In his early career, Keel was a newspaper reporter, Washington correspondent, editorial writer, and city editor for The Tennessean in Nashville. Currently his newspaper columns - on politics, state and local government, and life in the changing South - appear regularly in the newspapers of the USA Today Network Tennessee.
Where are Tennessee Republicans who put state over party and moderation over extremism?
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:02 a.m. CT January 11, 2024
When I was a lad, I didn’t know any Republicans over on my side of the river in Nashville.
I remember President Eisenhower (definitely Republican) sometimes appeared on our TV screen, but most of my parents’ pals had names like Fulton, Barrett and Seigenthaler – Democrats all.
At 19, I went to work at The Tennessean and my perspective took in more of the city. I met some other locals who, if you asked, actually called themselves Republican (though in interviews party labels actually never came up). These were mostly nice people, too – never mean or extreme in what they had to say.
Today is different. Now with great regularity we hear from Nashville’s Capitol Hill a stream of proposals that sort Tennesseans into categories: as Christian or other, straight or gay or trans, even male or female. Women feel particularly targeted on the issue of abortion with new laws curtailing reproductive freedom. Some young women wonder if they will have to leave Tennessee.
Remembering the Sundquist Years.
‘We tried to make it work.’
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 7:01 a.m. CT September 13, 2023
I first met Don Sundquist in 1980, just before the Arkansas precinct caucuses of that year, when Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. was briefly running for President.
I was part of a (very) small entourage on a daytrip from Nashville over to two Arkansas towns – Batesville and Bentonville. Gov. Lamar Alexander would be speaking to two dinner-time groups of Republican caucus voters, hoping to boost their support for Tennessee’s distinguished senior senator.
At this point, Sundquist did not hold any public office as yet. He would not go to Congress until two years later, and he would not be Tennessee’s governor himself (1995-2003) until 12 years after that. But in 1980, at age 44, Sundquist had already been chair of the national Young Republicans in the early 1970s and he was now Baker’s presidential campaign manager.
Leadership is missing in the special session. It was not always this way in Tennessee.
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 9:14 a.m. CT August 27, 2023
The dysfunction on Capitol Hill over the last two weeks - with legislative bullies expelling even respectful Covenant School parents, the Senate and House in a bitter stalemate, the governor visibly absent – has stirred some fond memories of much stronger leaders in our recent history.
This “Lockdown Session” to make Tennesseans safer from gun violence has been a credit to nobody.
The most we can say, as the whole ugly affair lurches to its conclusion, is that Speaker Cameron Sexton’s plan to make the building quieter (and less arduous for his Republican cronies) worked with remorseless efficiency.
Tennessee stumbles into the special session on gun safety
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 10:15 a.m. CT August 15, 2023
After waiting months to issue his call for a special legislative session on gun-safety, Gov. Bill Lee has disappointed many and satisfied nobody - with the possible exception of the gun industry which he faithfully supports.
In his new proclamation, which sets the boundaries for what lawmakers can consider, the governor shunned the word “gun” and any notion of better firearms regulation. And his lone specific proposal – that extreme-risk protection regime for removing guns from dangerous individuals – was given a sudden death by the gun-friendly Republican lawmakers upstairs.
Lee’s proclamation artfully lists 18 categories where new legislation could be considered. But only one of them even mentions the word “firearms” and then only in the context of better storage rules, with no actual penalties allowed for violating them. (So, you might get a sales-tax break from the state for buying a new gun safe for your home, but no fine for keeping it unlocked with kids around.)
Early voting came to Tennessee 30 years ago, but not without a fight
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 p.m. CT July 19, 2023
We mainly take it for granted anymore – nearly 30 years later – that we can cast our ballots in a race for mayor as much as two weeks before the actual Election Day.
Over most of American history, political campaigns were totally focused on “Election Day,” the one and only day that people could legally vote.
Virtually all the competitive campaigning would be totally oriented to voters persuading them to turn out on that one day. But in the early 1990s, advocates of “early voting” worked to break that rigid, locked-in process.
Tennessee was in fact one of the very earliest states in the U.S. to adopt “early voting” by law, back in 1994. As its sponsor envisioned back then, it has become a standard feature of elections in every Tennessee county. In Davidson County, a qualified voter can do it at a dozen different places, and when it’s convenient.
