Tennessee GOP: Don’t talk about children killed at school
Last updated Apr. 8.
Two Tennessee state representatives were booted from office Thursday over decorum rules. Their crime: They protested for stricter gun laws in the wake of The Covenant School shooting on March 27. They spoke out on the House floor after Republicans refused to recognize any Democrat to speak on the subject.
The mass shooting was the deadliest school shooting in Tennessee history and left six people dead, including three children aged 9. As of 2020, Tennessee was among the top 10 deadliest states in the country from firearms. Guns are the #1 killer of children in Tennessee.
Before this week only three members of Tennessee State House have been expelled since the Civil War of the 1860’s. In each of those three cases the members had been indicted or convicted of felonies or found to have used abusive behavior. Five members were expelled in 1866 because they refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, a condition necessary for Tennessee’s readmission to the Union.
While black Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were expelled, white representative Gloria Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, survived expulsion by one vote. Ahead of her own vote, Johnson refused to apologize for her participation in the protest. Johnson has been removed from her committee assignments due to the protest.
Justin Pearson represented Nashville and Justin Jones represented Memphis. They were the two youngest black lawmakers in the Tennessee Legislature. Together Pearson and Jones represented a combined constituency of about 130,000 people.
Thousands of people flocked to the Capitol to support Jones, Pearson and Johnson on Thursday. They were peaceful and no arrests were made.
The vote over rules violations for Jones went along party lines 72-25. The vote in Pearson’s case was 69-26. And Johnson’s vote was 65-30. Expulsion from the Tennessee House requires a two-thirds majority of the total membership.
The three Tennessee lawmakers, referred to as “the Tennessee Three,” joined hundreds of demonstrators who packed the Capitol last week to call for passage of gun-control measures. After the expulsion vote Jones said, “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.”
Representative Jones took Republicans to task, calling out their hypocrisy over a minor rules violation when several members of the Republican caucus, past and present, were guilty of much more severe violations. Said Jones, “For years, one of your colleagues, who was an admitted child molester, sat in this chamber — no expulsion. One member sits in this chamber who was found guilty of domestic violence — no expulsion… We have a member currently under federal investigation — no expulsion. We had a member pee in another member’s chair in this chamber — no expulsion, in fact they’re in leadership in the governor’s administration,” Jones said.
Jones was referring to the Republican majority refusing to expel state representative David Byrd. He was accused of sexually abusing three underage girls while a high school basketball coach. One of his accusers recorded him apologizing to her and saying, “I’ve lived with that and you don’t know how hard it has been for me.” Byrd won re-election in 2020 and only left the Tennessee House after becoming severely ill from Covid-19.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton, representing District 25, compared the incident to Jan. 6: “What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the State Capitol,” he said.
Unlike the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, as Sexton described it, the March 30 protest, according to the Tennessee Highway Patrol, was peaceful, with no property damage or arrests. According to a bipartisan Senate report at least seven people lost their lives in connection with the Jan. 6 U.S Capitol attack. Injuries of police officers numbered 114. The approximate losses suffered as a result of the siege at the U.S. Capitol total $2,881, 360, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Pearson told reporters Thursday that in carrying out the protest, the three had broken “a House rule because we’re fighting for kids who are dying from gun violence and people in our communities who want to see an end to the proliferation of weaponry in our communities.”
Johnson, a retired teacher, said her concern about school shootings was personal, recalling a day in 2008 when students came running toward her out of a cafeteria because a student had just been shot and killed. “The trauma on those faces, you will never, ever forget,” she said.
In 2021, Governor Lee signed a bill that allowed those 21 and older to openly carry handguns without permits. Tennessee is a permit-less carry state. Lee proudly thanked the National Rifle Association “for helping get this done.” Just last month, Tennessee Republicans embarked on another push to allow all 18 to 20-year-old residents to carry any firearm, including weapons the likes of AR-15, without permits. The bill would also have Tennessee recognize any out of state permit.
Bruce Oppenheimer, a professor emeritus of political science at Vanderbilt University, said expelling members from a legislative body is “extremely rare.” It usually happens when someone has been “indicted or convicted of a crime or when there is an extreme ethical violation he said .
Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, said that government bodies have the right to set their own rules of conduct and to punish violations but emphasized that this has only been done before in cases of “gross misconduct and criminal behavior.”
County officials in Jones and Pearson’s districts get to pick replacements to serve until special elections and could opt to choose the two. The expelled members can run again for their old offices in upcoming special elections and can’t be expelled a second time for the same reason per the Tennessee Constitution. Republicans in the chamber though may go around the constitution by simply refusing to seat them.