. Green, who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes portions of Nashville, and is an ardent Trump supporter, is an outspoken election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text conversations with the former chief of staff of the White House, Mark Meadows, as the far-right wing of the party sought nominal justification to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. Even after the disturbance on January 6, Mr. Green voted against certifying the presidential election of 2020. As Holly McCall, editor-in-chief of the non-profit news website Tennessee Lookout, says, such conduct by elected officials has “sown distrust in our voting public, which continues to hurt our democracy.”

However, destroying American democracy is insufficient for the Dead Dog Party. Mr. Green travelled to Brazil last fall to do the same duties in that democracy, which is much more fragile. During a trip paid for by the American Conservative Union, he spoke with Brazilian legislators who are attempting to alter election laws. The purpose of the gathering is to debate “vote integrity policies.” We know what occurred next: Thanks in part to one of Nashville’s members in Congress, anti-democracy riots are now an American export.

Mr. Green has recently been appointed chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.