July 3, 2002
If ever there were any question about the honesty of our state speaker of the house, July 2 nd should've been the day of that melted any doubt away. Speaker Naifeh made an agreement with CATS budget sponsor Representative Frank Buck. Here was the deal. Bucks, who had been waiting for the income tax to die before running his bill, would run the CATS bill first on one condition. That Naifeh would call for a vote on the income tax within two hours if CATS failed. CATS did, indeed, fail just before 9PM. Under the agreement, Naifeh would have until 11PM to bring his income tax bill to the floor. If it failed to pass, the issue would be dead. That was the deal.
Talk radio jumped into action. I immediately sent an e-mail to the thousands of people on our FOP list (Friends Of Phil) alerting them of the situation. Steve Gill and I coordinated our efforts and agreed to meet down at the Capitol. We filed reports on our respective stations and I proceeded to log updates each quarter hour.
The people turned out en masse. A reporter from Channel 4 commented to me on the sidewalk in front of the Capitol that “there were only about 25 protesters just 25 minutes ago.” By 10PM their numbers swelled to around 1,000 with hundreds more circling and honking. Sign-waving, horn-honking, taxpaying citizens overwhelmed the few pro-tax protestors, who had been camped out since the weekend.
An interesting sidebar. The pro-taxers with multicolored hair had taken over the normal talk radio spot and turned it into a mini Woodstock. Mr. Technicolor hair churned out loud, obnoxious music over their sound system as at least one supporter, who looked like he'd gotten into the brown acid, stood atop a concrete barricade and writhed to the music. I followed their extension cord to find the source of their power. We always bring our own generator. The cord led all the way back to a plug in the state office building. Even then, they were sucking off the government. How analogous to the whole income tax debate.
By 10:30, we saw representatives filing out of the Capitol. Jimmy Naifeh had adjourned for the evening without running his income tax bill and vowed to bring it back the next day. Apparently, the crowd had gotten to some of the softer ‘yes' votes. Members were furious, as was the crowd outside. Once again Naifeh had lied.
This should come as no surprise. The whole government shutdown was purely the doing of Naifeh and Governor Sundquist. Remember that last year we reached the end of the fiscal year without a budget but they passed a continuation bill to keep government open. They could've done that this year but Naifeh and Sundquist chose to shut things down to make people squeal.
The funny thing is, most people didn't even notice the government was closed. This ploy was taken straight from the playbook of the ‘Connecticut Plan', which was used masterfully by the pro-income tax forces there to pass an income tax in 1991. The pro-income tax forces here made one major miscalculation. In Connecticut, the people were much more dependant on state government. In Tennessee there are far less of us supping at the government trough.