Establishment is Beating Tea Party in Tennessee
By Sean Evans, Chair and Professor of Political Science
Jun 2, 2014 -
Despite talk of a civil war between establishment and Tea Party Republicans in Tennessee, the war is already over and the establishment has won because the establishment is already as conservative as most Tea Party Republicans. The fight now is to remove the conservatives who embarrass the party or are not team players.
While many claim that the Tea Party has moved the GOP to the right, the simple fact is that the GOP move to the right predates the Tea Party. Nationally, the Republican move to the right began in the 1970s as conservatives and liberals sorted themselves into the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively, as the parties adopted completely opposite views on economic, social, and foreign policy.
In Tennessee and the South, the sorting took longer but was nearing completion after the 1994 elections. Since then, the Republican state legislative caucus become increasingly more conservative until 2004 when it became as conservative as is possible.
Meanwhile in Congress, the Republicans elected in 2010 are more conservative than the Republicans elected in 1994 who were more conservative than their Republican predecessors. Today, all of Tennessee’s returning Republican Representatives are to the right of the U.S. House Republican mean except for Chuck Fleischman.
The only reason that Tennessee’s three statewide officeholders are not more conservative is because it takes time to work one’s way up to statewide office and their formative political experiences required them to work with Democrats because Democrats controlled state government or exercised great influence in their cities.
The next statewide officeholders will be more conservative because there is really only one potential statewide candidate in the moderate conservative mold of Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker and Governor Bill Haslam and that is Speaker of the House Beth Harwell of Nashville. The sitting Congressmen and ambitious state legislators like Senators Mark Green of Clarksville and Brian Kelsey of Germantown better reflect the conservative establishment.
Yet, the fact that Alexander and Haslam are cruising to re-nomination and reelection, with Alexander facing only token Tea Party opposition from State Representative Joe Carr, suggests that both are well within the mainstream of acceptable conservative beliefs.
The establishment is now fighting to ensure that the Republican caucus is conservative but not unruly. This past legislative session, establishment Republicans killed multiple bills closely associated with the Tea Party that they felt were unproductive. This list includes bills that would nullify Obamacare and federal gun laws which are unconstitutional, a ban on United Nations representatives from observing U.S. election when most Republicans are proud of how Tennessee runs elections and want to be a model for the world, and a bill replacing the nomination of U.S. Senators by voters with state legislators which implies that voters smart enough to send the state legislators to Nashville are not smart enough to nominate a U.S. Senator.
And in contrast to the past two election cycles when most challenges came from the right, this election cycle twenty Republicans face primary challenges and most of the challenges come from candidates with more establishment credentials. The list of Tea Party Republicans who face primary challenges include State Senators like Stacey Campfield of Knoxville and Mae Beavers of Mt. Juliet who regularly garner negative publicity and State Representatives like Micah Van Huss, Steve Hall, John Ragan, and Courtney Rogers who introduce extreme legislation.
Revised version appeared in the May 20th edition of The Jackson Sun