Former U.S. Senator Zell Miller endorses Democrat Michelle Nunn in Georgia Senate race
Miller, a popular two-term Democratic governor known for endorsing Republicans, cuts TV ad for Nunn
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
ATLANTA (CFP) — Former U.S. Senator Zell Miller has made a high-profile endorsement of fellow Democrat Michelle Nunn in Georgia’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race, a major boost to Nunn’s efforts to position herself as a moderate distant from national Democrats.
Former U.S. Senator Zell Miller
Miller, a Democrat who angered many in his party with his 2004 endorsement of President George W. Bush, has cut a television ad for Nunn that touts her as “a bridge builder, not a bridge burner.”
“I’m so angry about what’s going on in Washington — partisanship over patriotism. They can’t stop themselves, but we can stop them. Let’s send Michelle Nunn to the Senate,” Miller says in the ad. “Michelle Nunn gives this old Georgian hope.”
Nunn, the daughter of former Democratic U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, is running against Republican David Perdue, the cousin of former Republican Governor Sonny Perdue. Neither candidate has run for office before.
The Perdue camp has not directly responded to Miller’s endorsement.
Miller, 82, is a venerable — if unpredictable — figure in Georgia politics, serving four terms as lieutenant governor and two terms as governor before being appointed to the Senate in 2000 to replace the late Republican Paul
Coverdell.
In 2004, while still sitting as a Democrat in the Senate, he not only endorsed Bush but gave the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, where he offered a withering critique of the Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Miler did not seek re-election that year, but he rejected suggestions that he switch parties, opting to remain a Democrat.
In addition to Bush, Miller endorsed the Republican replaced him in the Senate, Johnny Isakson, and the state’s other Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, whose retirement is opening up the seat Nunn is seeking. He was also co-chair of Newt Gingrich’s unsuccessful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.
Recent polls have shown a close race, with Perdue slightly in the lead.
Perdue and outside conservative groups have been trying to tie Nunn to President Obama. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is in the middle of a $2.5 million ad buy calling Nunn “Obama’s senator.”
Unlike Democratic incumbents in the South who voted for Obamacare, Nunn does not have that vote to defend. But she has come under fire for evading a clear answer when asked whether she supports the president’s health care law.
View Zell Miller’s ad endorsing Michelle Nunn:
Defiant Texas Governor Rick Perry vows to fight indictment
Perry insists he was standing up for the rule of law when he vetoed funding for a local prosecutor jailed for drunken driving
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
AUSTIN, Texas (CFP) — With a defiant and determined tone, Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry is vowing to fight his indictment on two felony charges stemming from his veto of a funding bill for an Austin prosecutor who refused his demand that she resign after being arrested for drunken driving.
Texas Governor Rick Perry
“I stood up for the rule of law in the state of Texas, and if I had to do it again, I would make the exact same decision,” Perry said in an interview with Fox News Sunday on August 17. “This is not the way that we settle … political differences in this country. You don’t do it with indictments. We settle our political differences at the ballot box.”
A grand jury in Travis County, which includes Austin, indicted Perry on felony charges of abuse of power and coercion stemming from his veto of $7.5 million in funding for a public integrity unit in the office of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. If convicted, he could face prison time.
In April 2013, Lehmberg, a Democrat, was arrested for driving with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit, and video showed her being combative with the arresting officers. She pleaded guilty and served 20 days in jail.
Perry demanded the Lehmberg resign and threatened to veto funding for the public integrity unit — which investigates elected officials across Texas — if she refused to go. When Lehmberg refused to resign, Perry vetoed the funding.
“I had lost confidence in her. The public had lost confidence in her. And I did what every governor has done for decades, which is make a decision on whether or not it was in the proper use of state money to go to that agency,” Perry told Fox News Sunday.
Many Republicans in Texas, including Perry, have long been critical of the public integrity unit, saying it empowers Democratic prosecutors elected in Democrat-leaning Travis County to launch politically motivated investigations of Republicans.
