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      Two of expelled ‘Tennessee Three’ Democrats target re-election

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      The Tennessee representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the “Tennessee Three”, are hoping to once again reclaim their legislative seats on Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor.The young Black lawmakers were both reinstated by local officials, but only on an interim basis. To fully take back their positions, they must advance through a special election. Both easily cleared their primary election in June, and now face general election opponents for districts that heavily favor Democrats.Jones, who lives in Nashville, is up against the Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faces an independent candidate, Jeff Johnston.“Let’s send a clear message to everyone who thought they could silence the voice of District 86,” Pearson tweeted earlier this month. “You can’t expel a movement!”Jones and Pearson were elected to the GOP-dominated statehouse last year. Both lawmakers flew relatively under the radar, even as they criticized their Republican colleagues’ policies. It wasn’t until this spring that their political careers received a boost when they joined fellow Democrat representative Gloria Johnson in a protest for more gun control on the House floor.The demonstration took place just days after a fatal shooting in Nashville at a private Christian school where a shooter killed three children and three adults. As thousands of protesters flooded the capitol building to demand that the Republican supermajority enact some sort of restrictions on firearms, the three lawmakers approached the front of the house chamber with a bullhorn, and joined the protesters’ chants and cries for action.Republican lawmakers quickly declared that their actions violated house rules and moved to expel their three colleagues – an extraordinary move that has been taken only a handful of times since the civil war.The move briefly left about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee house.Ultimately, Johnson, who is white, narrowly avoided expulsion while Pearson and Jones were booted by the predominantly white GOP caucus.House Republican leaders have repeatedly denied that race was a factor in the expulsion hearings. Democrats have disagreed, with Johnson countering that the only reason that she wasn’t expelled was due to her being white.The expulsions drew national support for the newly dubbed “Tennessee Three”, especially for Pearson and Jones’s campaign fundraising. The two raised more than $2m combined through about 70,400 campaign donations from across the country. The amount is well beyond the norm for Tennessee’s Republican legislative leaders and virtually unheard of for two freshman Democrats in a superminority.Meanwhile, more than 15 Republican lawmakers have funneled cash to fund campaign efforts of Jones’s Republican opponent, Laura Nelson. Nelson has raised more than $34,000 for the race. Pearson’s opponent, Jeff Johnston, has raised less than $400 for the contest.Thursday’s election will also influence two other legislative seats.In Nashville, the community organizer Aftyn Behn and former Metro councilmember Anthony Davis are currently vying to advance to the general election for a house seat in a district in the city’s north-eastern region that opened after Democratic representative Bill Beck died in June.Meanwhile, in eastern Tennessee, Republican Timothy Hill will face Democrat Lori Love in a general election for Republican-leaning district 3. The seat was left empty when former Republican representative Scotty Campbell resigned following a finding that he had violated the Legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy.Hill served in the state house from 2012 until 2020 and rose to the position of majority whip. He later left his seat to run for an open US House seat in 2020, but lost in a crowded primary to current Republican US representative Diana Harshbarger. More

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      DeSantis Is Unhurt After Car Crash in Tennessee

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      The crash occurred in Chattanooga as Mr. DeSantis and his team were traveling to a fund-raiser there, a spokesman said.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was involved in a car crash in Chattanooga, Tenn., on his way to a fund-raiser there on Tuesday, according to his spokesman, who added that Mr. DeSantis was unhurt.“This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tenn.,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign, said in a statement. “He and his team are uninjured. We appreciate the prayers and well wishes of the nation for his continued protection while on the campaign trail.”A spokesman for the Chattanooga Police Department said that Mr. DeSantis’s four-car motorcade was traveling on Interstate 75 on Tuesday morning when traffic suddenly slowed, causing the lead vehicle to brake sharply and resulting in a pileup.Only vehicles in the governor’s motorcade were involved, and the police were called around 8:15 a.m., according to the police spokesman, Kevin West.“I don’t think they were going real fast,” Mr. West said.He added that a female staff member had suffered what he described as “minor injuries,” but that she was able to attend the event alongside Mr. DeSantis.The campaign said that the staff member “was assessed on site by medical personnel and cleared to depart.”Mr. DeSantis was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in Chattanooga held by local Republicans on Tuesday, as well as events in Knoxville and Franklin. More

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      Tennessee toughens voting rules for people with felony convictions

