The Senate recently took up what seemed to me like one of its exceedingly rare common-sense bills, the barring of anyone from holding more than one elected office at a time. Double-dipping, as it were.
“There’s an inherent conflict when people hold multiple offices,” as state Sen. Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville), the sponsor, told the body. I fully agree. And yet Democrats – every last one of the measly six in the 33-member body – voted against it.
What the …?
The effect was disconcerting. Had I entered Bizarro World, that DC Comics realm where logic doesn’t apply? Worse still, had some overnight conversion somehow occurred so that I awakened that day as a … Republican? Ye gads, as Mama (a Republican herself) would say.
Even my usual Democratic lodestar on matters of common sense, Sen. Jeff Yarbro, spoke in opposition. Clearly this was an issue calling for further research on my part.
The bill wasn’t even on my radar. Introduced last year, it passed the House in February 2025 but stalled in the Senate State and Local Government Committee. Then, phoenixlike, it arose a few weeks ago to be heard in that same body.
There, committee chairman Briggs made his case in much the same manner as with the full Senate. He explained the bill would allow current multiple-officeholders to continue to run for reelection – they’d be “grandfathered,” in legislative lingo – but not if there was a break in holding either office.
For example: Someone who was simultaneously on a city council and a county school board could continue running for reelection to both, but not after leaving either or both offices.
Sen. Kerry Roberts questioned the reasoning.
“Why wouldn’t we have them make a choice, when they’re in two separate offices, one term expires, why don’t we make them make a choice which path they’re going to go versus letting them run for reelection to both?”
Yarbro had the same objection.
“It troubles me,” he said, “that we’re going to have a statute that generally affords on a long-term basis rights to certain people who are in power that are denied to citizens generally. That just strikes me as not something this legislature should do.”
Briggs was sympathetic.
“I agree this bill does not do what I’d like to,” he said. “I’d like to clearly outlaw it.”
The problem, as he explained, is the political reality surrounding the issue. A couple of years ago when an outright ban was proposed, he said, it ran into trouble in a House committee because of “sympathy and support” for those holding more than one office.
Hence the grandfathering-in of those folks via the current bill. Sen. Page Walley described it as a route to an eventual ban on the practice. “I think we’ve reached, as best we can, the best glide plane down to eliminating this,” he said.
Yarbro – surprising me – actually waffled some on whether the overall intent of the bill was a good idea.
“I don’t like the multiple office-holding as a concept,” he told the committee, “but we also do a lot better job sometimes when we let the voters be the people who regulate who gets to serve.
“I kind of think if we’re not going to do this right, we shouldn’t do it,” he went on, “but I also think there’s potentially reasons to not do this.”
Fair enough, I guess, but I think the reasons to do it outweigh the reasons not to: Briggs told of a past situation in which one unnamed fellow held five – quintuple-dipping? – offices at once.
As for the “carve-out” that Yarbro opposed, no, it isn’t the ideal approach. But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.
As Briggs put it, the bill is “really trying to make more democratic government.” Even with the small “d,” that’s not something you hear very often in this legislature.
Take the win, Democrats. They’re few enough.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.