Bruce Griffey: The Constitutional Conservative Future Judge who Hates the Constitution
Hey all, sorry for the delay. I’ve actually been wanting to write this story for a bit but, you know, holidays and all that. Anyways, with the new Legislative Session in January and judicial elections in August, this seems to be very apropos.
Many of you have likely heard about a bill to essentially purge Tennessee’s undocumented population from the public school system. Now, anyone with a functional brain and sense up empathy could see that this is a bad idea. However, if like the sponsor, Mr. Griffey, you lack both, I’ll lay it out: besides being cruel to people who are illegally here by circumstance of their parents’ economic situation, you are essentially guaranteeing a significant amount of the state’s population, whose presence the Tennessee government has no control over, are locked out of a basic touchpoint for social services and minimal social, technical and intellectual skills that will help them survive and, ironically, integrate into their community.
However, this law is absurd on another level: Mr. Griffey is either willfully seeking to violate the Constitution, or, as a practicing lawyer in the Criminal space for decades, has less knowledge of the Constitution than a second year law student. And, at the risk of being cliché, I’m not sure which is worse.
To explain this, I do have to dox myself slightly. I myself am a lawyer, and was in my second year of law school sometime within the last decade. In that year of school, most law students have to read, or at least had to learn the basic precepts of, Plyler v. Doe in the context of Equal Protection. Thanks to a little slavers’ rebellion Mr. Griffey might have heard of, all individuals are entitled to equal protection under the law, a precept which undergirds much of modern Constitutional law.
To summarize a lot of law, to justify an action which discriminates on the basis of certain classes (race, alienage, etc.) there must be a compelling reason with no narrower way to solve the given issue, “strict scrutiny.” For other classes (age (protections for this are in federal law, not the Constitution), education level, work history, etc.) the government need only show some conceivable rationale for the discrimination, “rational basis.”
Finally, there are classes which the Government may discriminate against only with an important (rather than compelling) reason. These include sex, illegitimacy, and key here, immigration status. In Plyler, Texas, surprise surprise, wanted to cut funding to undocumented students in public primary and secondary schools, and charge any undocumented child who did attend. The Court’s opinion, written by the great Justice Brennan, said explicitly that there is no adequately compelling justification for denying undocumented children the rights to free public school where it is available to all other children, or even to demand payment where others may attend for free.
If that law sounds familiar, then that is because, with perhaps differences only the technicalities, does the exact same thing as this law that has been affirmed as unconstitutional in case law for around 40 years. If anything, this law is even more dire than the unconstitutional Texas law. And it is not like Griffey should not know this. Again, any law student this decade worth their salt should know this, and by my math, Mr. Griffey would have learned this no earlier than 1987 (assuming he went straight from high school to undergrad to law school), a time when this was not only settled law, but fresher in the mind of law professors who would be teaching him. No lawyer with a functional knowledge of Constitutional law should propose this.
The issue is that this is not Mr. Griffey’s “clearly unconstitutional” rodeo. Mr. Griffey rode into the Legislature in 2018 by taking out relative moderate Republican Tim Wirgau in the Republican primaries. Mr. Griffey’s district is composed of Henry, Benton and Stewart counties. These three counties, in the aggregate, lost 423 people even as the state in general grew by nearly 9%. This is bad, especially if you are in the Party that controls the municipal, county level and state governments, and hold all of the federal elected positions in the area. Mr. Griffey seems to have conveniently gotten around this by blaming the few willing to come into his district.
Mr. Griffey’s first set of bills included a whole host of anti-immigrant bills so vociferous that in 2019, almost all bills which immigrant rights group TIRRC made it their priority to oppose that year were authored (or at least sponsored) by Mr. Griffey.
Instead of going these laws one by one, I’ll give you what may be the most egregious: HB0562. That law would have taxed all money transfers from Tennessee to a foreign country, and send those funds collected to the Federal Government one the condition it builds a border wall.
Now, we do not have to go to this law being clear to any law student to show its stupidity (though by Supreme Court standards it is Tennessee essentially making its own foreign policy, a big Constitutional no-no). That is because it violates principles taught in 9th Grade civics.
The case McCulloch v. Maryland is (or at least should be) taught to every student. The crux of that case is that federal law is superior to state law, and state government may not unilaterally direct the Federal Government or impede its operation. Directing by law the Federal Government to spend money provided to it in the way a state government desires is a definitional violation of Federal Supremacy.
But at least he is in the Legislative branch and not directly in charge of implementing or interpreting law.
Wait no, he’s running to become a Circuit Judge.
What is concerning about this run is not anything as complicated as law school constitutional precepts or even high school civics but the basic idea that nepotism is bad.
For you see, despite having a face apparently made of scrotum skin, Mr. Griffey has a wife, and a lawyer wife no less. And this wife, not unlike her husband, has designs on being a judge.
This power couple thought they had an opening for Mrs. Griffey when Gov. Lee elevated local Chancellor McGee to the Court of Appeals. The couple were so eager that Mr. Griffey offered what could be interpreted as a quid pro quo to Gov. Lee, saying he would be “forever in [Gov. Lee’s] debt.”
Despite this tempting offer, Gov. Lee went with someone who, unlike Mrs. Griffey, primary practices in the civil law that a Chancellor would actually oversee (Mrs. Griffey appears to have practiced civil law in a different state in the past, but according to her LinkedIn, has been a DA for the better part of the past decade, and all her TN experience has been criminal). The Griffeys of course responded to this relatively reasonable appointment in an adult way.
That is, they essentially set out on the war path against the new Chancellor. This included changing the procedure for the Judicial District’s GOP primary so that they, as officials in the local GOP, could engineer her removal from the ballot as the GOP’s nominee. He also denigrated the new Chancellor as unqualified because she “has no campaign experience,” an element which eagle-eyed readers will note has no bearing on one’s quality as a Trial Judge.
The organized opposition over a failure to partake in blatant nepotism made the new Chancellor quit after nine days and abandon any ambition for judicial office in the future. Truly, the noble and ethical character we all want in a Judge.
For those of you who only pay attention to the newest headline-grabbing law likely meant as red meat for his primary voters, it is important to stress the depths to which this guy should not have gotten anywhere near where he is. He is a lawyer who doesn’t know (or maybe doesn’t care about) the law. A legislator who doesn’t know (or maybe doesn’t care about) basic civics. An aspiring judge who doesn’t know (or maybe doesn’t care about) the ethical standards a judicial position merits.
Thanks again, this story has honestly been a long-time coming. If you have any tips, email me at tennessee0101@protonmail.com. If you want hot takes or less involved commentary, follow me on Twitter @TNPoliticsGuy1.