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      Tennessee, already one of the strictest and most complicated states in the country for voting rights restoration, has enacted a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.Tennessee has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the United States. More than 9% of the voting age population, or around 471,600 Tennesseans, can’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. More than 21% of Black adults are disenfranchised.The vast majority of people who can’t vote have completed their criminal sentences but have outstanding court debt, including unpaid child support payments.Previously, someone with a felony who wished to vote again had to pay all debts and then get government officials to sign off on a form – called a certificate of restoration – affirming their eligibility to vote. The process was burdensome, especially compared to the automatic restoration that occurs in a majority of states upon release from prison or after a period of probation or parole.But on Friday, the state’s division of elections added another hurdle. It said that someone with a felony had to first successfully receive a pardon from the governor or have a court restore their full rights of citizenship. Once that is done, the person must then complete the certificate of restoration process to get their rights restored.Mark Goins, the state’s director of elections, said in a Friday memo the change was necessary because of a recent state supreme court decision in a case called Falls v Goins. In that decision, the state supreme court ruled that a man who had been convicted of a felony decades ago in Virginia and had his voting rights restored there still had to go through Tennessee’s process for restoring voting rights.The court read two different portions of Tennessee law, one from the 1980s and one from 2006, to say that there was a two step process for those with out of state convictions to become eligible to vote: first they had to receive clemency from the state where the conviction was, and then they had to go through the Tennessee process. The court made it clear that its ruling was narrow. “We limit the scope of our analysis to these facts and these facts only,” it said. But Goins interpreted the decision broadly, saying it applied to anyone with a felony conviction in Tennessee, even though the case did not address that issue.A representative for the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“It’s very hard to get your restoration of citizenship – even harder than getting a Certificate of Restoration,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who has been involved in a number of lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s rules around felon disenfranchisement, including the Falls case.“The new process is more difficult than the procedures that existed before the legislature created Certificates of Restoration in 2006 and it puts Tennessee in the bottom of the barrel on rights restoration as one of the only states with a fully discretionary process, alongside Mississippi and Virginia.”In Virginia, anyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting unless the governor restores their voting rights. In Mississippi, those with certain felony convictions must have an individualized bill approved by a supermajority of both chambers of the legislature and the governor before they can vote again. Very few people have successfully made it through that process, and Mississippi is the only state that disenfranchises more of its citizens than Tennessee.Tennessee’s confusing process for restoring voting rights has already come under considerable scrutiny. In 2022, a Memphis woman named Pamela Moses was sentenced to five years in prison for submitting a Certificate of Restoration when she was ineligible to vote. Moses said she believed she was eligible and a probation officer who filled out her form made a mistake and said she had completed her sentence.A judge overseeing the case overturned her conviction after the Guardian published documents that had not been turned over to Moses in which probation officials acknowledged the errors. More

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      I’m a drag queen in Tennessee. The state’s anti-drag law is silly, nasty, and wrong | Bella DuBalle

