A preliminary legislative update, with first things first: Tennessee is now officially the Volunteer State.

No real surprise there. As suggested by Rep. Jason Zachary, whose staff discovered the surprising nickname oversight and who sponsored the remedy in the House, “It may not be the best move as an elected official in the state of Tennessee to oppose this legislation.”

No one did. If only everything were so simple and uncontroversial.

Another measure to establish a state symbol has not yet met with the same success: Rep. Chris Hurt and Sen. Ed Jackson introduced bills to enshrine the ladder as the official state tool.

I don’t know about you, but when I think “tool,” a ladder isn’t the first thing that leaps to mind. Or the second, or third, or… But maybe the sponsors considered a hammer to be too potentially violent. A saw to be too divisive. A wrench too wrenching. Pliers too bipartisan.

And a screwdriver too accurate.

We move now to a section devoted to Rep. Micah Van Huss, one of the most reliable lawmakers in the General Assembly – reliable in the sense that he can always be counted on to rush in where angels fear to tread.

You will perhaps remember his proposed constitutional amendment from last year “recognizing that our liberties do not come from government, but from Almighty God.”

A majority of his House colleagues agreed in April, and the measure was passed along to the Senate. It failed in the Senate Judiciary Committee last week for lack of a second.

God bless the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Still alive, however, is Van Huss legislation that would authorize any county or city to “take a special census that includes unborn children in its population.”

Van Huss wants state money to be apportioned not only according to the number of human beings, but the number of fetuses and fertilized eggs.

As if that weren’t enough: Van Huss also has a resolution whereby the legislature would officially designate CNN and The Washington Post “as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic Party.”

Van Huss is peeved at a suggestion that “Trumpism is cultlike,” which he accuses a Post editor of making last Oct. 3, and that “Trump supporters belong to a cult and that our president is using mind control,” which he attributes to a CNN host Nov. 24.

I don’t know about his CNN claim. As for The Post, the editor was in fact taking issue with a book that makes the cult association, a point apparently too fine for Van Huss to perceive.

He defended his resolution in a House Judiciary Committee meeting last week.

“My constituents are tired of those elitists in the media denigrating them and they are tired of fake news and they are tired of folks who don’t fight for them,” said Van Huss, of Jonesborough. “So I’m going to stand up and I’m going to fight.”

Rep. Bill Beck, a member of the committee, took issue.

“It’s a sad day in the legislature today,” Beck said, citing committee time spent on the fake news resolution and a Van Huss gun measure, extolling a citizenry armed to the teeth, “that do nothing but are intended to inflame and drive us apart.”

Van Huss is not one to be swayed by pleas for comity. His fake news measure reads like an argument by someone not quite up to the rhetorical rigors of disputation.

“Whereas,” one section reads, “it is fascinating to see this latest ‘cult of Trump’ meme coming from the left, because they are the true masters of deploying mobs to demand total conformity and compliance with their agenda. …”

It passed 13 to 5. God help us.

But let’s not end on that note. I give you now Rep. Dan Howell and Sen. Becky Massey, whose paired bills would create a new specialty license plate benefiting wildlife management and would feature a likeness of the Southern leopard frog.

‘The Southern leopard frog is often encountered near ponds and lakes,” the bills say, “but can also be found on the dissecting tables of eagerly nervous high school biology students.

“Although still not a creature of interest to budding iron chefs, the Southern leopard frog is found on many southern menus for the cognoscenti who appreciate the delicate flavors of its lower limbs.”

It’s nice to find a flower among the weeds.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]