The next time you hear a Tennessee legislator pontificating about how he (or she) votes in accordance with what we constituents want, just go ahead and laugh out loud.
Slap your knees. Wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes. Write up a quick chain email about this uproarious joke.
Then look your Volunteer State lawmaker square in the eye and ask who those constituents are: the residents of Tennessee or his precious thousand-dollar suited lobbyists from the tea-party-leaning Beacon Center or Americans for Prosperity?
A Vanderbilt University poll of Tennessee registered voters found that a resounding 64 percent said they support Insure Tennessee. What's more, a whopping 78 percent want the full Legislature to vote on Insure Tennessee. Only 19 percent said they oppose Gov. Bill Haslam's negotiated Tennessee version of the Affordable Care Act which would help 280,000 low-income, working Tennesseans to buy private insurance in a program that won't cost Tennessee anything. Nada. Zip.
But Haslam's Insure Tennessee proposal was defeated twice in Senate committees during the recently concluded legislative session. Figuring prominently in those defeats were "no" votes from our own Republican lawmakers, Sen. Todd Gardenhire and Sen. Bo Watson, both of Chattanooga, and Sen. Mike Bell of Riceville.
"When the legislators walked into a hearing Tuesday morning to debate the measure, they looked out from the dais to a room packed with more than 100 people wearing red 'Americans for Prosperity' T-shirts," NBC's Perry Bacon Jr. reported on the day of one of those two committee votes.
You do the math: 64 percent of all Tennessee voters is clearly a number greater than 100 tea party T-shirts.
But, of course, that's not the math legislators bother calculating. They add and multiply with donor dollar signs.
The Tennessee constituents were clearly ignored, and the special-interest, partisan lobby groups won those rounds.