I’ll plead revenue dept. begin restitution, amnesty after halting illegal spying
After deposing official in our fraud-busting case, I hope to take irenic approach with 2 lawyers defending oppression worth F$1 billion a year to insurance companies
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Saturday, July 6, 2024 — Pending my deposition on Tuesday of a state official, I have been thinking about the words that I plan to share with the department of revenue lawyers once I excuse the witness.
Three Tennessee citizens (by God’s providence) will be sitting in the corporate board room of the department of revenue at 500 Deaderick St. in Nashville — three gnomes and two attorneys representing the commissioner, David Gerregano (“The Guano”) and tax employees who may drop in.
I have thought of two approaches in the brief we will exchange with Camille Cline and Anne Warner, attorneys at law, sitting opposite of us. The milder and gentler one is proper.
And that is that we three common citizens — (1) Christopher Sapp, my midstate bureau chief, and (2) Ed Soloe, the chain-smoking handyman and gnome librarian, and (3) me, a radio investigative journalist — are here to redeem the department from a program that is outside of the law it almost every point, a program that is a fully metastasized cancer.
We are here on behalf of 7 million Tennessee residents and citizens who are under continual arrest threat, seizure of car threat, jailing threat, criminal prosecution threat, 408,800 of them in a recent five-year period have been criminally convicted in the state’s courts.
The state, in other words, prosecutes and convicts them as criminals — most of them poor, many of them black and Hispanic, and many “white trash” like us gnomes.
We are here to bring peace between the state of Tennessee and the people. We are here to restore good relations, mutual respect.
Messrs. Sapp and Soloe and I are the gnomes who in July 2023 put a contested case to the department which has been in process for a year. Nothing like this intensely fought case has ever occurred in the department of revenue in The Guano’s term a commissioner, I suspect.
I’m demanding return and restoration with my motor vehicle tag. I don’t want a special favor, I don’t want an exception or exemption not readily and noisily granted to any and all. I want my tag back because I demand the 7-year-old Eye of Sauron system of EIVS be scrapped.
We are here to have the commissioner do the right thing because he is endangering himself and all of his employees by engaging in violations of T.C.A. § 55-12-201 et seq that are unmistakable and that we triangulated as law violations from not just two points, but dozens.
We want the commissioner now rather than next year to admit the program is illegal and begin a program of restitution and restoration and amnesty.
We demand the reform generate from within the 800-person department based on a clear reading of the law that we have supplied. Better inner reform than reform imposed from outside by a chancery court judge, the court of appeals, the Tennessee supreme court, a federal judge, a grand jury or a state or federal criminal prosecutor
I think that an irenic rather than a confrontational approach will go farther in Mmes Cline and Warner that we have made no mistake and that Brad Buchanan, the administrative hearing officer, is set to deny my petition and is predisposed to deny it, given a 30-page ruling against my motion for injunctive relief that he denies.
The commissioner can decide now by what I have said thus far — which isn’t everything — and determine that Tennessee is an after-crash voluntary insurance state, that the Eye of Sauron does not surveil and send fiery darts to all registered car owners who are not insured. The law dictates that EIVS — landscape-crisping electronic insurance verification system — focus its beam only on up to 3,000 high-risk drivers under administrative probation who use their licenses and tags conditionally under suspension. These high-risk people have violated the Tennessee financial responsibility law of 1977 by refusing to obey its accident-reporting terms or by having failed to make good on a court judgment following a car accident or DUI case.
We are here to help the department return to compliance with the law it is charged with administering, the Atwood amendment. We are here to restore amicable relations between the people and the state.
We’re not here to cause harm or injury to anyone in the department, but are giving notice about the law’s demands. I want relief. We gnomes demand relief for all the people by ending of the scam giving insurance companies a captive audience, an imprisoned clientele.
The program will come to an end in this case, one way or another. Best it come from within than from without. Best for all parties involved that The Guano retreat from arbitrary and capricious acts done in his person, outside his lawful office and agency, and that he cease all such acts in his personal estate and run his office solely from within the limits and confines of Tennnesee code, title 55, chapter 12, and no further, which is his charge from Gov. Bill Haslam when he was sworn into office in December 2016, and from Gov. Bill Lee who reappointed him January 2019.
The oath matters, and so do the rights of the people, who have rights under law to honest government.
This is but one battlefront of many. Victory shall be ours as long as we keep fighting.