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    A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast | Will Hutton

    The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More

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    Trump’s indictment and the return of his biggest concern: ‘the women’

    In August 2015, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, and David Pecker, then chief executive of American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. According to the indictment of the former president unsealed in New York this week, Pecker agreed to help with Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, “looking out for negative stories” about Trump and then alerting Cohen.It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print.Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories” about Trump’s competitors. The media this week seized on that passage in the indictment, noting how the Enquirer baselessly linked the father of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F Kennedy.Last year, however, a New York Times reporter got to the heart of the matter. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman says that around the same time as the meeting with Pecker and Cohen, Sam Nunberg, a political adviser, asked Trump for his “biggest concern” about running.“Trump had a simple reply: ‘The women.’”Trump now faces 34 counts, all felonies, of falsifying business records with intent to conceal another crime: breaches of campaign finance laws. All the charges relate to the $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film star and director who claims an affair Trump denies, and how Cohen was repaid $420,000 including $50,000 for “another expense” Cohen has said was for rigged polls, another $180,000 to cover taxes and a $60,000 bonus.But the New York indictment is not the only form of legal jeopardy Trump now faces. As well as state and federal investigations of his election subversion, a federal investigation of his retention of classified records and a civil lawsuit over his business practices, he faces a civil defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape.Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. One of them, the writer E Jean Carroll, says Trump raped her in a department store changing room in New York in the mid-1990s.Trump denies the allegation. Carroll has sued him twice: for defamation and for defamation and battery, the latter suit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law which gave alleged victims of crimes beyond the statute of limitations a year to bring civil claims. In the defamation case, trial has been delayed. The case under the Adult Survivors Act is due to go to trial on 25 April.To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.”As Jong-Fast indicates, the New York indictment detailed two other “catch and kill” deals which prosecutors said also showed “illegal conduct” admitted by Pecker and Cohen but directed by Trump himself.In late 2015, American Media paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.In September 2016, Cohen taped Trump talking about a payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims an affair Trump also denies.“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One fifty?”American Media paid McDougal $150,000 to stay silent.After Trump won the presidency, the indictment says, American Media “released both the doorman and [McDougal] from their non-disclosure agreements”.That speaks to the central contention made by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his charges over the Daniels payment: that Trump concealed it because he feared it could derail his campaign.According to Bragg’s indictment, in the McDougal case Trump “was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy”. In the case of the doorman, Cohen instructed Pecker “not to release [him] until after the presidential election”. Regarding Daniels, Trump is said to have directed Cohen “to delay making a payment … as long as possible … [because] if they could delay payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”.In short, prosecutors contend that Trump did not make and conceal hush-money deals because he wanted to avoid embarrassment or hurting his wife – the argument successfully pursued by John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who made hush-money payments in 2008 but avoided conviction four years later. The case against Trump is built on the contention he broke state and federal campaign finance laws.Observers argue over whether Bragg has built a case he can win. Some expect Trump to wriggle off the hook. Others think the first prosecutor to indict a president has a good chance of securing a conviction. In either case, the indictment has brought Trump’s treatment of women back to the national spotlight.So has Trump himself. As Jong-Fast points out, as the former president this week attacked the judge in New York, who subsequently became subject to threats to his safety, so too Trump went after the judge’s wife and daughter.“If you see interviews with Stormy Daniels, she has had terrible experiences as a result of her brush with Trump. Even the judge in that case, the judge’s daughter, Trump went after them. You go after Trump, you get it. He’s like a mob boss. That’s just how he does it.” More

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    Same world, different planet: Trump’s arrest lays bare US polarization