Thousands of Tennesseans speak out on gun-safety reform
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:03 a.m. CT June 23, 2023
More than 13,000 citizens across 94 Tennessee counties have submitted comments about gun-safety reform to Gov. Bill Lee’s office in the first six weeks since he first made an internet-based form available to the public starting on May 8.
The count of citizen comments had zoomed to 13,744 by June 20. This avalanche of comments has poured into the Capitol from all parts of the state. (The comment form remains open and available to Tennesseans wanting to register their views, according to the governor’s office.)
“The Governor will continue to listen to Tennesseans and discuss solutions with legislators and stakeholders as we approach the coming special session,” the governor’s press secretary, Jade Byers, told me.
An initial tabulation shows that more than 3,640 comments have come from Davidson County alone, and another 971 from Shelby County. In fact, comments have come from every county but one (none so far from Union County, north of Knoxville). Eight hundred have originated from outside the state.
Gov. Bill Lee needs to stay firm amid opposition to gun laws reform special session
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:02 a.m. CT June 1, 2023
Since Tennessee‘s founding in 1796, the Tennessee General Assembly has met 65 times in extraordinary session, summoned by a sitting governor to compel members to return and do special (or unfinished) work.
Over 227 years, the subject matter has ranged widely from secession and the Civil War to state education policy and prison reforms. Sixty-two times the session has been convened by the governor, and three times by the Legislature itself.
It’s been two months since the horrific shootings at Nashville’s Covenant School – that killed six and terrorized many more – and five weeks since Gov. Bill Lee announced he would call a special session of the legislature to consider new gun-safety laws.
He has not yet done so, judging by the standards set forth in the Tennessee Constitution.
Retired jurist Bill Koch, a quiet hero of Tennessee, is honored by his legal peers
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:01 a.m. CT May. 19, 2023
Finding real heroes in public life is a little harder nowadays than it used to be. They still walk among us, true enough, but seeing their service through the noise of modern media and politics make the search a challenge.
This is why, for me, it was such happy news to learn recently about a well-deserved recognition going to my friend of many years, Dean William C. Koch Jr. of the Nashville School of Law. Bill, a former justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court, also has been a true community leader and volunteer in Nashville.
On May 16, at a meeting of the Harry Phillips American Inn of Court chapter in Nashville, it was announced that a prestigious new scholarship program is being established in Koch’s name at the Nashville School of Law. The Bill Koch-Harry Phillips American Inns of Court Scholarship will be for a third-year law student in the top 20% of his or her class entering a fourth year of legal training at NSL.
Randy McNally is a decent man who now faces the wrath of Republican extremists
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 11:46 a.m. CT Mar. 14, 2022
I have known Randy McNally of Oak Ridge for going on 45 years.
I met him in the fall of 1978, when he was first elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives. At the time, I was on the campaign staff of Lamar Alexander, who was then running for governor.
They both won, and with a host of other public officials who came into office with them worked hard to restore public confidence in Tennessee’s state government. They put an end to a period of rampant corruption that had swirled about the state capitol.
This is how Governor Ray Blanton, who later went to prison, was ousted from office by members of his own Democratic Party, notably the House Speaker Ned McWherter, Lt. Gov. John Wilder, and Bill Leech, the state’s attorney general. It was that bloodless coup that put Alexander in office three days early and stopped a pardon scandal.
Man of the Big Shoulders
By Keel Hunt, Field Notes on Substack
Published Jan. 30, 2023
Avi Poster always seemed to me to be everywhere, so many were the honorable causes that drove him.
He was the kind of character you enjoyed meeting – and he made you feel better about our city. To me, he lived the welcoming spirit of most people I know across this city.
Just to name one of his many causes, this is why Avi in 2008 joined in with a diverse leadership group that rose up against the detestable ‘English Only’ referendum before it was soundly voted down the next January.
Our city lost this good man last Thursday. And on this morning, many of us – probably thousands of us – are reflecting on the scope of his influence on the life and spirit of Nashville.
Tennessee Republicans want a more compliant Nashville, not a more 'efficient' city
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:01 a.m. CT Jan. 12, 2023
We sometimes forget how thin the air can be at the upper elevations of Tennessee’s State Capitol and how prolonged exposure to it can cause confusion, much distraction, and strange policy.
The super majority of Republicans up there insist on giving public school parents cash for private schools. They abolished most gun permitting, obliging gun manufacturers. They attack transgender young people with great zeal, and needlessly disparage teachers and librarians for doing their jobs.
