Vanderbilt medical center staff went on high alert Monday due to a self-inflicted injury from current state senator and former Lt. Governor John Wilder. No, he didn’t pull the trigger on his Medic Alert bracelet again, rather took dead aim at his own feet by invoking “Rule 13″ about a conflict on interest in a bill about hiring illegal aliens.

Former lieutenant governor and current Sen. John Wilder said Tuesday that as far as he knows, he does not employ illegal immigrants on his West Tennessee-based cotton gin.

The clarification comes one day after he declared he had a conflict of interest on a bill relating to the employment of illegal immigrants.

Monday, on the Senate floor, Wilder declared the Senate’s “Rule 13,” which lawmakers are supposed to declare when they have a conflict of interest on a particular piece of legislation.

“I couldn’t run my cotton gin without Mexican help and I’ve done this for a long time,” Wilder (D-Mason) told his Senate colleagues Monday.

Tennessee historians will recall that the Cotton Gin, a new invention at the time, was a personal gift to Wilder by Eli Whitney himself. Ironically, in exchange for then youthful Wilder’s support of the Spanish-American War.

Later during Monday’s floor session, Wilder extrapolated on his previous comment:

“Let me apologize. Because of my personal relationship with these employees that we’ve had for these many years that have come back year in and year out, it’s personal, and that’s one reason I feel like I do. They are trustworthy. They work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“They are hard-working people and they are good people and they are Christian people and they are family people and that’s the reason I feel like I do.”

No word on whether those “good, Christian people” qualified for healthcare or the minimum wage or whether they were simply paid in food and shelter for “doing a few chores”.

Local ACLU attorney Bruce “Country Jo & The Fish” Barry took umbrage with Wilder’s flirtation with discriminatory hiring practices . “That the former Lt. Governor would demean his office by seemingly discriminating against Undocumented Agnostics is regrettable.”, Barry lamented. “Hopefully in the future Mr. Wilder will consider both legal and illegal atheists to work 84 hours a week for bread and water on his 21st century anachronism.”

Not one of Wilder’s Senate colleagues asked the 85-year-old Wilder for an explanation Monday. No one else in the body publicly declared that they had a conflict of interest.

Asked Tuesday whether he actually does employ illegal immigrants on his West Tennessee cotton gin, Wilder said he employs “Mexican workers” who are from “somewhere down there in Mexico,” but they are “not illegal people.”

“We’ve never had anybody say anybody’s illegal,” Wilder told The City Paper. “We’ve been doing it a long time, and a lot of them come back often and so forth.”
[...]
Wilder said his son, John Shelton Wilder Jr., run the cotton gin, which uses seasonal workers for about two-month periods.

“As far as I know, it’s not illegal,” Wilder said.

Congratulations for opening this tempest in a taco, Mr. Wilder. As April 15th approaches, as far as we know, you haven’t been avoiding taxes on these workers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 10:23 am and is filed under Illegal Immigration, White Trash Wednesdays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.