The Tennessee State Capitol in downtown Nashville.
Brian Kelsey
Frank NiceleyNASHVILLE – Republicans raised alarms on the state Senate floor Monday night about a GOP colleague’s bill aimed at stripping Tennessee primary voters’ ability to determine who their respective party nominees are for U.S. Senate and put it in the hands of just 132 state lawmakers.
“This bill is anti-democratic,” charged Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown. “This bill smells of elitism, of cronyism, and it would open up a system that was and could be in the future rife with corruption.”
Sen. Frank Niceley, R-Strawberry Plains, defended his proposal which would do a partial end run around the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment, approved by states in 1913, took away state legislatures’ power to name U.S. senators.
The federal government hasn’t functioned right ever since with exploding debt and trampling of states’ sovereignty, Niceley said. He said federal spending accounted for just 7 percent of gross national product before the change.
“Since then, it’s gone to 42 percent,” he contended.