BREAKING: Tennessee Republicans DEMAND $18 Million for "Charlie Kirk Plazas"
Tennessee Republicans wanted every public university in the state to build a memorial plaza to Charlie Kirk, complete with Ten Commandments plaques and a legally shaky mandate that could land the state in the same court fight it’s already lost once before. It stalled in March, not because Democrats blocked it, but because the GOP’s own committee couldn’t stomach the price tag.
A Tennessee bill that would have forced every public university in the state to construct a memorial plaza honoring conservative commentator Charlie Kirk stalled in the state House on March 4, 2026, after members of the Higher Education Subcommittee balked at its cost.
What the Absurd Bill Required
The bill, HB 2025, filed by Republican state Rep. Monty Fritts of Kingston with a companion bill from Sen. Ferrell Haile, would have mandated a 1,600-square-foot “Charlie Kirk Memorial Courtyard for Civil Debate” on the main campus of every public university in Tennessee, 47 institutions across the University of Tennessee system, the Board of Regents system, and locally governed schools, including Middle Tennessee State, Tennessee State, and Austin Peay.
Each courtyard would have needed to be open to the public by December 31, 2026, and would have featured four plaques: the Bill of Rights, the full text of the Declaration of Rights from Article I of the Tennessee Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Ten Commandments, each carrying Kirk’s name and date of death.
The fiscal note broke the cost down by system: $11,875,000 for the Board of Regents schools, $3,750,000 for the University of Tennessee system, and $2,510,000 for locally governed institutions, a combined $18,135,000 in year one alone, plus roughly $235,000 a year after that just for maintenance. The bill did allow universities to accept private donations and grants to help cover construction, but the mandate itself came from the state.
Fritts defended the price tag with a religious framing. “In the Bible, God would often have his people stack up stones to remember where he had moved or something significant,” he said. “I think we need to do that more.”
Even Republicans Wouldn’t Sign Off
On March 4, 2026, the House Higher Education Subcommittee voted to send the bill to summer study, a move that effectively shelved it for the rest of the session without formally killing it. Its odds from there weren’t good.
What’s notable is who did the shelving. This didn’t die because Democrats blocked it. Tennessee’s legislature has a Republican supermajority, and it was pushback from inside the GOP over the bill’s roughly $18 million fiscal note that sent it to the legislative graveyard of summer study.
Democratic Rep. Ronnie Glynn of Clarksville raised a separate objection while the bill was still being debated, pointing out the state was mandating a specific, non-negotiable name for the memorial. “To force a university to say we’re going to call it by this name, it kind of goes against the freedom of speech in my opinion,” Glynn said. “If it was just called the Courtyard of Civil Debate, I could be like, ‘absolutely.’”
The Ten Commandments Requirement
Beyond the cost, the bill’s mandatory Ten Commandments plaque sat on shaky constitutional ground. The U.S. Supreme Court already struck down mandatory Ten Commandments postings in public classrooms in Stone v. Graham back in 1980, and legal observers flagged that a state-mandated religious display at public universities, not privately funded or optional, but written directly into state law, invites exactly the kind of Establishment Clause challenge that’s sunk similar measures elsewhere.
In other words, even if lawmakers had found the $18 million, the bill as written was arguably teeing up a lawsuit Tennessee has a fairly poor track record of winning.
It Wasn’t the Only Kirk Bill Moving Through the Statehouse
Fritts’s plaza bill was one of two Kirk-related bills working through the Tennessee legislature this session. The other, the “Charlie Kirk Act,” HB 1476, filed by Republican Rep. Gino Bulso of Brentwood, took a very different approach: it required universities to adopt free speech and political neutrality policies modeled on the University of Chicago’s Freedom of Expression Policy and the Kalven Report, banned retaliation against students and faculty for protected speech, banned viewpoint discrimination in inviting campus speakers, and opened up new legal grounds for any Tennessee resident to sue a university or faculty member over alleged speech violations.
Unlike the plaza bill, Bulso’s version kept moving. It passed the Republican-controlled General Assembly in April 2026 and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee shortly after. Bulso told reporters he filed it to promote “robust civil debate on our public colleges and universities” and to “honor the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
Tennessee wasn’t alone in trying the plaza approach. Oklahoma state Sen. Shane Jett filed a bill requiring a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza at every public college in that state, one version of which specified a statue of Kirk “sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him.” That bill also stalled. Georgia’s Senate passed its own Kirk-branded free speech bill, notably without a plaza mandate attached.
The Backdrop: A University That Already Paid Half a Million Dollars Over This
The plaza bill didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Weeks before it stalled, Austin Peay State University, one of the 47 schools that would have been required to build a plaza, reinstated a tenured professor it had fired over a social media post about Kirk’s killing, and paid him $500,000 to settle the resulting dispute.
Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, while speaking at Utah Valley University, and the fallout at campuses nationwide, firings, disciplinary hearings, lawsuits, has been playing out in state legislatures since. Tennessee lawmakers spent early 2026 trying to legislate free speech protections in Kirk’s name while one of their own universities had just spent half a million taxpayer dollars settling a case over what happened when a professor actually exercised that speech about him.
Tennessee Republicans tried to force every public university in the state to build a legally questionable, $18 million monument to a single political commentator, funded by taxpayers whose universities never asked for it. It took pushback from inside their own party to stop it, at least for the time being. The bill wasn’t killed outright, just deferred to summer study, where it was expected to come back up still carrying both the price tag and the constitutional problem that got it shelved in the first place.
Tennessee Rethuglicans are even stupider than the average Rethuglican. I don't suppose there are any children going hungry in Tenn, who could use the $$$ these perfect morons would like to distribute.