Nashville News Blog

My world has turned upside down. A bill sponsored by Rep. Stacey Campfield has just cleared a subcommittee. Stranger still, this bill might actually make sense. It would change family law to accommodate parents called to active military service. They could ask a judge to temporarily assign someone else their rights to visit their children.

The House Family Justice Subcommittee puzzled over this bill for a few minutes this morning, assuming there was something wrong with it because Campfield's the sponsor. They asked Tennessee Bar Association lobbyist Steve Cobb what he thought. "It seems like a good bill," a dumbfounded Cobb reported before the subcommittee passed the bill. It was all a little surreal.

Here in the gritty Legislative Plaza pressroom, reporters are discussing whether Campfield has ever gotten one of his bills this far in his four years in the House. Under the reign of Democrats, his bills were routinely killed in subcommittee. Democrats once played with Campfield's emotions, someone recalls, and let one of his bills make it all the way to the Calendar Committee, one step away from the House floor, and then they killed it.

Update: Here's more from Humphrey on the Hill.