A few very good friends of this writer have remarked that the columns which have appeared in this space over the last week exposing what we are calling "Amendmentgate," the altering of an amendment to the passed 2011-2012 Tennessee State Budget without the knowledge of legislators-except for the ones guilty of the alteration. Frankly, I've been told that I am "attacking" Republicans and that I shouldn't do that, since it is well-known that this writer is a Republican, and an active one at that. It is not and attack, least of all upon the Republican Party, to simply demand full disclosure. That is what many Republicans demanded in the wake of the Tennessee Waltz bribery scandal, so we as a party should be prepared to let the standards we demand of others apply to us as well. That does not weaken our party, but strengthens us because it says that Tennessee Republicans have the one quality that the Democrats did not have when they were in control of the General Assembly-real openness.

 

It should be said that at this point that one of the things this writer has come to believe is that the people who made the change to the budget amendment did not seem to have malicious intent. There seems to have been a genuine concern on the part of most of the legislators who appear to have participated in this business or had knowledge of it that without a change to the language of the budget amendment, Tennessee would somehow come into a prolonged conflict with the federal government. Some may have argued that the Campfield amendment, which would defund Planned Parenthood as written, was unconstitutional at the State level because it used the budget to change State law. Senator Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) argues for his part that the amendment was written to apply to funding rules for this year, and that it made no de jure legal change-he knows that will have to come next year. The problem at hand is the way in which these changes were made, and the larger question worth asking, namely whether making these kinds of changes to legislative intent can happen frequently because we clearly see that it has happened in the instance of the Campfield amendment.

 

Complicating the story is this idea that we want to avoid conflict with Washington, but why? Are we afraid of federal threats? The State of Indiana is clearly not, as it is prepared to fight the federal government in court in order to de-fund the world's largest abortion provider. Indianapolis has said that it will openly act in defiance of the Obama Administration and enforce the law that it has passed and that Indiana's Republican Governor Mitch Daniels has signed. If conflict with the federal government is the prime concern over the Campfield amendment, that issue won't go away either this year or next, and Indiana is showing the nation that they are ready to take on the challenge. If Governor Haslam uses the line-item veto to negate the altering language and thereby enforce the Campfield amendment, Tennessee will enter the fray immediately. If Republican leaders do not push for a line-item veto now, but then do as promised and pass the de-funding law in full as part of next year's session, the spat with Washington will only be delayed, but will almost certainly come-and in a Presidential election year. We should not be afraid to fight the federal power when Tennessee is fighting for what we know to be right. If the General Assembly intends to defund Planned Parenthood, why delay the inevitable?