They also enacted one of America’s most extreme “no-exception” abortion bans – because it suited an extremist national Republican agenda – and they are still trying to fix it.
Now a bill to cut in half the size of Nashville’s Metro Council shows up, and we remember our Republican legislature’s deeper behavior all over again.
Why Nashville's Metro Council should say 'yes' to the new Titans stadium
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:02 a.m. CT Dec. 16, 2022
It has been 26 years since Nashvillians in large numbers – in a public referendum, mind you, not just the politicians at city hall – shouted a resounding “Yes!” to welcoming the Houston Oilers of the National Football League.
That vote a generation ago wasn’t close. It was more on “landslide” scale with 59% approving. In so doing, Davidson County voters not only authorized $80 million in bond financing to build what later became Nissan Stadium but, more fundamentally, Nashville voters were saying “Yes” to a major-league future for Music City.
This bit of history is, to my mind, the key starting point for understanding the questions currently before Metro Council of whether to give a green-light to a replacement stadium so soon for the Tennessee Titans.
How Nashvillians saved Radnor Lake 50 years ago
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 9:28 a.m. CT Dec. 2, 2022
One hundred years ago, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote “April is the cruellest month.” This year, it was October for me.
The month began with the full fury of Hurricane Ian slamming across the barrier island called Sanibel where we have had a Florida home and beloved neighbors for a dozen years. Then came all the headaches and heartache of managing our recovery, both long-distance and days later there on the scene.
A writer friend in Asheville, seeing none of my usual blog posts or newspaper columns meanwhile, sent me a thoughtful note asking, “Where have you been?” There had been no time left for writing anything new.
October left us with piles of debris and big troubles – and a new appreciation for what so many Nashvillians endured in the flood of 2010 and, later on, the remorseless tornadoes that raked our own region. For us all, “rescue” and “recovery” can be hard, complicated, stressful words.
Nashville's Imagine East Bank is the type of vision that can make a great city
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:00 a.m. CT Sept. 2, 2022
For most of my life, the riverfront on the east side of the Cumberland was a disappointment – a heavy industrial zone of successful businesses, true, but visually uninteresting, unappealing, uninspiring.
Nashville’s inner-most city blocks between the river and that stretch of interstate highway on the east side seemed especially forlorn if not downright ignored. If any city planners with a strong design sense had ever focused on this zone as a worthy challenge, I figured they must have given up on it.
A quarter-century ago, with the advent of the Tennessee Titans, fundamental improvements, at last, seemed possible.
The new stadium became a crowning jewel for Nashville as a city with dreams of major-league sports. But this stirring didn’t last long, as all the real action remained downtown over on the busy west bank of the river, not the east.
Gov. Bill Lee's reaction to Hillsdale president insulting teachers spoke volumes
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published July 12, 2022
Sometimes it’s what you don’t say that matters most. Gov. Bill Lee has been learning this lesson in spades over the past couple of weeks.
Phil Williams, the investigative reporter at Nashville’s CBS affiliate Channel 5, broke the "Story of the Month" the other day. It featured a video recorded at a private conference involving Governor Lee and a man named Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan.
All this matters because Lee has placed Hillsdale in a position of significant influence for Tennessee education programs this year.
Not only is Arnn’s institution to develop 50 new charter schools in Tennessee, at Lee’s invitation, but the governor wants Hillsdale to develop a new restricted standard for how Tennessee students should be taught American history.
After Roe v. Wade reversal, America needs better from our leaders now
By Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT July 10, 2022
That disaster of a Supreme Court decision June 24 – undoing 50 years of settled law governing abortion – was for many Americans a jarring reminder of all the wrong things:
The double standard among women and men in our society.
The death (or life-altering injuries) that can come from dangerous back-alley abortions.
The shortcomings of America’s hyper-partisan politics, and how frustrating government can be in our time. Part of this is the rising level of alarm over the gathering proof that ex-President Trump steered the failed insurrection of last year.
If you still wonder if elections matter, on January 22 came your latest reminder.
What does Nashville need in its next Mayor?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT May 26, 2022
We are seeing more than the usual hubbub among the political class in Nashville about a mayoral election that won’t even happen until August of 2023. Already Mayor John Cooper is being publicly challenged.
