Disregarding the pleas of the most-senior member of the Tennessee State Senate, the longest serving Lieutenant Governor who appointed both Democrats and Republicans to chair Senate Committees, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville) continued his legislative maneuvering to place activist judges to the Tennessee Appellate and Supreme Courts.

A week ago, Speaker Ramsey claimed he would use a bill as “leverage” to make the changes necessary to upend the Judicial Selection Commission so that Ramsey’s activist judges can be appointed to state courts, allowing the commission and nearly sixty other state agencies to “sunset” costing time and money as departments must “wind down” and then start back up again as expected.

This week, Ramsey and a consort of Republicans sat stone-faced as former Lieutenant Governor John Wilder (D-Mason) acquiesced to Ramsey’s amendments to the sunset laws.  In the end, Wilder was unsuccessful in swaying the partisan will of the committee.

Because of the situation, [Sen. Dewayne] Bunch said, Republicans did not want to even attach the Ramsey amendment to the selection commission sunset bill sponsored by Wilder, and preferred to kill the measure outright, unamended, to “send a message.”

 

Wilder’s pleas were ignored by the mostly silent Republicans. At one point, Sen. Bo Watson, R-Hixson, moved to call an immediate vote on the bill.

 

“Is there any way we can take a vote and not kill it?” Wilder asked. “I know five of you want to kill it.”

Under Senate rules, if the five Republicans - a majority of the committee - voted against the bill, it would be dead for the session and could not be resurrected.

 

Committee Chairman Thelma Harper, D-Nashville, ignored Watson’s motion and declared, “I don’t know if we have learned how to treat senior members of our society.”

 

The senators, she said, should show “courtesy to Sen. Wilder.”

Inserting partisan politics into Senate procedure in order to appoint equally partisan judges is as shameful as the comportment of the Republican members of the Senate Government Operations Committee who ignored Governor Wilder’s requests and neglected to consider his history-making tenure as a bipartisan member of the Senate.