A Republican judge appointed a special prosecutor, San Antonio attorney Mike McCrum, to investigate the circumstances of Perry’s veto after a complaint was filed by a liberal advocacy group.
Early in the Obama administration, McCrum had been considered for an appointment as a federal prosecutor, with the backing of Texas’s two GOP senators. But he withdrew his name in 2010 after the appointment stalled in the Senate.
Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, is not running for re-election this year. But he is considering making a bid for the White House in 2016, after making an unsuccessful presidential run in 2012.
Florida Legislature approves changes to U.S. House map
New plan makes slight alterations to 10 districts and is unlikely to disturb delegation’s GOP tilt
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CFP) — On a largely party-line vote, the Republican-controlled Florida House and Senate have approved a bill redrawing the state’s U.S. House map, which a state judge ruled last month was unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
The new map makes only minor alterations to 10 of the state’s 27 districts that are unlikely to change the House delegation’s partisan balance. The groups that sued to strike down the map, including the League of Women Voters, are demanding more substantial changes that could trigger new districts statewide and are expected to ask the judge to reject the redrawn map.
The Senate approved the new map by a vote of 25-12 on August 11. The House gave its approval a short time later by a vote of 71-38. Lawmakers rejected a democratic alternative that would have made two GOP-held districts near Orlando more competitive.
Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis ruled that two districts in northwestern and central Florida — the majority black 5th District and the Republican-leaning 10th District — violated two constitutional amendments Florida voters approved in 2010 designed to limit political gerrymandering.
Under the new rules, districts cannot be drawn to benefit any political party and must be geographically compact. However, the amendments left redistricting in the hands of legislators, rather than turning it over to an independent outside panel.
Lewis ruled that the map draw by legislators packed black voters into the oddly shaped 5th District to make surrounding districts more Republican and also added an appendage to the 10th District east of Orlando to add more Republican voters.
Lewis ordered legislators to draw a new map by August 15, although he has not said whether he will order the map to be used in this year’s congressional elections. That could throw the Sunshine State’s election process into chaos as absentee ballots have already been sent out for the August 26 primary.
While Republican leaders in the legislature decided to comply with Lewis’s order to redraw the map rather than appeal, they have said they will only support using the new map beginning in 2016 and want to continue this year’s elections under the old map.
Lewis has set a hearing for August 20 to hear arguments on implementing the new map.
U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown
Under the original map, the 5th District, held by Democratic U.S. Rep Corrine Brown of Jacksonville, was a majority black district that meandered from Jacksonville over to Gainesville and then down to Orlando, taking in heavily black precincts to create a black majority At one point, it is the width of a highway.
In the new map, the 5th District still runs from Jacksonville to Orlando, but some black voters in the Orlando area are shifted to adjacent districts and some more rural areas are added south of Jacksonville to make the district geographically wider. The new district is 48 percent black.
Brown joined with Republicans in supporting the original map, which she said met the Voting Rights Act’s requirement to create majority minority districts wherever possible.
The new map also makes changes to the 10th District, held by U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster, and the adjacent 7th District, held by U.S. Rep. John Mica, that will make them less Republican. Because House districts must have equal population, the changes to those three districts required slight changes in seven surrounding districts in central Florida.
The League of Women Voters and the other plaintiffs are criticizing the new map, saying it doesn’t fix the geographic problems with the 5th District. They have proposed a different map that would have the 5th District running due west from Jacksonville past Tallahassee — a change that would require a wholesale revision of the map statewide.
The Democratic alternative rejected by the legislature doesn’t go as far as the plaintiff’s map, but it would have made the 7th and 10th districts more evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
Although Florida is evenly divided politically, Republicans enjoy a 17-10 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, largely due to their control of the redistricting process.
In his ruling striking down the map, Lewis was highly critical of the behind-the-scenes role Republican political consultants played in the redistricting process, which was supposed to be apolitical.