Normally, the pre-election hubbub is tempered by two competing impulses – Ambition and Fear. One usually constrains the other: Ambitions for higher office tend to get moderated by the worrying what the incumbent mayor might think and do about anyone threatening his shot at a second term.
This time not so much.
Gov. Lee, through secrecy about what went wrong, adds new worry about death penalty
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Apr 26, 2022
What exactly went wrong with Oscar Smith’s scheduled state execution last Thursday night?
Nobody is saying. Yet every Tennessean, whatever your personal belief about the death penalty, has a solid interest in the answers to some uncomfortable but simple questions that now have lingered past the weekend.
1. Who alerted Gov. Bill Lee – and when – of the so-called “technical” glitch that was so troubling in the final run-up to Smith’s death that the governor suddenly announced (on Twitter) he had postponed the whole thing?
2. Was it new trouble with the controversial lethal-injection procedure? Was it the equipment or the drugs? Did one of the three chemicals prescribed in Tennessee’s “Execution Manual” fail to arrive in time?
3. Or had any of the vials holding the “death cocktail” turned bad in transit to Riverbend prison – or after they arrived in the prison pharmacy? Did no official check on them before the day of and the eleventh hour?
4. Were any of the nine syringes also specified in the manual dropped onto the floor and were spoiled? Was there no backup supply in case of an accident?
The bluster and bullying on Capitol Hill have little to do with education
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Mar 25, 2022
There is much dangerous foolishness occurring up on Tennessee’s Capitol Hill these days – from banning books to demonizing educators – and leaders who ought to know better are tolerating the nonsense.
Just when we thought our legislature could sink no lower as an institution, they surprise us with new bottom-marks on the depth gauge – new levels of extremism in the Republican Party’s national culture wars.
None of this has much to do with actual education, school curricula, library science, or tradition. It’s about a leaderless dysfunction in 2022.
Read more
What does Bill Lee believe public school students need most?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Feb 24, 2022
If you are a public-school parent or a classroom teacher anywhere across Tennessee, you had better be paying close attention this week to the news relating to schools coming from your state capitol.
Lord knows, there’s been plenty of legislative mischief to earn a citizen’s scrutiny already – like all that noise about banning books, the loony views on how to teach American history, the official bullying of colleges and classrooms, the obsessive meanness over which kid should use which bathroom. Good grief!
But on Thursday morning will come some more broadly serious business: That’s the day Gov. Bill Lee has promised to unveil his election-year plan for changing how Tennessee pays for K-12 schools. Buckle your seatbelts.
The anxiety level is understandably high. This is true not only among members of the General Assembly, who answer to their own constituents including parents and teachers, but among the school boards and superintendents in 147 school districts from Memphis to Mountain City, from Chattanooga to Covington, and all jurisdictions in between.
Why are so many so anxious? Let me count the ways…
Tennessee legislature’s new district maps will drag them back into court
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Jan 30, 2022
Redistricting by state legislatures is always a nest of insider politics.
The legislative majority always controls who gets into the rooms where the deals are cut. The real work is hidden from all others. Their lawyers especially clamp down on who speaks publicly outside the private rooms.
Tennessee’s Republican legislature made clear on Monday night that this year was special. By a strict party-line vote, they put their full stamp of proud approval on a new redistricting scheme. How ugly is their work-product?
Aim High: What should Nashville be next?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Jan 14, 2022
Since the new year began, I have been struck by public messages of two local elected leaders suggesting – in different words, from different angles – that it’s time for more Nashvillians to think harder about the city’s future.
One was from Metro Council Member-at-large Bob Mendes. The other was from Councilman Freddie O’Connell of District 19.
Both used the word “vision” and suggested it is in short supply at city hall of late. Not a good spot for a modern city to be in, even (or especially) one nearly overwhelmed by calamities ranging from pandemic to destructive weather to a recycling provider gone bankrupt.
If I Were Chairman… What we all need the Democrats to do now, and why
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Dec 16, 2021
I am old enough to remember a time when Democrats out-numbered Republicans in Tennessee. Imagine that.
I don’t get misty-eyed about it, not in the way some of my Democrat friends do, but this pre-history is relevant to understanding our present day - and to how we yet rescue everything from extremism and gridlock.
In book talks, people ask me how Tennessee was so overwhelmingly Democratic in the middle 20th Century but became the opposite in fewer than 50 years. That simple question requires a long answer.
