In the first Senate roll call vote on TVA board nominations in nearly 25 years, the U.S. Senate voted 86-12 Tuesday night to confirm Democrats Ron Walter and Virginia Lodge to the Tennessee Valley Authority board.
Walter, general manager of the Memphis CBS television affiliate WREG-TV, and Lodge, a Nashville business consultant who was previously commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services, won 5-year terms on the 9-member, part-time board that oversees TVA. Their confirmation will put the governing board for America's biggest government-owned utility entirely under Democrats for the first time since TVA's current board system was adopted by Congress a decade ago.
Walter and Lodge succeed Barbara Haskew, a retired MTSU professor who lives in Chattanooga and is a Democrat, and Bill Sansom, the chairman of H.T. Hackney who lives in Knoxville and is a Republican.
TVA nominations are typically approved on voice votes in the U.S. Senate. But the rare roll call vote was ordered Tuesday after some Republicans objected to Obama putting all Democrats on the TVA board without advance input from the GOP senators in the Tennessee Valley.
Both of Tennessee's Republican senators voted for the confirmation of Walter and Lodge after the TVA board nominees signed a letter Monday indicating that they would recuse themselves from involvement in deciding on the Bellefone Nuclear Plant financial plan being pushed by a Democratic real estate developer. Franklin Haney, a former Chattanooga congressional and gubernatorial candidate who made a fortune developing real estate, talked with Walter and Lodge about his plans for Bellefonte before their confirmation.
Both Corker and Alexander said Walter and Lodge are qualified for the TVA board so they joined the majority of senators in favoring their confirmation. But the Tennessee senators also have vowed to have more Congressional oversight of what will now be an entirely Democratic board governing TVA next year when the Senate is controlled by Republicans.
"I have expressed before my displeasure with this White House's process for nominating TVA board members," Alexander said in a statement Tuesday night. "It has regularly ignored the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent on presidential nominations, one of the Constitution's most important checks on executive power. Next year, when there is a Republican Senate majority, this will change."
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340