    If the US needed a reminder that a rather large group of Americans completely disagree with another very large group of Americans, it got one this week.Donald Trump’s arrest in New York City on Tuesday, when he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, was marked by diametrically opposed rallies, commentary and media coverage.For those on the right, the charges were an outrage, a sham, a witch-hunt: evidence of an abuse of political power and proof that the system was attempting to silence their man.For non-Trump supporters, it was justice: recompense, at last, for a man who was dogged by accusations of illegality throughout his presidency, and indeed for decades before that.As Trump was fingerprinted and read his rights on Tuesday, a neat illustration of the divide was on show outside the court.A group of Trump supporters, who had gathered to support their man, chanted: “Fuck Joe Biden”. Yards away, behind a metal barrier, came the opposite chant from people gathered to cheer Trump’s arrest. “Fuck Donald Trump”, the non-Trump voters shouted.As Trump and his lawyers begin to prepare for a trial in the Stormy Daniels case – and brace themselves for other looming lawsuits – some academics believe the country has not been this politically polarized since two sides literally went to war with each other in 1861.“When I look at the numbers that are coming in when we do the polling, I don’t see any daylight in the distance as far as polarization melting away,” said Tim Malloy, polling analyst at the Quinnipiac University Poll.“And that’s not opinion, that’s just looking at the numbers – they really never change.”A recent Quinnipiac survey found that reaction to Trump’s legal travails differed widely between Democrat and Republican voters. Among Democrats, 89% thought the charges against Trump were very serious or somewhat serious. Just 21% of Republicans felt the same.Some 88% of Democratic voters thought that criminal charges being filed against Trump should disqualify him from running for president again. Only 23% of Republicans were of the same view.It mirrors the wider divide over Trump, who retains his unique knack of completely alienating some people, and utterly captivating others. Among Republicans, 73% think the one-term, twice-impeached, criminally charged former president has had a positive impact on the Republican party.Democrats disagree: 93% think Trump’s influence has been negative.It presents a continuing problem for a country that has recently seen its main seat of democracy attacked by thousands of Trump supporters, but in electoral terms, it isn’t great for the Republican party, either.“That the fact that if the election were held today, Biden would beat Trump fairly handily has got to be a huge red flag for Republicans,” Malloy said.The division has worked for Trump previously. From the moment he announced his first presidential campaign, in June 2015, he set out to paint politics as us v them: branding elected officials “losers” who were “morally corrupt”, and would-be immigrants “rapists”.Little has changed.In a rambling speech in Florida on Tuesday, hours after he had been charged, Trump lashed out against basically everyone who doesn’t own a Make America Great Again hat, claiming “our country is going to hell” and accusing “radical left lunatics” of trying to interfere in his run for president.On Truth Social, Trump’s eccentric and misleadingly named social media platform, his followers also received an interpretation of the trial that was completely different from the one in the rest of the world. Democrats have “weaponized our system of laws”, Trump posted, in an effort to drive him out of the 2024 presidential race.A problem for the US is that people listen, and believe him. Outside the Manhattan court on Tuesday, it was no surprise to hear his supporters parrot Trump’s talking points.“This is all just a bunch of BS so that Trump doesn’t run for president,” Shaun Lloyd, a Trump supporter, told the Guardian. “The American people are waking up more than ever, every day, to the truth, and the lies and the Democrats are telling them.”It also doesn’t help that the rightwing media continues to channel lies and misinformation about elections and rival politicians’ behavior. This week some went as far as to hint at violence, with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, telling his audience it was “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s”, the semi-automatic rifle that has been used in multiple mass shootings.It is difficult to see a path out of the deep polarization in the country, in part because the divide goes to issues that run to race, identity and culture, said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington.“There is increasing evidence that the best predictor of support for Trump in 2020 (and continuing), in addition to one’s party identification, is not feelings about the economy but racial resentment among white voters,” she said.“For that reason, it seems unlikely that this polarization will decline any time soon. Feelings about race in the US have been continually whipped up by stories of police conduct toward Black people and by a number of Republican Trump supporters, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who find it to their electoral advantage to keep making controversial statements that imply race-baiting.”The divide represents real dangers in the US, beyond the already evident destruction of faith in election integrity, the political gridlock and the inherent unsavoriness of a society at odds with itself.In the two years since Trump left office, polls have shown that one in three Americans – including 40% of Republicans – believe violence against the government is sometimes justified: a number that is at a two-decade high.“We are a nation filled with guns, many of them capable of blasting bodies to pieces,” Hershey said.“A society that’s roiled by conflict can loosen some of those people’s inhibitions. Let’s hope people remember that you can’t kill an idea by killing an individual; ideas can’t be shot.” More

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    Vow of silence: why Biden is saying nothing about Trump’s indictment

