On January 24, famed Tennessee political figure John Jay Hooker died at the age of 85. This obituary covers many of the remarkable activities in his political life, including being a seminal figure in the first winning case for equal population for legislative districts. The obituary does not mention that Hooker was perhaps the very first person to suggest to Ross Perot that Perot run for President, and that Hooker, along with Jack Gargan, would not let the idea die until Perot started taking it seriously.
Although Hooker was a Democrat, he was frequently an independent candidate in his later years for important office. His last run was in November 2014, when he polled 30,579 votes as an independent for Governor, placing third.
His last political crusade was to force Tennessee to acknowledge that conflict between the State Constitution and the actual practice of holding judicial elections. Tennessee had been using retention elections for judges for decades, during a period when the State Constitution did not recognize that practice and said judges should be elected. Hooker was outraged that the state was ignoring its own Constitution, and filed lawsuits in federal court and state court to force the state to come to grips with the conflict. Finally the legislature and the voters amended the State Constitution to explicitly put retention elections into the document.
