September 16, 2025 
 
Dear Members of the Tennessee GOP State Executive Committee: 
 
As fellow members of the Tennessee Republican Party, we respectfully urge your immediate action to address the legislative overreach imposed by Senate Bill 799 (SB 799) and its companion, House Bill 855 (HB 855), enacted during the 2025 legislative session of the 114th General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Bill Lee. 
 
These bills contain centralized and dictatorial control, undermining the autonomy of county parties by restricting their ability to determine their own sovereign nomination methods.   The autonomy of political parties to select their candidates is a cornerstone of our republican process, protected under the First Amendment’s associational rights. State intervention through SB 799 and HB 855 disrupts the valued local control that empowers county parties to operate effectively and represent their communities’ interests. 
 
 This overreach threatens our party’s ability to freely choose candidates who reflect our values and priorities.   As a private organization, a political party and its various local chapters have always enjoyed complete autonomy to select their nominees to political office as they see fit.    With the majority passing to republicans in this state around 2010, we are now governed largely by members of our own party.    
 
It is a breathtaking and very troubling development indeed that now those same elected representatives see fit to replace a grassroots system run by local party members with a socialist, top down system of rigid control from a distant capital, where those same legislators now unjustly are able to pick winners from the elitist centers of state power.   This is tantamount to the “soft tyranny” that Alexis de Tocqueville warned us about in the 19th century, in his book “Democracy in America,” and to acquiesce to this socialist power grab is to endorse the exact type of rule that the republican party was created to prevent. 
 
We call upon the Tennessee GOP State Executive Committee to take immediate and decisive action by initiating legal proceedings to challenge SB 799 and HB 855. Such action is critical to restoring and protecting the internal autonomy of our county parties, ensuring that our nomination processes remain free from undue state interference. 
 
We trust in your commitment to uphold the principles of the Republican Party and look forward to your prompt response and action on this urgent matter.   Thank you in advance for your timely and urgent attention to this matter, 
 
Sincerely, 
 
 
 
 
Members of the Tennessee Republican Party