Right Minded Online

I’ve long had the sick feeling that Mae Beavers was in her last term in the Tennessee General Assembly. That fear was confirmed last week when she announced that she would not seek re-election, and that she will instead run for Wilson County Mayor. At least we wouldn’t be losing her totally. But the State Senate will lose its most principled conservative.

Senator Beavers spent 8 years in the State House of Representatives, first winning election in 1994. She made a name for herself during the infamous years of Governor Don Sundquist’s second term. Beginning in 1999, the trinity of Governor Sundquist, then-Senator Bob Rochelle, and, later, then-Speaker of the House Jimmy Naifeh began a four-year full-court press trying to stick Tennesseans with an income tax.

Mae Beavers opposed the income tax from the outset, and, unlike many of her peers, stuck to her opposition. A frequent guest on Nashville talk shows hosted by conservatives Steve Gill and Phil Valentine, then-Representative Beavers became not only a critic of the income tax, but an outspoken one, and that’s how her name spread beyond District 57.

The odd thing about those years was that the Tennessee GOP was largely devoid of any male elected conservative leadership. The state’s most prominent Republican, Don Sundquist, was firmly in the tank for an income tax just weeks after his second inauguration, this coming after he campaigned against an income tax. Elected conservative leadership thus came from then-Senator Marsha Blackburn, and Representatives Mae Beavers, Donna Rowland, and Diane Black, while the male GOP caucus members were either cowering in their opposition or acquiescing to the income tax.

When the income tax ultimately failed to pass during the 2002 legislative session, conservatives claimed victory. Don Sundquist was on his way out, and, after Mae Beavers announced that she would challenge Bob Rochelle for the Senate in District 17, Rochelle bailed out, leaving Beavers to face off against an unknown Democrat challenger, Sherry Fisher, from Carthage. Mae Beavers won election to the Senate with 52% of the vote. What made her victory especially remarkable was that District 17 had heretofore been the Democrats’ turf. District 17 is Al Gore country, after all.

Mae Beavers won by simply being conservative: low taxes, limited government, pro-life, and pro-Second Amendment. That she had consistently voted conservative made her a credible conservative candidate. Not only did she articulate conservatism on the campaign trail, she voted that way in the General Assembly. (It’s what I call “principled conservatism.”)

Senator Beavers continued doing the things that had made her a conservative icon while in the House. She voted against budgets that exceeded the Copeland Cap, noting that it doesn’t make sense to vote against overriding the Copeland Cap, and then vote for a budget that overrides the Copeland Cap. She attempted to phase out the state’s sales tax on food, but couldn’t get her bill past the Democrats. She consistently made efforts to advance gun ownership rights. She defended the unborn.

Mae Beavers had illustrated that conservatives can win in yellow dog Democrat districts by winning them over as conservatives, and not by trying to out-Democrat the Democrats. This is how Ronald Reagan won landslides in 1980 and 1984. It really does work.

While serving her first term as a State Senator, Mae Beavers overcame a bout with cancer, and managed to still serve the voters of District 17 while taking chemotherapy. When 2006 rolled around, she was recovered and ready to run for re-election. That’s when Bob Rochelle announced that he would challenge Senator Beavers for his old Senate seat. By now, Senator Beavers was well-regarded for her principled conservatism. Voters knew that what Senator Beavers promised on the campaign trail, she would deliver in the Senate. And so she easily won re-election, this time getting 58% of the vote.

One of the frustrating things for conservatives is watching good conservatives go to Nashville, or go to Washington, D.C., get sucked into the political machine, and lose their conservatism. Don Sundquist is a prime example of an elected conservative gone bad.

Senator Beavers never went bad, never got corrupted by “the system.” She’s every bit as conservative now as the first day she set foot in the State Capitol in 1995. I wish she had run for governor, but I understand why she wants to spend her time here in Wilson County. Politics is often a cutthroat business that can easily corrupt elected leaders if they aren’t careful. By the time she leaves the Senate, Mae Beavers will have served the people of Wilson County (as well as the other counties in her district) for 16 years.

I’ll miss having her as my state senator, but should she become our next county mayor, the voters and taxpayers of Wilson County will be very well served by one of the most principle conservatives we’ll ever see in elected politics.