    The biggest news story in the US this week was Donald Trump’s unprecedented appearance at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courtroom – an event that Joe Biden took pains to appear blissfully unaware of.On the day Trump learned he was facing 34 charges related to falsifying business records in the first-ever indictment of a former American president, Biden spent his day talking on the phone with the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, and Britain’s King Charles III, and presided over a meeting with his science and technology advisers at the White House. And, despite the best efforts of the reporters who follow him around on a daily basis, he ignored all questions about the allegations made by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.“Look, our focus is going to continue to be the American people. What you all cover is up to all of you, but we’re going to do our best to stay the course, to talk about the issues that matter,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Wednesday when asked why the indictment appeared to be a verboten subject at the White House.Observers of Biden’s administration say the strategy is probably a wise one as he heads into a potential rematch next year against Trump, the Republican opponent he bested in the 2020 election. Despite several legislative wins, Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for months, and CNN on Thursday released a survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer someone else as their nominee for president in next year’s election.“I think that is sort of the intentional thing. I think they want to keep their distance from what they see as the chaos and divisiveness that Donald Trump creates,” said Navin Nayak, executive director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former Democratic campaign staffer.This strategy also gives Biden the opportunity to cast Trump as scandal-plagued and unfit for office, and himself as the competent alternative – a tactic he deployed to defeat him in 2020.Biden has yet to say whether he’ll run for a second term, though people close to him have repeatedly said he will. “He says he’s not done,” the first lady, Jill Biden, said in February. Reports from earlier this year indicated the president would announce his re-election campaign sometime after his February State of the Union address – a date that has come and gone. Trump’s prosecution could be one reason for the delay.“Why compete with that?” said the Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman. “I don’t see any reason right now for him to announce that he’s running. He’s already the president, and there’s gonna be all this attention on Trump and his legal battles, at least in the short term. And so I think it’s definitely a reason to push that back a little bit, at minimum.”The former president’s Tuesday appearance at the criminal court in Manhattan was covered by hundreds of journalists, some of whom waited overnight to be in the courtroom when details of the indictment centered on facilitating hush money payments and running a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative news stories ahead of the 2016 election were relayed to a scowling Trump.Trump could also soon find himself summoned to courtrooms elsewhere in the US. Fani Willis, the district attorney in the Atlanta-area Fulton county, is investigating Trump and his allies’ failed effort to overturn Biden’s election win in Georgia. In Washington DC, special prosecutor Jack Smith is in the middle of an inquiry into three sources of legal peril for the former president: the classified documents the FBI discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, his election meddling and the January 6 insurrection.As serious as the allegations in Bragg’s case are – no current or former American president has ever been indicted – Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the White House may view it as the sort of scandal Biden should stay away from.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It wouldn’t surprise me if his team just sees that as almost below the president or not what the president should focus on,” he said. But if Trump were to be charged over the January 6 insurrection or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, subjects Biden has spoken out against forcefully in the past, that might change the president’s tone.“That’s something where you need the president to be out front. Even if it doesn’t persuade a lot of people, that still is part of the president’s role, to defend the constitutional order,” Schickler said.While Biden may have kept his thoughts about the Manhattan case to himself, Cooperman said the indictment is to the president’s benefit, in part because it serves as a distraction for the discontented public.“By saying nothing, Biden is kind of saying everything,” Cooperman said. “Even if this might help Trump win his own party’s presidential [nomination], I think that from Biden’s perspective, less is more, and being able to say nothing and let that play out is the best thing that he could be doing.” More

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    Trump reportedly seeks 2024 campaign role for far-right activist Laura Loomer

