Lee Reeves Lacks Character, and Shouldn’t Be Let Anywhere Near Congress

SUBSCRIBE 

Williamson County neighbors: 

Hi. It’s Jared Sullivan. I began this community newsletter after the Covenant massacre in 2023. My posts have been infrequent in recent months, because I’ve been promoting a book, VALLEY SO LOW, about TVA. Now that book promotion is finally slowing down, I will, fingers crossed, begin writing more frequently about local political and gun-reform-related issues. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a letter I wrote that ran in the Williamson Herald this morning. It’s about House Rep. Lee Reeves, who, in addition to the problems I outline below, has no interest in pursuing meaningful gun-reform measures. Williamson County is full of upright, well-meaning people, and we should expect our representatives, no matter the party, to reflect our fundamental decency and share in our desire to make Tennessee a more vibrant, safer, and economically robust place to live. Reeves’s policy platform would work against all those goals.

In the coming weeks, I’ll follow up with a post about who I think actually deserves your support.

Lee Reeves Lacks Character, and Shouldn’t Be Let Anywhere Near Congress

I read with dismay in a recent edition of the Herald that a large number of Williamson County elected officials — some of whom I greatly admire — have thrown their support behind Lee Reeves, who currently represents House District 65 in the General Assembly and who’s now vying to fill Mark Green’s vacant seat in Congress. Lee, a reactionary through and through, lacks character and has no place representing our fine community in any capacity, much less in the U.S. House. He has made this point clear in his brief, dismal time in public life.

Reeves won his campaign for House District 65 last summer because a pro-voucher, out-of-state PAC spent nearly $1 million to support his campaign. And how did the PAC support him? By sending out deceptive mailers that attempted to smear the good name of a longtime public servant, County Commissioner Brian Beathard, Reeves’s opponent. You’d think a Christian — and Reeves very much wants you to know he’s a Christian to help secure your vote — would aim to run an upright, honest race and would therefore denounce such dirty tactics. But Reeves never did, which says much about his principles, or deficiency thereof. 

Despite the mailers, many voters saw Reeves for what he is: a puppet for out-of-state interests. Which explains why a million dollars in lies bought Reeves only 95 more votes than Beathard. 

What’s truly remarkable is that several local leaders who now support Reeves — among them the mayors of Fairview, Franklin, and Thompson’s Station, plus County Mayor Rogers Anderson — also had misgivings about his candidacy. They published a letter in the Herald last July, stating that the pro-Reeves mailers “cross[ed] the line of decency,” and expressing concern about “out-of-state PACs and ‘dark money’ special interest groups’ ” influencing local elections. That Reeves has now won their backing is as striking as it is saddening.

Once in office, Reeves continued to demonstrate his poor discretion by helping push through Governor Lee’s voucher scam, which this year will siphon $447 million in taxpayer funds from public schools statewide, including those in Williamson County, and give much of that money to well-off families whose children are already enrolled in elite private schools. Williamson County residents broadly oppose private-school vouchers, as do voters nationwide: no school voucher bill has ever passed through a ballot initiative or referendum. And yet Reeves made defunding our excellent public schools — the economic foundation of our county and the reason why many of us moved here — his top priority. 

If you need further reason to be wary of Reeves, I would urge you to follow him on social media, where he spends much time posting about culture-war issues while saying almost nothing about how he intends to improve our county in real, material ways. 

Many local leaders would represent Williamson County well in Congress. Lee Reeves isn’t one of them, and every day we allow such an unprincipled man to remain in office, we do a disservice to ourselves. —Jared Sullivan