🥊ROUND TWO IN DISTRICT 65

The Republican primary for the District 65 state House seat looks quiet. It isn’t.

Every two years a few thousand people in southwest Williamson County pick a state representative, and most years nobody even notices. District 65 isn’t a swing seat. Win the August Republican primary and you’ve effectively won. So it’s a race hiding in plain sight, which is a shame this time, because it’s more interesting than the signs let on.

State Rep. Lee Reeves holds the seat. He won it in 2024, briefly ran for Congress, dropped that bid when Trump endorsed someone else, and then regrouped to run for re-election. Michelle Foreman wants that same seat, and has been seeking elected office for a while, having lost races in 2019, 2022, and right here in 2024. This is the rematch.

The easy way to cover it is positions and endorsements. But the more useful way is to look at what the office actually does and ask which of these two is built to do that work.

Start with Reeves, the incumbent, because he’s the one with a record. Reeves got seven bills signed into law in his freshman session and six more in 2026. One of them, House Bill 749, makes it a misdemeanor to drive in Tennessee on an out-of-state license issued to someone here illegally, and he points to it as proof he is, in his own words, “a leader in the fight against illegal immigration.” He also voted for the governor’s school-choice expansion, which supporters argue has helped forestall another expensive high-school expansion in a fast-growing county. And he landed a seat on Finance, Ways and Means, the House committee where the money gets decided. Last, the Tennessee Journal also named him Freshman of the Year. Whatever else you make of all that, it’s a record of legislating, which is more than his opponent can claim.

A record also leaves a man a couple of things to answer for. Reeves voted for school choice — to send public money to private schools in a county where the public schools are half the reason people moved here. The families who moved here are now owed a straight answer on why their tax dollars should help fund private-school tuition, not just the glossy pitch from the school-choice groups that likely helped put him in office.

His one real fight with his own side came over House Bill 855, a caucus measure changing party rules that the State Executive Committee voted almost unanimously to condemn. Whether one agrees with the bill or not, crossing the party’s grassroots on a question this central to party governance is the kind of vote that deserves a clear public defense. A case has been made here on this page without apology, but Reeves should make that case himself — and voters should hear it.

His first term also raises a different question. Barely settled into the seat, Reeves launched a campaign for Congress, saying he ran because Williamson County deserved representation there. When President Trump endorsed someone else, he ended the effort and returned to District 65. The issue isn’t ambition. Politics is full of ambitious people. The issue is commitment. Voters are entitled to know whether they are choosing a representative for the next two years or simply the next opportunity.

Somewhere in a stack of more than a dozen signed bills across two sessions, the question is which ones changed daily life for an ordinary household in Fairview, Thompson’s Station, or Franklin. Reeves points to measures affecting local transportation, growth costs, and emergency line workers. Voters can decide for themselves whether those accomplishments justify another term.

On the other side of the equation is Foreman, who is harder to read because she’s never held the office. Her campaign thus far is mostly about Reeves. So look at what Foreman has done instead. An what she has done, mostly, is litigate.

Foreman sued Nashville councilman Dave Rosenberg, who beat her in 2019, for $300,000 after he called her “truly unhinged” and pointed to her own social media to prove it. A Davidson County judge threw the suit out under Tennessee’s anti-SLAPP law and sanctioned her $100,000, a penalty the court said was meant to deter similar suits. The judge also found a “determined degree of willfulness” in her effort to “impose extreme expense on those she sees as critics.” An appeals court upheld the dismissal last December.

If that wasn’t enough, she brought two more defamation suits in the same stretch, one against the Democrat who beat her in 2022 and one against a private citizen. She admitted in court to filing one of them in a different county “to find a better jury,” then dropped the case an hour before the hearing.

History matters, here, for a plain reason: a representative who answers criticism with a lawsuit is a particular kind of hire, and a district ought to know when it’s making that choice.

Foreman has accused Reeves of “committing federal felonies” for owning apartment buildings, even though the conduct she describes does not match any crime on the books. She also asked a court to seal a concluded case of her own from public view, arguing the public had no legitimate interest in it. For a candidate who runs on transparency, wanting her own record erased is a tell. The court declined… and yes, we are interested.

The longer and considerably less polite version of Foreman’s litigation career ran on this very platform almost a year ago. For anyone who wants the full tour, it’s still there. Look back at last July.

Foreman’s politics are mostly the party’s, tough on immigration and close to Trump. The exception is school choice. “I am not in favor of vouchers,” she told a 2024 forum, and, “Vouchers will not help, I am against them.” It’s an odd place for a MAGA conservative to break with both her governor and her party’s national standard-bearer on a signature issue. Voters deserve to hear her explain that contradiction.

One thing Foreman talks about frequently is election integrity. She has advocated for hand-marked paper ballots, hand counts, and additional auditing procedures, and has spent years questioning how elections are conducted and counted around the country. The relevant question for Williamson County voters isn't what she thinks about Georgia, Arizona, or Pennsylvania. It's whether she believes changes are needed here. Williamson County's election system enjoys a strong reputation for accuracy and professionalism. Voters can decide for themselves whether Foreman's proposals would strengthen that system or attempt to fix something that isn't broken.

And there is one very big, very unfortunate wrinkle. Before moving to Williamson County, Foreman served on the Tennessee Republican Party's State Executive Committee. In 2022, that committee voted to overturn the result of one of its own elections after voters had elected a write-in candidate. That candidate was Mark Pulliam, and Pulliam says Foreman voted with the majority to invalidate his victory. So before voters worry about what Foreman thinks happened in Georgia, Arizona, or Pennsylvania, there is a much simpler question much closer to home: why did she vote to nullify a Republican election? If Pulliam's account is accurate — and it reads as authetic — Republican voters cast ballots, a candidate won, and party insiders stepped in afterward and threw the result out. Foreman may have had reasons she believed were valid. But if she wants influence over election policy in Williamson County, voters deserve to hear that explanation from her directly.

Whatever one thinks of the underlying dispute, the contradiction is difficult to miss. The candidate who warns that elections cannot be trusted participated in setting aside the result of one.

In most races her election views would be a talking point. In this one they’re closer to a job description. The District 65 seat helps shape who serves on the Williamson County Election Commission. Under state law, the county’s legislative delegation recommends the commissioners, and those recommendations are effectively final. The commission runs every election in the county, decides how ballots are cast and counted, and sets the rules poll workers follow.

If elected, Foreman would help influence the people who administer elections here at home. Voters are entitled to know what that means in practice. Who would she want on the commission? What changes would she push for? Name names now, before the primary.

And let’s talk local. “Keep the charm, don’t sell the farm” sounds great on a yard sign. The problem is that a state representative isn’t a county commissioner, a planning commissioner, or a city alderman. Annexations are decided by cities and counties under their own growth plans, and the most a legislator can do is try to rewrite the statute and wait. Anyone promising to fix it personally from a House seat is selling a power the office doesn’t carry.

Strip away the signs and a real choice remains. The incumbent has a record to defend, from the bills he passed to the quick detour toward Congress and back. The challenger has a record to explain, much of it made in courtrooms rather than committee rooms. One candidate spent the last two years legislating. The other spent much of the last several years campaigning, litigating, and fighting political battles outside the office she now seeks.

The campaign finance reports due in July will show who is paying for all of it. When they arrive, a lot of the fog should clear. None of this is difficult to weigh. It just requires paying attention.

The seat is bigger than the race for it. It helps write the state’s laws and sits near the budget, and it has a hand in who runs the county’s elections for years after this one. That’s a serious thing to hand out in a quiet primary. Worth more than a passing glance before the vote.