NASHVILLE, Tenn. — State Rep. Jody Barrett (R–Dickson) is pushing back hard against the national pressure campaign to expand Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher program, accusing the Club for Growth and its president David McIntosh of trying to intimidate Tennessee conservatives into compliance.
In an op-ed published Tuesday in The Tennessean, Barrett likened McIntosh’s tactics to The Godfather, writing that his recent letter to lawmakers “reads like something out of the mob playbook” — an offer Republican legislators “can’t refuse.”
Barrett said McIntosh’s group, which has spent millions in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District and other GOP primaries, is using out-of-state money to “bully Tennessee conservatives into falling in line” on a “budget-busting, Sharia-law-enabling, rural-community-destroying” voucher expansion.
He argued that the so-called “Education Freedom” program has failed to expand opportunity, citing Tennessee Department of Education data showing that nearly 90% of scholarship recipients came from only 16 of the state’s 95 counties — most of them the wealthiest — and that a large majority of participants were already attending private schools before applying.
Barrett said that’s not expanding access but “subsidizing tuition for those who were already paying it.”
The Republican lawmaker also pointed to his own experience in this year’s 7th District congressional special election, where he finished second despite heavy spending by Club for Growth Action against him. Barrett said his opposition to Lee’s voucher bill reflected the “overwhelming majority” of his constituents and that he “won [his] two House-district counties despite $2.5 million in negative advertising.”
In the column, Barrett contrasted McIntosh’s push for state-run vouchers with what he called a more fiscally responsible approach: President Donald Trump’s proposed federal school-choice tax credit plan. He said that while 94% of Republican voters in his district support school choice in principle, just over half support the current universal voucher plan — with nearly 70% preferring Trump’s federal approach instead.
Barrett closed his piece by framing the debate as a test of principle, not party loyalty, asking whether Republicans “will be a party of principle or a party of political expediency” and whether they “will follow the money or the voters and the values that built our movement.”
McIntosh’s earlier Tennessean op-ed, published Oct. 28, argued that “school freedom” has become “the heartbeat of America’s reform movement” and the new test for GOP candidates — a view he said was validated by Matt Van Epps’ victory over Barrett in the 7th District GOP primary. McIntosh warned that Republicans who oppose school vouchers “should expect to lose their next primary.”
Barrett’s rebuttal underscores growing friction within Tennessee’s Republican ranks over the scope and pace of Gov. Lee’s Education Freedom Act, which would make private school scholarships available statewide beginning next year.
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