    Donald Trump has told aides to hire the far-right anti-Muslim activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer for a role in his campaign to return to the White House in 2024, the New York Times has reported.Citing four anonymous sources, the Times noted that Loomer, 29, attended Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, an angry rant delivered hours after the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in New York over hush money payments, including to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying big leads over his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, despite the historic indictment and multiple other forms of legal jeopardy.DeSantis has not declared a campaign but has nonetheless presented himself as a candidate in Trump’s hard-right mould. The former governors Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas), declared candidates closer to the political centre, barely register in polling.Loomer told the Times: “I’m not going to comment on private conversations that I had with the president. The president knows I have always been a Trump loyalist and that I’m committed to helping him win re-election in 2024.”A Trump spokesperson said: “The entire movement is united behind President Trump and his campaign, and it will take everyone rowing in the same direction in order to beat [Joe] Biden and take our country back.”Loomer said Trump “likes me very much. And it’s a shame that he’s surrounded by some people that run to a publication [the Times] notorious for attacking him in order to try to cut me at the knees instead of being loyal.”Loomer ran for Congress in Florida in 2020, winning Trump’s endorsement and a Republican primary but losing the general election.She told the Times she was a “Jewish conservative woman, a Trump loyalist and a free speech absolutist”. In the current election cycle, she has agitated against DeSantis, in one instance picketing an appearance to promote his campaign memoir.Loomer has previously described herself as “pro-white nationalism”, claiming “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy … and a lot of liberals and leftwing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that”.In the same conversation with a white supremacist podcast, in 2017, Loomer said the US “really was built as the white Judeo-Christian ethnostate, essentially. Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”Another attendee at Trump’s speech on Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, greeted news of Trump’s courtship of Loomer with evident dismay.“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has risen to power in the Republican party despite spreading conspiracy theories including that wildfires are caused by space technology controlled by the Rothschild family and that the Parkland school shooting in Florida was a “false flag” operation.Loomer, Greene said, “can not [sic] be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for [House] speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle.”Greene also accused Loomer of “loving” Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white supremacist activist who controversially dined with Trump and the rapper Ye last November.Observers pointed out that Greene has appeared with Fuentes in public and spoken at a conference he staged.Regarding Trump, Greene said she would “make sure he knows” why hiring Loomer would be a bad move. More

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    Protests in Tennessee as Democrats face removal for gun control demonstration

    Thousands of protesters flocked to the Tennessee state capitol on Thursday to support three Democratic lawmakers facing expulsion for their role in a gun control demonstration after the killings of three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school last week.Crowds cheered and chanted outside the house chamber, so loud that they drowned out proceedings.Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are the subjects of the expulsion vote. Last week, they approached the front of the chamber floor and chanted back and forth with gun control supporters who packed the gallery.On Thursday the three Democrats held hands as they walked on to the house floor. During the pledge of allegiance, Pearson raised his fist to the crowd.Their possible expulsion has once again thrust Tennessee into the national spotlight, underscoring not only the ability of the Republican supermajority to silence opponents but also its increasing willingness to do so. The move sends a chilling message just as lawmakers grapple with how to respond to the devastating shooting at the Covenant school.On Thursday, many protesters had traveled from Memphis and Knoxville, areas Pearson and Johnson represent, and stood in a line that wrapped around the building. Johnson urged those in the gallery to remain calm and not shout at lawmakers, to avoid getting removed.Protesters outside the chamber held up signs that said “School zones shouldn’t be war zones”; “Muskets didn’t fire 950 rounds per minute”, with a photo of George Washington; and “You can silence a gun … but not the voice of the people”.As the House began proceedings, a Democrat, Vincent Dixie, urged that colleagues “not get distracted”. He mentioned the funeral of Mike Hill, the custodian killed at the Covenant school, which took place earlier in the week.“I want us to keep in mind the sacrifice that he made to keep those kids safe,” Dixie said. “Each of us has power to make change.”Before the expulsion vote, House members were set to debate more than 20 bills, including a school safety proposal requiring public and private schools to submit building safety plans to the state.The bill did not address gun control, sparking criticisms from some Democrats that lawmakers were only addressing a symptom and not the cause of school shootings.Expulsions in the Tennessee general assembly are rare.In 2019, lawmakers faced pressure to expel the former Republican representative David Byrd, after he faced accusations of sexual misconduct dating to when he was a high school basketball coach three decades before.Republicans declined to take action, pointing out that he was re-elected as the allegations surfaced. Byrd retired last year.In 2022, the state senate expelled a Democrat, Katrina Robinson, after she was convicted of using about $3,400 in federal grant money on wedding expenses instead of her nursing school.Before that case, state lawmakers last ousted a house member in 2016, voting 70-2 to remove the Republican Jeremy Durham after an investigation detailed allegations of improper sexual contact with at least 22 women in four years in office.If Johnson, Jones or Pearson are expelled, the county commissions in their districts would get to pick replacements to serve until special elections could be held. The three Democrats would remain eligible to run in those contests. More