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Will Republicans regret taking on the ‘Tennessee Three’? Politics Weekly America podcast
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Justin Pearson celebrates return to Tennessee legislature after expulsion
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
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Ousted Tennessee Democrat Justin Pearson reinstated by local commission
Local government officials in Memphis, Tennessee, voted on Wednesday to return the second of two Democratic state lawmakers expelled from the statehouse last week by Republicans over a gun safety protest following another school shooting.The Shelby county commission voted to nominate Justin Pearson, 29, as interim state representative to fill the vacancy created when he and fellow Democrat Justin Jones were ousted for taking part in a gun reform protest in the chamber following the murders of six people last month at a Nashville school.The two Black men had recently joined the legislature and condemned their expulsion as a racist action. Joe Biden had criticized the expulsion as unprecedented and Kamala Harris railed against the action on a hastily-arranged trip to Nashville last Friday less than 24 hours after the two lawmakers were ousted.Jones, 27, was returned to his seat on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Nashville council.On Wednesday afternoon, the Shelby county board of commissioners, where Democrats hold a supermajority, voted in favor of doing the same for Pearson at a special meeting in Memphis, where Pearson’s district is located.In announcing the meeting, Mickell Lowery, the board’s chairman and a Democrat, had called the expulsions “unfortunate”.The commission meeting was preceded by a protest rally at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in support of Pearson, who said in a powerful New York Times opinion essay on Wednesday that he “wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced”.A community organizer before entering politics, Pearson condemned what he saw as hypocrisy from Republican lawmakers.“There is something amiss in the decorum of the state house when GOP leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from ‘hanging by a tree’ as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr Sherrell later apologized for his comment), feel comfortable berating Mr Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience.“This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.”The Republican majority opted not to expel a third member of the so-called Tennessee Three, Democrat Gloria Johnson, 60, who is white.In his op-ed, Pearson also called out Republicans, in Tennessee and elsewhere, for promoting a swath of pro-gun legislation he said left the US “a nation in pain and peril”. Thousands were drawn to the statehouse in Nashville to protest the Covenant school shooting, he said, but were ignored by his Republican colleagues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus,” he said.“But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.”On Tuesday, Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, said he would sign an executive order to strengthen background checks for weapons purchases in the state, and called on lawmakers to pass a red flag law to keep guns away from those who pose a danger to themselves or others.“We should set aside politics and pride and accomplish something that the people of Tennessee want to see get accomplished,” Lee said. The governor and his wife, Maria, were friends with two teachers killed at the Covenant school.Pearson acknowledged Lee’s action in his essay as “a small victory for our people clamoring for change”. More
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Removing Black lawmakers is voter suppression – and the US has done it for centuries
When Tennessee lawmakers expelled two Black legislators from the state’s Republican-dominated house of representatives, pundits described the decision as “stunning” and “historic”. Joe Biden called it “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”. The New York Times characterized it as “an extraordinary act of political retribution”.Sorry, have you met America?This tragic comedy always has the same theme: Black voter suppression vs white power. In the comparatively short arc of this country’s political history, this display of unapologetic whiteness is as unusual as water being wet and fire being hot. It is the most preposterous narrative to say the partisanship that defines this political climate is new or even remarkable.In 1869, the Georgia supreme court ousted Chatham county’s Black superior court clerk Richard W White from office. The three-judge panel noted that White “received a majority of the votes” and was “eligible, and qualified by law for said office”. Nevertheless, White was removed. Theconstitution didn’t matter. Votes didn’t matter. All that mattered was whiteness. So, instead of naming their decision White v Clements, the Georgia supreme court rejected the usual naming conventions and opted instead for the more candid title Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia?On 10 January 1966, Georgia’s house of representatives refused to seat the civil rights activist-turned-legislator Julian Bond after he signed a statement opposing US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bonds’ majority district went without representation until the US supreme courtunanimouslydecided that the first amendment protected Bond’s right to speak out on public issues.The fact that Justin Jones has been reinstated by a vote of Nashville’s council and Justin Pearson probably will be by a similar vote doesn’t mean the opposition party will stop using tricks from which democracy, common decency and even the rule of law offer no shelter.The decision to subvert the will of the voters and evict state representatives is not unprecedented – it is a great American tradition. And when placed in the context of white history, the theme that emerges has more to do with America’s racial binary than it does two-party politics.All politics is about power and there can be no real conversation about American politics that ignores the single, most common characteristic of the people who wield it. The weaponization of white power is a poltergeist that has haunted every significant political decision ever made, from the drafting of the constitution to the picking of presidents. It defined American citizenship, catapulted a toddler country into an economic superpower and created the bloodiest war in the history of this continent. In fact, racism might be the most bipartisan part of politics.Republicans whose historical knowledge is limited to eighth-grade social studies books love to tout that they’re the party of abolition and Reconstruction. They therefore blame the totality of the post-civil war racial terrorism on “the Democrats”.Even though it would be more accurate to attribute this political and social violence to southern conservatives still wistful about the lost cause of the Confederacy, these history buffs conveniently forget how the success of Black Republican candidates outraged the party’s white members, sparking the “Lily White Republican movement” that lasted for half a century, until the 1930s. This anti-Black GOP movement began in Texas, but soon Republican committees in North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and nearly every southern state banned Black candidates from running for office. Lily White Republicans were willing to sacrifice their party’s political power to preserve the racial hierarchy.While Julian Bond, Black Republicans and the Tennessee Three may have lost their elected positions, there is a far longer list of Black officials who were murdered in order to remove their authority.Returning to 1868, Georgia’s Black voters had already registered to vote in droves. Buoyed by a turnout rate (74.8%) twice that of their white counterparts (38.4%), the newly freed electorate sent 30 Black state representatives and three African American state senators to the Georgia legislature in that year’s election.By 1869, every one of the duly elected Black lawmakers known as the “Original 33” had already been ousted from the state assembly and a quarter of them had already been killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. Hundreds of African Americans had been massacred by terrorist groups. By the time the state’s highest judicial body determined, in the Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia? case, that state law “does not confer upon the colored citizens of this State the right to hold office”, white conservatives had already gained control of state politics and reasserted the government-sanctioned system of white supremacy.This story repeats and repeats.In 1898, a lynch mob unseated Lake City, South Carolina’s new postmaster, Frazier B Baker, by shooting Baker and his two-year-old daughter Julia dead. White vigilantes shot the South Carolina state representative Simon Coker in the head as he prayed – he was one of at least two dozen Black Republicans murdered in his state on that day. The civil rights attorney Robbie Robertson won his seat on the Savannah, Georgia, city council with 80% of the vote and lost it to a 1989 mail bomb.Murder of Black representatives is the purest form of voter suppression. It exposes the myth that there is a conservative “pro-life” movement that doesn’t believe in “cancel culture”.And to be clear, the historical effort to suppress Black political power has nothing to do with ensuring the supremacy of the white race. If the powerful white people in the Tennessee legislature were truly concerned about the collective wellbeing of white people, they would have protected white children by helping the legislators they ousted to pass gun control laws. If they truly wanted white kids to succeed, they wouldn’t condemn their constituents to perpetual ignorance with a whitewashed version of history.More than 160 years ago, the Tennessee state senator William H Barksdale, speaking from the same building Pearson and Jones were removed from, exposed the entirety of this strategy. “Our slaves are true and faithful, we fear not them,” he said, defending a bill “for the expulsion of Negroes from this state” in 1860, “but this free, combustible material, this fire brand, let us prepare for the future and hurl it out of the camp.”They do not care about white people; they care about white power, and anti-Blackness will continue to be the most reliable tool for maintaining their authority and control. More
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The Tennessee GOP presents itself as a defender of democracy. Do not fall for it | Jan-Werner Müller