Jefferson Street Cap: Sometimes it’s best to start over
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Nov 18, 2021
In Nashville, we have learned much of our social history the hard way.
For instance, it should not have been necessary for the future congressman John Lewis to spend any time at all in the city jail. Nor for Diane Nash and hundreds of other college students and preachers to march on City Hall.
But it was necessary in mid-century Nashville. So, Lewis served his time behind bars, and Nash and the others marched downtown. They did what they had to do.
It was not until decades later that Nashvillians evolved smart techniques for hearing each other. (See Nashville’s Agenda, The Plan of Nashville and Nashville Next.) And these eventually would be called the “Nashville Process” and the “Nashville Way.”
Are private-school vouchers behind Gov. Lee’s 90-day review of the BEP?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Oct 22, 2021
Whatever your opinion of private-school vouchers, we had all best be paying close attention to Tennessee’s education policymakers in the weeks just ahead.
Every parent, educator, school board, and taxpayer will have a stake in what may be coming with Gov. Bill Lee’s announced 90-day “review” of Tennessee’s Basic Education Program, the framework for how our schools are funded.
So far there few details to help us understand this initiative – for instance, how the public participation process will work, what policy issues may be declared off-limits, or what Lee’s own expectations are for its outcomes.
We know the announced timeframe is aggressive for a large-scale public participation. We know the 90th day will be about when the legislature re-convenes in January. We know that the governor’s re-election comes ten months after that.
We see 18 subcommittees have been announced. Some of the chairs and co-chairs have not previously known as advocates of public schools.
What’s really going on here?
What’s become of the ‘It City’
The stalemate on Nashville party vehicles serves nobody
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Sept 23, 2021
By Keel Hunt
The great Scots wordsmith Robert Burns, poet of my people, might have captured our fraught downtown moment best in a single line: What a gift it would be if only we could “see ourselves as others see us.”
Burns wrote that in 1786, having watched a bug crawl on a lady’s hat in church. He might have been strolling through Nashville’s Lower Broadway on any day, at any hour, in 2021.
Last Sunday, as I read through the morning newspapers, one headline in The New York Times stopped me cold: “In the Heart of Nashville, Rolling Parties Rage at Every Stoplight.”
Depending on your current understanding of our controversial downtown, the accompanying photos were either fun to see or visions of a modern hell.
I take the hellish view.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee chooses politics over leadership in COVID-19 response
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Aug 20, 2021
While local Tennessee school boards have faced threats, Gov. Bill Lee has been focused on pleasing his base and obtaining Donald Trump's endorsement.
By Keel Hunt
So, the angry rabble of anti-maskers screamed loudly at Williamson County’s board of education in that Franklin meeting room. Even so, the majority hung tough and wisely chose common sense over nonsense.
By Monday, though, it was Gov. Bill Lee who blinked.
That executive order he issued on Monday – allowing Tennessee families to “opt out” of any local requirements for students to wear protective face-coverings in schools – doubtless pleased some, but not me.
“Gutting” was the word The New York Times used on Tuesday morning. Clearly, the tasks of school leaders and local health authorities just got tougher.
That job was already tough enough, given the inordinate fear of both face-covering (it’s just a mask, folks) and all the alleged government conspiracies that have been floating among the gullible.
Dr. Fiscus was fired, and again Tennessee makes the wrong kind of headlines
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT July 15, 2021
Before Tuesday of this week, Dr. Michelle Fiscus was a state government official but not a true public figure.
By Tuesday night, all of that had been reversed.
Dr. Fiscus was sacked for doing her job as chief of the immunology division. Her crime: She, like most public health professionals today, took Covid-19 seriously as the killer it is.
In so doing, her stumbling bosses made her a national symbol for what’s become of Tennessee in the eyes of the nation: That drifting lost place, a pathetic poster-child for the recklessness of amateur administration in government, and of how too many politicians today fear and deny reality.
Tennessee, once again, is making national headlines for doing the wrong thing at the worst time and at the highest level.
This is the damage a governor and legislature can do when they listen to the wrong people
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT July 9, 2021
Some sixty years ago, Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement complained to an aide: “Instead of the legislature meeting for 90 days every two years (as the state constitution prescribes) it should meet two days every 90 years.”
I am reminded of his lament on this hot summer day of 2021 because Tennessee’s policymakers have just made the place even hotter and more dangerous.
