Tennessee is one of “my” states. Meaning, I’ve been there and around it several times and have developed an interest in it. Not only do I have dear friends in Nashville, I have a passionate attachment to and complex relationship with one of Tennessee’s small towns, Dayton.
Oh, and another one. Hohenwald. Less said about the hours (and couple of $) I spent with my friend Mary in Hohenwald. (What is Hohenwald known for? asks Google. An elephant sanctuary, apparently. I write “apparently” because I didn’t know about it. Elephants were not what Mary and I were doing in Hohenwald.)
What’s going on nowadays down in Tennessee is pretty awful, if not entirely surprising. It’s gone All Trumpism, All The Time.
I keep up with Tennessee’s thrills and chills, the kind that make me scream, “You fuckers!!You can’t do that!”, via a neat reporting tool called The Tennessee Holler, which has provided videos of the outrageous racism exposing itself in the state legislature, and offered a trio of heroes, in case you feed on heroes: The Two Justins and Barbara Johnson, whose anti-gun stance got her and the Two Justins thrown out of the legislature, which in turn gave her a leg up in her U.S. senate campaign to beat Marsha Blackburn. (If you have a bit of extra money, send it to Barbara.)
But Tennessee also has a governor, of sorts. His name is Bill Lee and he is racing to sign legislation that will (a) make you scream or (b) make you say “Huh?”
To wit, I speculated that Tennessee’s governor might spare the state some embarrassment by vetoing SB 2691. He did not. So as of July 1, putting anything “within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight” will be prohibited.
So can Tennessee figure out how to keep another state’s atmosphere on its side of the border, or how to get around the Supremacy Clause? Stay tuned.