This past week, a Republican supermajority voted to expel two young African American men from the Tennessee legislature; a third Democrat – who happens to be white and female – only narrowly escaped this punishment. The charge? The lawmakers, who are now being called “the Tennessee Three”, had participated in a protest against the GOP’s cynical inaction after the elementary school shooting in Nashville on 27 March.According to Republicans, using bullhorns breached the “decorum” of the legislature. This de facto disfranchisement demonstrates yet again that the problem with the GOP is not one lone demagogue (who may or may not be consumed by lawsuits), but a commitment by plenty of its members to authoritarianism at federal, state and local levels.What’s more, Republicans, in a typical form of projection, now present themselves as defenders of democracy, and Democrats as a source of “disorder” and “dishonor” for sacred political institutions. They even draw a parallel between peaceful protest and the January 6 insurrection. We must not fall for this false equivalence; and we must remember that even measures beyond ordinary protest – namely civil, which is to say peaceful, disobedience – can be legitimate if they serve democratic ends.US states have long functioned as laboratories for autocratic measures, be it vote suppression or gerrymandering. Ron DeSantis and other pioneers of what scholars call autocratic legalism are experimenting in state assemblies to see how they can entirely disempower their opponents through measures that violate the spirit of democracy, but are passed in procedurally correct ways.This happens even in situations where Republicans already have supermajorities and Democrats appear to be condemned to griping from the sidelines. In Oklahoma, a Black, Muslim and non-binary representative, Mauree Turner, was censured and relieved of committee assignments by the GOP-controlled legislature after a transgender activist found refuge in their office. Such measures obviously have a chilling effect; they also send a not-too-subtle signal of what kind of minorities Republicans deem dangerous.Of course, as we have learned the hard way in recent years, knowing how to lose matters greatly in a democracy. Rightwing politicians will charge that protesters against outcomes they don’t like are simply sore losers who throw “temper tantrums”, as the Tennessee GOP sponsor of the expulsion measures put it; maybe not insurrectionists, but, ultimately, in the same category as the January 6 rioters. The right thus turns the charge habitually levelled against Trump and his autocratizer allies around: it is the “woke mob” that is breaking both formal and informal norms on which democracy ultimately depends.This is the politics of false equivalence. For one thing, losers in a democracy do of course remain free to criticize the outcome; all the losers are asked to do is put up with the results, not to shut up about the results. And, at the risk of stating the obvious: a noisy protest is not the same as trying to hang the vice-president and kill the speaker of the House. In situations, however, where results evidently do not reflect what majorities actually want, it is also perfectly legitimate to dramatize this fact in a peaceful manner. After all, the reason why the US remains a country where civilians can brandish assault rifles is not due to some age-old American tradition, nor to the second amendment (which – do we really need a reminder? – regulates militias and does not license individuals to acquire technology made for mass shootings). Rather, it is the multiple veto points that allow well-resourced minorities to block legislation which, in less dysfunctional democracies, would long have long been pushed through. It is not protesters who cause “disorder” and “dishonor” here; it is the cynical defenders of a long-discredited status quo.In the face of such a tyranny of the minority, what some legal scholars call a distinctly democratic form of disobedience – which is to say, peaceful and primarily symbolic, lawbreaking – can be justified. The idea is different from the kind of peaceful law-breaking associated with the civil rights movement; the latter was alerting majorities to a fundamental injustice which absolutely had to be rectified. Democratic disobedience, by contrast, gives leeway for people to decide what they consider legitimate outcomes – but it has to be genuine majorities who make the call, as opposed to special interest groups, or, for that matter, justices apparently beholden to such groups.Democracy is not about decorum or, as the communitarian kitsch endlessly repeated in our age has it, “civility”. Its purpose is to help us deal with disagreements and divisions; the latter will not magically heal if we just keep our voices down or refrain from grabbing bullhorns. Those targeted by the radical right now dominant in many GOP-controlled state legislatures have every reason to make what John Lewis famously called “good trouble, necessary trouble”. More
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Ousted Tennessee lawmakers say move is ‘attempt to crucify democracy’