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      I am the show director at Atomic Rose, a nightclub in Memphis, Tennessee. I first discovered drag through Shakespeare. I’m a founding member of Tennessee Shakespeare Company, and I got to play some drag roles there. Growing up in the conservative south, I had learned to suppress anything considered feminine as a safety mechanism. Drag was the first time I was able to put the feminine parts of me forefront, as a source of pride and strength rather than shame or weakness. I fell in love with the art, and I’ve been doing it now for over a decade.On 2 March, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law two bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community. The first, SB1, outlaws all gender-affirming healthcare for minors. SB3, the “anti-drag bill,” redefines drag performers as adult cabaret artists and classifies drag as a prurient art form. “Prurient” is a legal term referring to a shameful or morbid interest in sex.If SB3 is enforced in the way its backers would like, it would prohibit any public drag displays – meaning no Pride events, no Drag Queen Story Hours, no drag performances in any place that might be seen by a minor. This would shut down all-ages drag brunches and other family-friendly functions. It would even raise questions about venues like mine that have large windows and lots of passersby. Would that qualify as viewable by a child? The law’s language is vague and incredibly broad.SB3 was supposed to take effect on 1 April but a local drag theatre troupe I used to work with, Friends of George’s, filed a suit against it. “The law prohibits a drag performer wearing a crop top and mini skirt from dancing where minors might see it,” their complaint notes, “but does not prohibit a Tennessee Titans cheerleader wearing an identical outfit from performing the exact same dance in front of children.”A federal judge temporarily blocked the law through 26 May while it is adjudicated. We are confident it will be overturned as a blatantly unconstitutional infringement on free speech. Even the judge – a Trump appointee – has effectively said as much, which is telling. Multiple district attorneys, including Memphis’s Steve Mulroy, have also called the law unnecessary and unfair.As for SB1, the US Department of Justice recently filed suit against Tennessee to prevent the bill from going into effect on 1 July as originally scheduled. We hope to see it swiftly overturned as well.Although neither of these laws currently has legal standing, they have absolutely had a chilling effect on freedom of expression and the queer community. Organizers in Knoxville said they may have to cancel their annual Pride parade if SB3 goes through. I also know some local non-queer venues that have shut down their shows out of fear or uncertainty. Theatre, ballet, and opera companies are asking lawyers, “Can we still produce Peter Pan with a female Pan? Can we do Mrs Doubtfire? Is it okay for us to put on Shakespeare the way it was traditionally performed?”Transgender and gender-nonconforming people are worried about just being in public. The rightwing pundit Michael Knowles recently called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life entirely”; I think people with that worldview, who view trans folks as embodiments of an ideology rather than actual human beings, could see a trans woman in public and say, “That’s a man impersonating a woman.” SB3’s language never uses the word “drag”; it only refers to “male and female impersonators.” My fear is that the language is intentionally and maliciously vague.These attacks on the queer community are part of a broader political impulse. SB1 and SB3 are just two items on what we call Tennessee’s “Slate of Hate.” I get the sense that many of our elected officials are not as politically experienced, savvy or well-versed in law or public policy as they present. Children and families in Tennessee face very real issues, but our state’s legislative session was obsessively focused on trans kids, pronouns, drag queens, and the like – all in the guise of “protecting children.”Tennesseans overwhelmingly support stronger gun control, particularly after the Covenant shooting – one of many horrific mass shootings in Tennessee in recent years. Yet the legislative session ended having done nothing to address these concerns. This comes as little surprise: our governor recently signed into law a widely-opposed permitless carry bill – at a gunmaker’s factory. How is this protecting children?Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention released a list of over 700 of their ministers accused of sexual abuse, with many of the ministers in Tennessee. And that’s just one denomination. There is no record, not a single documented instance, of a child ever being harmed or abused at a drag show. Statistically speaking, children are far safer at a Drag Queen Story Hour than at church. Yet we aren’t attempting to legislate whether parents can take children to church. How is this protecting children?Tennessee is dead last in the nation in the stability of our foster care system – failing the nearly 9,000 children under the state’s care. This information was released by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth after multiple failed attempts to dissolve the commission by state senator Jack Johnson – who incidentally also introduced both SB1 and SB3. How is this protecting children?We have real and difficult issues in Tennessee that require real and difficult solutions. Rather than confront the problems constituents are begging them to address, rightwing lawmakers are concocting solutions to imaginary issues. And it’s not just here in Tennessee; conservative legislatures across the US have realized there is an easy political power grab to be had by vilifying a minority group. Over 650 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 46 states since the beginning of the year. This is beyond alarming.I am reminded of a not-too-distant past when the Nazi government painted queerness as inherently evil, a danger to families, children and culture. It resulted in pink triangles, camps, executions, the burning of books and the destruction of the Hirschfeld Institute. The othering and dehumanization of a minority group is always the first step toward their eradication.In the last election cycle, about 10% of queer Tennesseans voted. In that same cycle, nearly 60% of our elected representatives ran unopposed. It is well past time we elect officials focused on solving the myriad problems facing their constituents rather than those championing a far-right Christian nationalist agenda.
      Bella DuBalle is a drag artist in Tennessee More

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      Popularity is optional as Republicans find ways to impose minority rule

