RE-ELECT CARTER TO LEGISLATURE
State Rep. Mike Carter is loyal to his constituents, his conservative ideals and his conscience, and, what’s more, he likes his job representing House District 29.
“I feel like the luckiest man in the world,” says the threeterm Republican representative of the district that spans the northernmost and easternmost parts of Hamilton County.
Carter’s mixed loyalties, he admits, sometimes cause his fellow legislators to wonder “where I’m going to end up on a bill.”
“I have a need to change some things,” he says. “I hope and honestly believe I speak for those who have no power and no resources with which to purchase power. … Doing the right thing is not always the politically correct thing.”
It is just such principles which make us admire Carter, 65, and endorse him for another term.
He is opposed by Cleveland Middle School teacher Tammy Magourik, 53, a resident of Ooltewah and a former chairwoman of the Bradley County Democratic Party, former vice president of the Bradley County Democratic Women and current president of the Cleveland Education Association.
Carter, while in Nashville, has helped pass an annexation bill that others had attempted for 38 years. In the most recent session, he steered the state toward ending emissions testing (an end he said would be “life-altering for the less fortunate”), sponsored Supported Decision Making legislation (helping people with disabilities make as many decisions as possible about their lives), sponsored the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (preventing the innocent from losing property when a crime is committed) and sponsored legislation that will help stop batterers from filing frivolous lawsuits designed to bankrupt or inflict additional harm on people they already have abused.
Further, he sponsored a bill that streamlined the adoption process in Tennessee and one that banned most underage marriages in the state.
The passage of so many consequential bills would be a career for some but was just a season for Carter.
In the next session, if re-elected, he’d like to work on issues of mental health and health care.
“We owe it to our people with mental health issues,” Carter says. “[The situation’s] reached a breaking point.”
On health care, he says, “to say we don’t provide health care is a lie. It’s how we deliver it. That’s the biggest disappointment in my whole life.”
Magourik has based much of her campaign around education, the field in which she has trained and worked for many years. She believes legislators need to thoroughly immerse themselves in education legislation because “students and teachers are not being treated fairly,” the state Board of Education is not monitored well enough and results of the consequential TVAAS tests do not consider wider criteria.
“It’s time legislators take back control of education,” she says. Magourik also wants to work on health care for the working poor, mental health issues in public schools, the state’s opioid crisis and traffic control in certain Chattanooga interstate bottlenecks.
While we appreciate the challenger’s laser-focused interest in education, we hope voters will return Carter — truly a man in public service for the right reasons — to the legislature.