Two Tennessee state lawmakers who were expelled from the legislature after partaking in a gun control protest outside the chamber to which they were elected have called the move an unprecedented act of political retaliation as well as an “attempt to crucify democracy”.During an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Easter Sunday, Justin Jones said his and Justin Pearson’s removals from the Tennessee house of representatives would “not go on unchallenged”.“The Tennessee house Republicans’ attempt to crucify democracy has instead resurrected a movement led by young people to restore our democracy,” said Jones, who – like Pearson – is a Democrat.Pearson echoed Jones’s sentiments, which seemed to evoke the imagery of Easter, when Christians mark the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion.“The reality is an institution filled with people who are more concerned about supporting [gun access advocates] than it is protecting the [free expression] right to children and teenagers to be able to come to the capitol and advocate for gun violence prevention laws,” Pearson said to Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press.Jones and Pearson were ousted from the Republican-controlled Tennessee house after a vote on Thursday prompted by the two Black, first-year lawmakers’ roles in a gun control protest held outside the chamber days after a shooting at a school in Nashville killed three nine-year-old students and three staffers.Jones condemned his and Pearson’s ousting from posts to which they were democratically elected, saying: “This attack against us is hurting all people in our state.”“Even though it is disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, this is hurting poor white people,” Jones added. “Their attack on democracy hurts all of us.”During the interview, Pearson pushed back against the Republican Tennessee house speaker, Cameron Sexton, who called the youth-led rally for gun control at the state capitol an “insurrection”.“It’s that type of language, it’s that type of political ideology that is destructive to our democracy,” Pearson said. “And what ends up happening is the perpetuation of systems of injustice like patriarchy, like white supremacy that lead to the expulsion of two of the youngest Black lawmakers in Tennessee.”He went on to describe the work environment in the house as “toxic … where you have people who make comments about hanging you on a tree … as a form of capital punishment”.The remarks seemed to allude to one of the most common ways that white supremacists historically lynched Black people, particularly in the US south. In February, a Republican state lawmaker suggested adding “hanging by a tree” to a bill concerning methods of execution in Tennessee.“They’re really sending signals that you don’t belong here,” Pearson said, adding: “It’s about us not belonging in the institution because they are afraid of the changes that are happening in our society and the voices that are being elevated.”Jones described his and Pearson’s expulsions as a result of a “system of political hubris … an attempt to silence our districts, predominantly Black and brown districts who no longer have representation”.He added that when he and Pearson went outside the statehouse to support the gun control protests, their voting machines were turned off so they could not be able to vote on the chamber floor.“The speaker … runs the capitol like it’s his private palace and so there is no democracy in Tennessee,” Jones said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe expulsion of the two Black Democrats have prompted nationwide outcry.Tennessee’s state legislature opted against expelling a Republican representative accused of sexual misconduct in 2019. Those the body had previously expelled included one lawmaker accused of spending federal nursing school grant money on a wedding and another who allegedly had improper sexual contact with more than 20 women in four years in office.Joe Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”.“Three kids and three officials gunned down in yet another mass shooting,” the president said. “And what are GOP officials focused on? Punishing lawmakers who joined thousands of peaceful protesters calling for action.”A third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, also joined in on the calls for increased gun control and narrowly avoided expulsion by one vote. Johnson is a white woman, and she has said she believes she was spared only because of her race.County commissions in the districts Jones and Pearson were elected to represent are now tasked with picking their replacements to serve in the newly vacant seats until special elections can be held. Jones and Pearson remain eligible to run in those special elections and could also possibly be appointed by the county commissions to stay in their seats until those contests, though the commissions have reportedly been facing Republican political pressure to choose interim replacements.After the deadly shootings at the Covenant school in Nashville on 27 March, the US Senate’s chaplain, Barry C Black, called on federal lawmakers to offer more than just platitudes after deadly mass shootings.Last month, Black opened the legislative session by asking senators to move beyond “thoughts and prayers” – words that critics say are used by opponents of substantial gun control to deflect the responsibility to take action after mass killings.Black on Sunday told CBS’s Face the Nation: “I have been hearing, ‘You have my thoughts and prayers’ … But I also know that there comes a time when action is required.” More
