House Speaker: Durham expulsion vote will happen
I went back to my alma mater this week to express my condolences.
It has been a difficult few months for my beloved University of Memphis.
Its two highest-paid employees, the football coach and the basketball coach, left for greener fields and shinier courts.
Last week, we got the disheartening news that it was spurned by the Big 12, a bigger, better athletic league.
What will ESPN think of us now? Will they ever think of us?
On the way to campus, I stopped to pick up some sympathy flowers. I thought tiger lilies might to class and the library and the student center. be nice, but Apparently, at many they only universities, academics is had them in even more important than orange. athletics.
The Makes sense. The university flower shop was created before had plenty the varsity, not the other of Oxford way around. Blues, but In fact, “university” is that didn’t derived from the Latin seem appropriate either.
I settled on a nice array of blue and white irises. It’s our state flower. Plus, iris oil can be used to make a sedative.
Turns out, no one on campus, at least no one north of the railroad tracks, seemed in need of a sedative or sympathy.
Flags are still flying at full mast. Fountains are still flowing in the plaza.
Thousands of students and professors are still going
— or a “community of teachers and scholars.”
U of M has campuses full of them.
Take Dr. Santosh Kumar, the “sensor guru” in the computer science department. He’s head coach of one of the nation’s “Big 11” Data Centers of Excellence. (Others include Ohio State, Michigan, Georgia Tech and UCLA.)
House Speaker Beth Harwell indicated Wednesday that there will be an effort to expel embattled Rep. Jeremy Durham, R-Franklin, when the legislature reconvenes in a special session next week.
“Expulsion motions are procedural in nature, so it is permitted regardless of the call,” Harwell told The Tennessean newspaper via email. “There will be a motion and a vote on expulsion, and I welcome the opportunity to vote for it.”
The announcement is the strongest indicator in months that Durham could be expelled from the legislature in the wake of investigations by The Tennessean and state attorney general related to his inappropriate sexual conduct. But Peter Strianse, a Nashville criminal defense attorney representing Durham in relation to an ongoing federal investigation, disagreed that an ouster motion against Durham during this specific special session would be legal.
“Article III, section 9, of the Tennessee Constitution precludes the legislature from conducting any ‘legislative business except that for which they were specifically called together.’ Any motion to oust Representative Durham would be beyond the scope of the proposed special session and, thus, unconstitutional,” Strianse said Wednesday afternoon.
On Friday, Haslam called for a special session to undo a DUI law that threatened to prevent Tennessee from receiving $60 million in federal highway funding.
Haslam said it was up to lawmakers whether to include expelling Durham, who is accused of inappropriate sexual contact with at least 22 women.
Unless lawmakers remove Durham, he is set to receive a lifetime pension that would annually give him $4,130.
House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, RChattanooga, said Wednesday he’s still holding out hope that both Durham and Rep. Joe Armstrong, DKnoxville, will resign before the start of the special session. Harwell made no mention of expelling Armstrong, who was recently convicted of a felony in a federal tax case, but Mc-