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      “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.” These were the words of Justin Jones, a Black Democrat, to Tennessee Republicans after he and a colleague, Justin Pearson, were expelled for leading a gun protest on the state house of representatives floor.A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The ballot box didn’t work – the voice of the people said, we’re not going to tolerate these kind of threats by Republicans. But Republicans are using other tools and shredding the fabric of American democracy. It’s a kind of minority authoritarianism.”Despite extraordinary pressures, democracy has proved resilient in recent years. It survived an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Joe Biden was sworn in as the duly elected president and declared in his inaugural address: “Democracy has prevailed.” And election deniers were routed in last year’s midterms.But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.The supreme court, which includes three justices appointed during Trump’s single term, last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly half a century, despite opinion polls showing a majority wanted to protect it.Lower courts have also flexed their muscles. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge nominated by Trump in Amarillo, Texas, has ruled against the Joe Biden administration on issues including immigration and LGBTQ+ protections. Earlier this month he blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common abortion method in America.A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said: “One extremist judge appointed by a twice impeached, now-indicted former president, Donald Trump, was attempting to effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. The decision is a prime example of minority rule at its worst. These extremists will not stop until they control our reproductive health decisions.”Polling by Ipsos shows that two-thirds of Americans believe medication abortion should remain legal, including 84% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 49% of Republicans. Timmaraju added: “It’s obvious that anti-choice extremists and lawmakers are out of step with Americans. It’s really worth remembering how far out of step they are.”If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.The case hinged on whether the shooting was in self-defence. A jury found that Perry, who is white, shot and killed Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man, who was carrying an AK-47, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Abbott tweeted that he will pardon Daniel Perry, 37, an army sergeant, as soon as a request from the parole board “hits my desk”.Earlier this year Abbott also led a state takeover of Houston’s public school district, the eighth biggest in the country with nearly 200,000 students, infuriating Democrats who condemned the move as politically motivated.In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.In this he is backed by a supermajority in the Florida state legislature. State governments, which receive less and less scrutiny as local newspapers go extinct, are another key weapon in the Republican arsenal. In deep red states they have imposed near or total bans on abortion, loosened gun restrictions, curbed LGBTQ+ and voting rights and endorsed Trump’s false claims of election fraud.RaceMinority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.Makia Green, a lead strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said: “A lot of it is not only taking away the people we sent to speak for us – to make sure that our voices are heard and that we are part of the process – but also to overwhelm Black voters, to instil apathy in Black voters so that it feels like, ‘I went out, I voted, I did what I had to do, and they took the power away from me, so why should I show up next year?’”Green, co-founder of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black community organisation in the Washington area, added: “Our democracy has holes in it, especially with the record number of attacks on voting rights and civic education. Republican and rightwing extremists have been making it harder and harder for our people to vote and so people are questioning, do I still live in a democracy?”Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “It’s never the situation that the GOP moderates their position on something. It’s always a reflexive pivot to attacking and undermining democracy and that’s exactly what they did in this situation.”But Hatcher-Mays added: “If there’s any silver lining to the way that the GOP behaves it’s that they can’t hide forever from the bad and unpopular things that they do.”Republicans have long been struggling against demographic headwinds and political trends. They have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They suffered another reminder of abortion’s potency when a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge won a recent Wisconsin supreme court race with the fate of the state’s abortion ban on the line.Republicans remain competitive in the US Senate – the body that approves nominated judges – because small, predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse ones. In 2018 David Leonhardt of the New York Times calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, noted that the government was founded with checks and balances to ensure that minority viewpoints could be heard. “But it was not the intent of the framers and founders to have those minority views imposed on the majority and certainly not to have those in the minority attack the rule of law to try to unravel majority rule, which is what’s happening right now. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than expelling members from a legislative body for expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected way.“Republicans are inflicting injury and harm on democracy. It’s a continuation of what they started to do with the big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen] … which paved the way for an insurrectionist attempt. We’re seeing other extreme iterations of that play out in individual states. When you have a minority of people exercising power over the majority, that’s authoritarianism.”Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino More

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      Justin Pearson celebrates return to Tennessee legislature after expulsion

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      The second of two Black Democrats who were kicked out of the Republican-led house of representatives in the Tennessee legislature followed his colleague back to work at the capitol on Thursday, a week after their expulsion for participating in a gun control protest propelled them into the national spotlight.State representative Justin Pearson, a lawmaker from Memphis, was sworn in on Thursday outside the statehouse in Nashville. The day before, Shelby county commissioners had unanimously voted to reinstate him after an expulsion he, his fellow expelled lawmaker Justin Jones and others have denounced as motivated by racism.“Yes indeed, happy resurrection day,” Pearson said on Thursday morning as he signed paperwork for his return.“There will be a new building of this building, with a foundation built on love,” Pearson said during a fiery speech outside the capitol after being sworn in and before returning to the house floor.He continued: “With pillars of justice rising up. With rafters of courage covering us. With doors that are open to everybody in the state of Tennessee. Not just rich somebodies, but everybody. Not just straight somebodies, but everybody. Not just Republican somebodies, but everybody.”Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had forcefully criticized the representatives’ expulsion.Before Pearson returned to the house floor, lawmakers cheered and applauded as the police officers who responded to the deadly 27 March mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school shooting – the event that prompted the gun control protest – were honored in the chamber.The Democratic state representative Bob Freeman praised the officers’ bravery but stressed to his fellow lawmakers that as a response to the tragedy “inaction is not an option”.Republicans banished Pearson and Jones last week for their role in the protest on the house floor over the shooting, which left three children and three adults dead.In his address outside the capitol, Pearson read the names of those killed and referenced another mass shooting on Monday at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, in which five people were killed and eight others were injured.“Our law enforcement, which many people praise, are being forced to go to war when they just are going to work,” Pearson said.“Kids are told to go to fortresses, instead of to go to school and places of learning. We’re told to go to church, carrying the status quo’s thoughts and prayers, while we must be in fear that somebody will walk in with an assault weapon.”The Nashville metropolitan council took only a few minutes on Monday to restore Jones to office. He was quickly reinstated to his house seat that day.The appointments are interim, though Jones and Pearson plan to run in special elections for the seats later this year.The house’s vote to remove Pearson and Jones but keep their white colleague Gloria Johnson, who also took part in the protest, drew accusations of racism.Banishment is a move the chamber has used only a handful of times since the civil war. The so-called Tennessee Three – participating from the front of the chamber – broke house rules because they did not have permission from the speaker.The expulsions last Thursday made Tennessee a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy. In the span of a few days, the two raised thousands of campaign dollars and the Tennessee Democratic party received a jolt of support from across the US.In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers have been supportive of the idea to strengthen school safety, but they have largely rejected calls for stricter gun controls with only weeks to go in the legislative session. More