Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed official guest host Aaron Gulbransen in-studio to discuss the call for transparency by the Tennessee Supreme Court’s process in the election of the state’s attorney general.
Leahy: Right now, I want to talk with our official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report and the lead political reporter of The Tennessee Star, Aaron Gulbransen. Aaron, we were just talking about Attorney General Slatery, whose 8-year term is up on August 31.
He says he doesn’t want to come back again, so the Supreme Court in the state of Tennessee, the only state of the union where the attorney general is selected by the five members of the Supreme Court, he has not joined any of the other states that have sued the defense department over this COVID-19 vaccine requirement for Tennessee National Guard members. Now they’re not being paid, those who didn’t take the vaccine, and they’re on their way out.
And so this is the kind of passivity, shall we say, that we don’t want to see in a Tennessee attorney general. And again, Slatery is a good attorney, and when he decides to take a case, he does well, although he’s not led on a number of these issues.
He’s led on one or two, but for the most part, he’s missed it. Here in Tennessee, according to our state constitution, the attorney general is selected by the five members of the Tennessee Supreme Court.
The last time they did this, was in September of 2014. They selected Herb Slatery, and he was one of eight finalists that they had perfunctory kind of last-minute hearings about. And he was basically Governor Haslam’s pick.
In essence, the Supreme Court rubber-stamped his pick, even though the state constitution gives the governor no role in this process. By tradition, I suppose that’s what happened.
I’ve got some interesting information for you, Aaron. I’d like to get your reaction to this. There are five members of the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Four of those members were appointed and confirmed after the last time they selected an attorney general. My point on all this is, it was not a particularly transparent process back then.
Do we have any expectation that the process this time will be more transparent? And does the Tennessee General Assembly want to play a role?
Gulbransen: It would be really interesting if there were four not new, but newer, Tennessee Supreme Court justices [who] had decided to put their own stamp on the process and make it a lot more transparent.
I’ve heard some proposals being floated out there to give the Tennessee General Assembly an advisory role in the process, even though it’s not in the constitution, but to have some hearings in the interest of transparency with the legislators. Because, think about it this way, too: you have the attorney general who works, obviously, in the judicial branch, he’s appointed by that, works with the General Assembly, and works with the governor.
So, it is in the interest of the people, you would think, to have a completely transparent process … because you’re not just appointing a standard bureaucrat here, you’re appointing the chief lawyer for the state. And so it would be very interesting to see if these justices would actually decide that, hey, we’re newer than the last guy. Let’s put our own stamp on it.
Leahy: And let’s just make this other part of the argument. I think these five justices–I haven’t tracked all of their cases, but the cases that I’ve tracked, I think they came down on the right side of the law in significant ways.
Back in 2018, an election issue about the timing of the election where they made the right choice for the mayor’s election. They followed the state law regarding the education vouchers.
They came down on the side of the governor, but they followed the state law, allowing that, calling that law constitutional. And the whole carpetbagger-Robby-Starbuck fiasco, on his part. I think they made the right choice there as well.
So I think judicially, they’ve got a very good track record, it would seem to me, and – they may be listening to us; we call them every day and say, what’s happening? They haven’t officially told us, but I think they kind of can read the room, and the room says it’s time for transparency. Will you be calling them today?
Gulbransen: Yes, I will, as I do every day.
Leahy: We call every day. When are you announcing the finalists? When will you hold hearings, and will they be open and transparent and robust, as opposed to perfunctory?
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