The General Assembly convenes in January. They argue awhile, go to dinner a lot, adopt a big budget, and go home by mid-May. By July, in most years, legislators have ceased to be in our daily worries.
Not so this year.
Bill Haslam and Roy Herron's books on faith and politics call for leaders to rise to serve
Former Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Haslam and ex Democratic state lawmaker Roy Herron wrote tomes that address politics, faith and public service.
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Jun. 3, 2021
Two new books by Tennesseans – written separately by a Republican and a Democrat – offer much encouragement that we all might find our way through the political and policy turmoil of our modern day.
On the surface, the two authors are opposites. They come to their subject matter from markedly different directions and political histories, but they steer by the same stars. Who knew?
There is much common hope on the pages of "Faithful Presence" by Bill Haslam of Knoxville, and "Faith in Politics" by Roy Herron of Dresden. That both these books are appearing in this fraught spring of 2021 is, in my view, a happy and encouraging coincidence for our democracy.
Politics and spite are driving legislative assault on the courts in Tennessee
Tennessee lawmakers want to create a statewide court to snub Nashville, but extremism is guiding this misguided attempt to create a “kangaroo court.”
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Apr. 23, 2021
Of all the bad bills hatched in our state legislature lately — from regulating who should use which bathroom to the persecution of young LGBTQ people —a new measure now surfacing seems especially bad news.
Senate Bill 868, in one fell swoop, would accomplish the Republicans’ political trifecta: Politicize our courts, waste more than a million taxpayers’ dollars, and jumble our state government’s separation of powers. All for spite and political payback.
The bill would strip jurisdiction from Davidson County’s Chancery Courts, give it instead to a new statewide “super chancery court” with three new judges to be named by Gov. Bill Lee.
The GOP is hoping Americans forget Jan. 6. Let's remember this moment.
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Feb. 19, 2021
Whatever your political affiliation, we would all do well to consider what became of the Republican Party over these past five years and especially these past six weeks.
Before the colors fade, we should all take careful note of what happened – not only on Jan. 6, that gruesome day when the U.S. capitol was invaded, but what our ruling authorities failed to do about it, during and after.
Prominent in our lasting memories should be that shocking video the House impeachment managers made: damning scenes of mayhem, horrifying audio of insurrectionists with murder on their lips.
Blackburn, Hagerty, and the clown car that went badly off the rails
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Jan. 7, 2021
Last week both of Tennessee’s United States senators chose – freely and voluntarily – to place themselves squarely on the wrong side of history.
By Wednesday afternoon, the nonsense turned destructive and deadly at the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly President Trump’s unhinged nature, heedless of his own sworn duties, became monstrously visible for all the world to see.
It was not surprising to see Sen. Marsha Blackburn falling in line, but we were disappointed to see our newest senator, Bill Hagerty, making this his first official act. Immediately upon his swearing in, Hagerty joined the handful of bitter enders in the Senate, the dozen extremists who signed on to Trump’s lies about why he lost the November election.
What Just Happened? Context Helps. Words Matter (Part 2)
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Nov. 13, 2020
We live in horse country, and there is a funny thing that horses sometimes do.
It can be startling, but it always gives me a chuckle in the end.
A herd will suddenly start running for no particular reason and accelerate together in a thunder of hooves. But then, say at the far end of the paddock or corral, they will all just stop and sometimes you see their ears lay back.
It’s as if they are suddenly embarrassed at their involuntary mass psychology. They appear to stand around asking themselves, “What just happened?”
Who owns downtown Nashville and what should its future be?
Multiple stakeholders and conversations are needed to create a balanced lifestyle on Lower Broad beyond just Nashville's famed honky-tonks.
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Oct. 16, 2020
Downtown Nashville, our fraught front door that welcomes the world, is currently in the crossfire of a struggle for the soul of the city.
We love those aerial TV shots on “Monday Night Football” but currently the street-level views are not so dazzling.
Does anyone go anymore to historic Lower Broadway, between First Avenue and Fifth, who isn’t a bachelorette from out of town or an essential worker?
Is Tennessee Sen. Alexander the last of the problem solvers?
Sen. Lamar Alexander, who was mentored by Sen. Howard Baker, was famously about bipartisan collaboration. Now, that he is retiring, is that era over?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Sep. 18, 2020
Two national political reporters recently asked me if I thought, from a Tennessee perspective, the coming retirement of Sen. Lamar Alexander would constitute the “end of an era” for collaborative government.
