Tennessee’s Legislature proved unusually inept this year in passing a 2010-11 budget and trying to reach adjournment. Lawmakers have run five weeks past their own proposed deadline for ending the annual legislative session. And even then, the budget they finally passed last week failed to close the corporate tax loopholes or make any of the revenue adjustments recommended by Gov. Phil Bredesen.
As a result, the Legislature had to approve the lay-off another 853 state employees, bringing to 3,500 the total of state jobs lost in the current and pending fiscal years due to the recession and 22 straight months of declining tax revenue. It also had to dip deeper into the state’s vital contingency funds, even as they agreed to whack services and education budgets across the state. Tennessee’s School of Medical Sciences alone, for example, will suffer another $30 million in cuts next year — further crimping its ability to provide for Tennesseans’ health-care needs — and state employees will again go without a pay increase.
The reason legislators refused to debate even the most restrained revenue measures, of course, was that some lawmakers face daunting election battles later this year and don’t want to be accused by anyone of raising fees or taxes, even by ending corporate tax loopholes.
Chief among these risk-adverse lawmakers is Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, who is running against Congressman Zach Wamp and Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
Yet today, on the last day of the Senate’s session, Mr. Ramsey will be required, however briefly, to rule on a request related to a mountain-top-removal coal-mining bill that will again expose just how inextricably linked he is to the coal-mining industry, which has showered him and his political action committee with $195,000 in campaign contributions since last year.