Lame Don
If ever a governor was a lame-duck, it's Gov. Don Sundquist, after 24 hours of exhausting, exhilarating activity in the state legislature that appears to have reduced the governor from merely politically ineffective to impotent and irrelevant. It also appears to have left the income tax dead and seals the Sundquist legacy as one of massive over-spending and a failed grab for a new tax code designed to fund what he himself described as the endless expansion of state government.

A once-very popular congressman who won the governor's mansion twice, the second time by a landslide, Sundquist now limps toward the end of a second term marked by no notable accomplishments. The state's finances are a wreck precisely because he wrecked them - spending reserves, blowing surpluses, refusing for years to reform TennCare, overcharging the federal government $450 million via an illegal nursing home tax-and-grant program, and filling his budget proposals with unaffordable pork like $27 million to build fraternity houses at MTSU and ETSU, and golf-cart crossings at state parks.

After 7-plus years of profligate spending, mismanagement and lies, the Sundquist Administraton has ended with a whimper, his grand dream of turning Tennessee into a high-taxing and big-spending state crashed on the rocks of reality: almost no one wanted the snake oil Sundquist was selling.

It was an amazing 24 hours. Tuesday, Spendquist pathetically proposed a new tax reform plan he described as a "compromise" but which was really a bait-and-switch. It would have imposed a 1% income tax come Jan. 1 - to "test" the constitutionality of it, the governor said - and voters would have been asked to vote - 2 years from now - on whether to call a constitutional convention on taxes. If they voted no, the income tax would rise to 3.5%.

But of course the income tax is already unconstitutional, and we have three state Supreme Court rulings that say so. We don't need to do something illegal to 'test' whether a stacked court of liberals will let the government get away with violating the restrictions placed on it by Article 2, Sections 28 and 29, and Article 11, Section 9, of the state constitution.

And of course there was no guarantee that Sundquist's allies-in-taxation - House Speaker Jimmy "We Vote 'Til I Get My Way" Naifeh and Sen. Bob "Work is a Taxable Privelege" Rochelle - wouldn't later push a bill to strip the referendum out of the law.

No matter - the press barely had time to report on Sundquist's proposal (which he announced with all the emotional fervor of a limp dish rag) than the legislature yawned and ignored him. Last night, Jimmy Soprano made one last stab to keep his income tax alive by lying to Rep. Frank Buck - Naifeh promised to bring the income tax up for a vote but instead adjourned the House after realizing he didn't have the votes.

But by Wednesday afternoon, Naifeh - his credibility in tatters - was reduced to admitting his income tax plan was dead. And Gov. Sundquist, according to Channel 4 news, was forced to promise he wouldn't pursue "tax reform" again for the rest of his term.

Of course, there's no guarantee the governor, who campaigned for his job by promising loudly to oppose an income tax, will keep his promise. He still has a few more months to dream and scheme and try once more for "tax reform." But the events of the past 24 hours have shown he has paid a high political price for his lying ways: No one is listening to him anymore.

Thank God it's over.