It’s a good question. You should ponder it, too, if you appreciate solid progress on actual policy over the noise and empty pot-shots of shallower officials. Working across party lines is always the harder path, but it’s more productive in the long run.
Call it bipartisanship, or just working with others, but there are important examples in our Tennessee history. We appreciate this manner of conduct now because of its vanishing rarity in the capitols at Nashville and Washington.
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What would suffragists think 100 years later about American politics?
"The Woman’s Hour" author Elaine Weiss answers questions about how suffragists might have reacted to divisive rhetoric and attacks on the U.S. Postal Service.
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Aug 21, 2020
On Tuesday, we observed the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, the landmark in U.S. history that gave women the right to vote. We especially celebrate this in Tennessee, the 36th state that put our nation over the top for ratification.
And, as it turns out, two concurrent news events also have vividly reminded us why the 19th has been so important in American life for so long:
n a high road, Sen. Kamala Harris of California has become the first woman of color to be a national party’s candidate for vice president. Democrat Joe Biden announced she will be his 2020 running mate. (One imagines the old suffragists smiling at this news.)
President Donald Trump, on a somewhat lower road, said he aims to keep the U.S. Postal Service from helping citizens vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic. (A big turnout seems to worry him.)
These two events have brought into a sharp focus anew the high stakes for democracy in this strange election year.
Remembering the suffragists of 1920, what might they make of these developments? If they could observe our current political scene a century after their triumph for broadened civic participation, what would they say?
I believe they would celebrate the Harris news as good progress whoever wins this November and that they would scoff at Trump’s Postal Service gambit as a case of shameless corruption.
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How soon is it safe to re-open schools in Nashville?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT July 17, 2020
On the best of days, a school is a complicated place.
Consider the children, who come in a variety of sizes, behaviors, gifts, talents, and needs. The younger they are, the more most of them delight in crowding into each other’s faces.
Think of the educators, who lead the learning across all those differences. No wonder our best teachers, librarians, and principals are seen as heroes, if not saints.
Now, add into this mix the COVID-19 scourge that closed down our schools altogether in early March, and you have the most complex question of the summer: When and how can K-12 classes re-open – safely – so that education resumes and parents get back to work?
Confederate statue defenders are promoting an anti-history agenda
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT June 26, 2020
As more Confederate statuary comes tumbling down across the South, the most fevered objection I hear to these removals is how the angry activists “just want to erase our history.”
Where to begin with this.
First, the opposite is true: The aim of removal is not erasure, nor is it destruction alone, which we are right to abhor, but a more balanced understanding of America’s history, a less distorted view without the glorification of a failed insurrection.
The prominence of Civil War statues and busts lays a fog over our memory that clouds much of our actual U.S. history. These monuments hold aloft only one side of a story, and shed no light on its underside.
Unlike our monuments to heroes and patriots — like Washington, Jefferson and Jackson, who had flaws but are chiefly remembered for better deeds — these Confederate objects elevate a story that isn’t noble and never was. The enslavement of other peoples — being America’s original sin — was awful on its own but also has cast a long shadow that has oppressed even more people.
How not to reform education in Tennessee
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT May 15, 2020
For at least 16 months, the vital issue of education funding in Tennessee — particularly what private-school advocates label “school reform” — has been caught in a one-sided conversation on our Capitol Hill.
It has been a closed loop, held captive by Gov. Bill Lee’s office on the one hand and his obedient cronies in the legislature’s Republican supermajority on the other. It is the issue of providing public funding for use in private schools, through vouchers. On this subject, generally nobody else gets heard.
But on May 4, the third branch of state government called foul. It was Chancellor Anne C. Martin who weighed in with a ruling that what Lee calls his “Education Savings Account” program is unconstitutional. In so doing, she knocked down the closed-door conversation on vouchers.
The voucher issue has long been fraught with controversy. The question of providing cash vouchers to private-school parents, currently some $7,000 per child, is not a new gambit. But for decades vouchers have failed to win enough votes to become the law in Tennessee.
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Put anti-Obama politics behind us, expand Medicaid now, and save hospitals and lives in Tennessee
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Apr 18, 2020
The notion of a president or governor with no public service experience may be appealing to some voters — until it’s not.
