Tennessee GOP Moves to Expel 3 Democrats From State House Over Gun Protest
Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives took moves toward expelling three Democratic lawmakers on Monday, April 3, after they took part in demonstrations at the State Capitol in Nashville on Thursday calling for more gun controls.
On Monday, GOP representatives filed resolutions calling for Reps Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis to be removed from the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton said their “actions are and will always be unacceptable, and they break several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor.”
Speaking on Monday outside the Capitol, Rep Jones said he and his two colleagues had already been removed from committees and said their “representative ID badges” had been shut off. Later, Jones stood alongside students protesting inside the legislature.
The three Democrats have called the moves an attack on democracy.
Tennessee House Republicans branded the protest as a “Tennessee Capitol Insurrection,” aiming to draw parallels to the attack on the US Capitol carried out by Trump loyalists on January 6, 2021.
US Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who served on the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, rejected the comparison, tweeting on Sunday: “TN Speaker equates peaceful student rally w/Jan 6 insurrection but (1) no officers injured in TN, 150 wounded in DC; (2) no effort in TN to coerce Speaker to abdicate power and turn state over to usurper; (3) no 5-hour disruption of business to block transfer of power. Nice try!”
According to The Tennessee Star, the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security said “no arrests” were made in relation to Thursday’s protests and there were “no investigations or criminal charges pending.”
On Tuesday, Jones tweeted “It’s morally insane that a week after a mass shooting took six lives in our community, House Republicans only response is to expel us for standing with our constituents to call for gun control.”
Pearson posted a letter he said he had sent to all representatives explaining his decision to join the protest.
Johnson accused Republican lawmakers of hypocrisy, noting that in 2020 they refused to expel Rep David Byrd after he was accused by three women of committing sexual assaults against them in the 1980s when they were underaged.
“They would not expel an admitted child molester, but are now going to expel three members who spoke without permission,” Johnson tweeted. Credit: Chandler Quaile via Storyful
Video transcript
- So what's going on here in Tennessee today?
JUSTIN JONES: So three of us lawmakers who stood with our constituents demanding that they take action and hear the thousands of people gathered on Thursday talking about the crisis of mass shootings, we're-- we've been kicked off our committees as representatives elected by our constituents. Each of us represent 78,000 people. And our people are being silenced because they're kicking us off committees.
They're threatening to take a vote to expel us today. Our member ID badges have been shut off. Our representative ID badges have been shut off. And this is not what democracy looks like. We are elected to serve our constituents. And I'm the youngest Democratic lawmaker here, the most diverse district. And by shutting me down, they're shutting down the voice of my constituents.
So this is one of my constituents, Ms. Brooks, and so-- whose family was hit and a victim of the mass-- the Waffle House mass shooting. And so we're here to speak for them, and they won't even let us speak for our people. They wouldn't let us talk on the floor. They shut our microphones off. They shut our voting machines off. We couldn't even talk about the issue. And so when we went to the well to force the issue, they called us insurrectionists and are now trying to expel us from the legislature.
- [INAUDIBLE]
JUSTIN JONES: They're going to have to answer to all these people in here. This is about people power and that the voice of the people will no more be silenced, no matter what happens. This is what democracy looks like. This is why we were speaking up for the people because all these people were begging us to act. This is who we're standing with today, all these children or parents who have said that they don't want our kids to be killed in their elementary schools by preventable deaths because we have this proliferation of guns. So this is what democracy looks like.
- Thank you.
