What happened? Is Tennessee a Democracy?

What happened when a Republican supermajority gained control—and wasn’t satisfied
By Anne Applebaum

Drive along the outer rim of the exurbs north of Nashville, past structures that might be barns or might be wedding venues, around developments called Vineyard Grove or New Hope Village, and eventually you will arrive at what is meant to be the new headquarters of the election commission of Sumner County, Tennessee. A featureless one-story brick warehouse with some makeshift offices attached, it has just enough space for the tiny handful of election-commission employees, the 275 voting machines that they recently purchased, and maybe some of the maintenance workers who used to share rooms with them, back when the agency was still in the basement of the county-administration building.

To fully grasp this story, you need to understand that the standard forms of American political polarization don’t exist in Sumner, a rural but rapidly suburbanizing county where Democrats are not part of the equation at all. None has won any county office for more than two decades. Instead, the main opponents of the Constitutional Republicans, who won 14 out of 17 seats on the county commission (following a general election in which only 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots), are the ordinary Republicans—or, as their opponents would call them, RINOs (“Republicans in name only”). The Constitutional Republicans’ website explains that RINOs are different from themselves: “They raise taxes, they vote to silence the citizens, they won’t protect private property rights. They often partner with Democrats to defeat true Constitutional Republicans like us.”

Upon taking over the county commission, the Constitutional Republicans issued a document formally declaring that their activities will be “reflective of Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” They also shut down the HR department, tried to privatize a public historic building, and refused to pay for the election commission’s move to the brick building, although it had been agreed by the previous administration. The old offices—three basement rooms that recently flooded—were too small to store the new voting machines, and also insecure. The entrance to the basement stood right beside a cashier’s window where dozens of people were lined up to pay taxes on the day I visited. The county commissioners are unmoved by those arguments. “If we don’t fund it, you don’t get to do it,” Jeremy Mansfield, one of the Constitutional Republicans on the county commission, told the election commission at one public meeting about the move last fall. At a meeting in June, another county commissioner, angered because the new voting machines had been delivered to the new building, said that although he would “hate to pull the ace card,” the commission could always “declare this property surplus, and sell it.” That would leave the election commission, and its machines, with nowhere to go.