It is not in Washington now, seeing how the Trump White House berates experts and rejects science. And this past month has shown how we are at a delicate point with our new state administration just two months into its second year.
We hope the administration of Gov. Bill Lee is making smart choices with the worst of the COVID-19 hospital surge still to come.
The early flip-flops on how much to tell the public about the contagion were not a good look for the governor, then he delayed giving a firm “stay at home” order to slow the spread. These next two weeks will bring further decisions on extending it (or not) as economic pressures mount.
What Gov. Bill Lee and legislature can do to help Tennessee's coronavirus response
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 10:11 a.m. CT Mar 17, 2020
Last Wednesday evening, we received a message from a friend in central Italy.
She was forwarding an anguished note from a friend of hers in Bergamo in that country’s Lombardy region. It reported dire conditions there from the spread of rampant COVID-19 infections.
Italy’s hospitals and medical personnel, she said, are being overwhelmed by many thousands of citizens crowding into emergency rooms:
“If you are in Europe or the U.S. you are weeks away from where we are today in Italy. Today the ICUs in Lombardy are at capacity – more than capacity….
“On Monday a doctor wrote in the paper that they have begun to have to decide who lives and who dies when the patients show up in the emergency room, like what is done in war. What happens when the doctors, nurses and medical staff are simply not able to care for the patients? …You have a chance to make a difference and stop the spread in your country. Soon you will not have a choice, so do what you can now.”
U.S. response has been slow and uneven
Neighbors across the city help Nashville heal after the tornadoes
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 6:00 a.m. CT Mar 11, 2020
This is a city of good people.
When the worst happens, as it did when the tornadoes came in the night, much is revealed to us and about us. We have seen not only images of destruction and stories of suffering and death, but also the good works of people we don’t know or commonly notice.
With all respect to James Agee, let us now praise men and women who deserve to be famous but are not – the neighbors who help neighbors, no matter anyone’s ZIP code, title or position. All these become visible to us in a hard time like we’re going through now.
Who will defeat Donald Trump? Democrats, choose wisely, then unite behind the eventual nominee
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Feb 21, 2020
On a lunch hour recently, in a neighborhood bagel shop on the west side, I ran into four women sitting together and discussing the candidates for president of the United States.
My “I Voted” sticker was visible on my jacket, having been to the Howard Office Building that morning. It was enough to spark a brief roundtable on the state of the race, on the Democratic side.
“We’re for four different candidates,” one of the women announced. I asked for details. One is supporting Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another favors Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a third believes Sen. Elizabeth Warren would make a fine president. The fourth said she was, actually, still deciding.
“So,” I asked, “nobody here is for President Trump?”
“No. We do agree on that,” one replied. “And we also agree: No more old white men!”
I let that remark pass. That’s my demographic, but I didn’t take it personally. I’m not running after all, so it wasn’t about me.
On Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, what will Lamar Alexander do?
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 12:24 p.m. CT Jan 30, 2020
On Tuesday afternoon, I took a call from a Washington reporter for NBC News. She asked me to speculate how Sen. Lamar Alexander might vote on the issue of calling “witnesses” in the Trump impeachment trial.
The call was unusual but an indication of how this week, on Capitol Hill, many eyes are trained on my former boss – not because Alexander is loud on the issue of the President’s impeachment but because he has been so silent.
POLITICO and The New York Times reported last weekend that other senators, Republicans and Democrats, are following closely what Tennessee’s senior senator is saying and doing on the witness issue. This is partly because he might be a swing vote but also his history of building bridges.
To be clear, I have no clue. It’s been 30-plus years since I worked for Governor Alexander, and I haven’t spoken with my senator in weeks. Yet even I am asked at least once a day, “What will Alexander do?”
Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton suggests new dynamics in 2020 legislative session
Keel Hunt, Columnist for The Tennessean
Published 5:00 a.m. CT Jan 17, 2020
In Nashville here’s how we know it’s January: The temperatures drop, any remaining birds fly south, and the Tennessee legislature rolls back into town.
It’s all as certain as the morning, though that part about the legislature can be especially chilling and cheerless as the winter wind.
“Now is the time,” the 19th-century statesman Daniel Webster is said to have once said, “when men work quietly in the fields and women weep softly in the kitchen. The legislature is in session, and no man’s property is safe.”
Tuesday was opening day for the 2020 session. On the House side, 2019 was a hard year for the Republican supermajority, most of the travail having little to do with official business.