“They made a mockery of the legislature’s proclaimed transparent and open process of redistricting by doing all of this in the shadow of that process, utilizing the access it gave them to the decision makers, but going to great lengths to conceal from the public their plan and their participation in it,” Lewis said.
Analysis: Southern Senate races expose fault line that GOP must correct
Incumbents’ weak victories show bitter primaries have become the new normal
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com editor
Tea Party-backed insurgents struck out in their quest to unseat sitting Southern Republican U.S. senators this year, with a final tally of 0-for-5.
But while those results are arguably a significant victory for the powers that be in the GOP, a closer look at the results shows a deep and potentially problematic fault line running right through the party. And the rancor and contention generated by the establishment’s aggressive push back against the Tea Party has made that fault line wider.
Historically, sitting senators rarely face much of a battle for renomination. If they have any opposition at all, it is usually dispatched with an easy majority of 70 or 80 percent. While that is still largely true for Democrats, for Republicans — in the South and elsewhere — bitter primary contests seem to have become the new normal. True, all the incumbents survived this year. But they didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
In Tennessee, Lamar Alexander — a well-respected former Cabinet secretary and university president who has won statewide office four times — could only manage a meager 50 percent, while in Mississippi, Thad Cochran was dragged into a runoff that he only survived with the help of Democrats.
John Cornyn in Texas and Lindsey Graham in South Carolina did a bit better (59 percent and 56 percent, respectively), but they should be thankful that their opposition was as weak as it was. If bigger names had gotten into either of these races, the outcome might have been very different.
The Southern GOP senator who performed the best was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took 60 percent in his race, despite an avalanche of outside help given to his opponent, Matt Bevin. But that brutish primary did nothing to help McConnell’s prospects in a tough race this fall with Democratic Secretary of State Alison Ludergan Grimes.
What these races, collectively, show is that 40 percent or more of the Republican primary electorate is unhappy enough with their own elected leaders that they are prepared to vote them out — even if that means nominating little known candidates who, in many cases, seem less than fit to sit in the Senate.
For the time being, the GOP might be able to ignore this fault line because there is little indication, except perhaps in Kentucky, that Democrats will be able to take advantage of the Republican schism to flip seats in November.
But if Republicans can’t figure out a way to avoid this internal warfare, Democrats are eventually going to figure out a way to use it to their advantage. And that presents a real and present danger to the political hegemony that the GOP has built in the South.
Yes, 2014 was a victory for the establishment. But it was also a danger-Will-Robinson moment. And the bitterness left over from these primary fights has probably made the divisions within the party even worse, particularly in Mississippi.
Few of those Tea Party Republicans who feel scorned by their party are going to vote Democratic in November, but more than a few may stay home. Is this hemorrhage from the base likely to imperil these sitting Southern senators? No, except maybe for McConnell. But if the establishment can’t find a way to bridge this divide, there is certainly potential for trouble ahead.
Conservative effort to oust Tennessee Supreme Court justices fails
Three of the court’s five justices were targeted in retention election
♦By Rich Shumate, Chickenfriedpolitics.com
NASHVILLE (CFP) — Conservative critics of Tennessee’s Supreme Court have failed in their campaign to oust three of the court’s five justices, which would have given Republican Governor Bill Haslam the power to appoint a new majority on the state’s highest court
Chief Justice Gary Wade
Tennessee voters decided to retain Chief Justice Gary Wade and Justices Cornelia Clark and Sharon Lee in the August 7 vote. The three targeted justices were all appointed by former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen.
In Tennessee, justices don’t run directly for election, but voters decide every eight years if they should be retained. The Supreme Court also has the power to appoint the state’s attorney general, which uniquely in Tennessee is neither elected nor appointed by the governor.
Support for retention of all three justices topped 55 percent.
Critics of the three justices accused them of being soft on crime, particularly in death penalty cases. The effort to oust them was lead by Republican Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey and supported by Americans for Prosperity, a political operation funded by the billionaire Koch brothers from Kansas.
The justices raised and spent more than $1 million defending their record.
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