Tennessee General Assembly

The Tennessee General Assembly is the formal name of the legislature of the U.S. state of Tennessee.

According to the Tennessee state constitution of 1870, it is a bicameral legislature and consists of a Senate of thirty-three members and a House of Representatives of ninety-nine members. The representatives are elected to two-year terms; according to a 1966 constitutional amendment the senators are elected to four-year terms which are staggered, with the districts with even numbers being elected in the year of Presidential elections and the those in the districts with odd numbers being elected in the years of Tennessee gubernatorial elections.

Each house sets its own rules and elects its own speaker; the Speaker of the Senate carries the additional title and office of Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee. For over three decades, both speakers have been from West Tennessee; this has caused considerable resentment in the eastern two-thirds of the state.

According to the state constitution, the Secretary of State, state Treasurer, and the Comptroller of the Treasury, who serves many of the functions of an auditor, are selected by the General Assembly in joint convention, where each member of the General Assembly is accorded a single vote and the office is awarded to the first candidate to receive a majority of the votes (67 of 132). A contested gubernatorial election is also to be decided by a joint convention of the General Assembly according to statuory law; the General Assembly is to decide the election by joint convention according to the constitution in the event of an exact tie in the popular vote, an extremely unlikely proposition.

The General Assembly districts of both houses are supposed to be reapportioned based on population as determined by the U.S. federal census on a deciennial basis; in practice this was not done between 1902 and 1962, a fact resulting in the United States Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr which required this action to be taken and subjected it to judicial review. Aftwerwards, there have been other lawsuits, including one which resulted in an order for the body to create a black-majority district in West Tennessee in the House in the late 1990s.

The General Assembly also selects the members of the State Election Commission. It selects three members from the majority party (the one controlling the majority of the 132 total seats). In theory, they then select the members of the 95 county election commissions; in practice the General Assembly members tell which members of their party from their districts should be elected and the parties themselves select the members from the party which is not represented in that county by either a state senator or a state representative.