State Sen. Richard Briggs highlights medical, military service and pushes opioid, traffic and AI priorities

State Sen. Richard Briggs introduced himself and sought re-election, saying he has served the region at the county and state levels while working as a heart surgeon and serving in the U.S. Army reserves.

"I'm State Senator Richard Briggs," he said at the start of his remarks, adding later, "I've done open heart surgery on almost 10,000 of our Knox County residents." Briggs identified himself as a conservative Republican and said he has been a registered Republican for 56 years.

Briggs emphasized his local and national experience as part of his pitch. He said he served on the Knox County Commission after winning a seat in 2008 and was elected to the Tennessee Senate in 2014. He also described 38 years of Army service with overseas tours in Korea, Egypt, South America, Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he commanded the largest hospital in Afghanistan and in Iraq during his later tours.

As chairman of the state and local committees in the Tennessee Senate, Briggs said he can "bring a lot of bills that benefit Knox County and East Tennessee," and he used the platform to highlight policy areas he said he has worked on and wants to pursue if re-elected.

On public-health and opioid policy, Briggs said he shepherded a 2017 law that "closed two-thirds of the pill mills in the state," while leaving legitimate pain clinics open. "We cannot back down on that," he said, arguing the change reduced harms to families and public safety. He also said he has been "very instrumental in the rehabilitation of our drug addicts" and described forming a statewide heart-and-stroke network intended to speed patient access to appropriate care.

Briggs framed his work on taxes and the economy as part of a broader GOP record. He said Tennessee "pays the lowest taxes of any state in the country" (while acknowledging an asterisk for Alaska) and asserted the state has the least debt per capita; he also said the number of federally defined "distressed" counties fell from about 23 to about eight under recent Republican leadership.

Looking ahead, Briggs said traffic on the I‑40 corridor needs attention and warned that the growth of data centers and artificial intelligence is "happening and changing so fast, we don't know where it's going to go," urging action now. He also described a proposal he referred to as the "280G program," saying it would direct sheriff's offices "to turn arrested felons over to the IRS for deportation," a description he used in the remarks; he did not specify the legal mechanism or how the proposal would operate in practice.

On taxes, Briggs said he has opposed increases for many years and noted that, he said, Knox County had not had a tax increase since 1999. He closed by asking listeners to allow him to "return to the state senate so I can represent Knox County and Knoxville in the coming years."

The remarks were a mix of biographical background, claims about prior legislative results and a short list of priorities if re-elected. Briggs did not introduce formal legislation during this appearance and did not call for immediate committee action during these remarks; several of the factual claims he made about statewide rankings and program outcomes were stated as his assertions and were not documented with citations in the remarks.