Nashville’s new congressman has become a local embarrassment and a national liability

Andy Ogles does have an office in Tennessee, but it’s locked. No signs indicate that the U.S. representative for 708,000 Tennesseeans resides in suite No. 5 on the second floor of 22 Public Square in downtown Columbia, where — in our fourth attempt at contacting the Ogles office — the Scene handed a business card to Ogles aide James Amundsen through the partially cracked door.

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“This is just where his mail comes,” says Madison Ausbrooks, who works the desk at Whatley & Ricci. “I think his office is somewhere on the square, but I honestly don’t know where you can find him. If I knew, I would tell you.”

Ogles has lots of reasons to hide. Shortly after gerrymandering by Tennessee’s Republican supermajority carved Nashville into three odd-looking new districts, Ogles won the Republican primary with a 36.9 percent plurality — about where polls put the size of the Trump base in Tennessee. He beat out Beth Harwell, a former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Kurt Winstead, a retired brigadier general in the National Guard, both of whom Ogles attacked as insufficiently conservative. “Liberals, we’re coming for you,” he told the crowd on the night of his primary victory, before cruising to a 13-point victory over state Sen. Heidi Campbell in the general election.

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Last week, UT scholar Nathan Kelly spoke to the Scene about democracy, fascism and authoritarianism in Tennessee. He said, in part: “Democracies die a slow death by 1,000 cuts. And so, while I think we do have to be careful with our rhetoric and we don’t want to be overly alarmist, at the same time, any move away from democracy is a move toward authoritarianism. And if one doesn’t raise the alarm on initial steps away from democracy, you pretty soon find yourself 20 or 30 steps closer to authoritarianism.”

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https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverstory/pleading-the-5th-rep-andy-ogles-stumbles-into-congress/article_f4b9e4bc-edd7-11ed-ab4b-bbed5a52185a.html