My family’s history in North America begins in North Carolina, where an ancestor, Lucy Hardiman, was enslaved. She must have been a resistor because her daughter, Mary Coleman, would weep when recounting the lashes Lucy received during her involuntary entrapment.
Mary moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my family lived from the late 1800s to 1941 during the first phase of their inhabiting the state; a younger generation returned to Tennessee in the early 1990s.
The first phase of my family’s Tennessee history was marked by abandonment, murder, mental illness and alcoholism. Like many Black southern families, there exist cold cases. My grandfather Mack Hopkins was murdered by a white man who said my grandfather had threatened him with a knife. One version of the murder was that my grandfather knocked on the wrong door. There was an inquest, and the white man went free.
My grandfather, a laborer, supplemented the family’s food supply by hunting. My only photo is of him posing in front of a car. About a dozen rabbits, a source of protein, are strung up. It’s bad enough that the capitalist system has opposed Blacks acquiring assets, but the murder of Black men compounds the loss, depriving their survivors of assets these victims might have accrued.
My mother was 17 when she visited my grandfather in the hospital; his clothes were soaked with blood. As he was lying near death, he told her he’d overheard the doctor say, “Let that n—-r die.” Years later, when I received a copy of the death certificate, his cause of death was listed as “shock,” with the sentence, “stabbed by some man.”
Four years after my grandfather’s death, I was born in the hallway of the same hospital.
I haven’t been able to obtain the inquest report, but in court my mother called the murderer of my grandfather a liar. She was tough like that, an attribute she inherited from her grandmother, Mary Coleman, who opened a food stand in her front yard after her Irish husband abandoned her. Mary catered to white workers who were employees of the pipe manufacturer located near the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. She insisted that they call her Mrs. Coleman.
The 1930s were difficult for my mother. In 1930, Mary Coleman, her grandmother, died. In 1934, her father was murdered. In 1938, she became pregnant by a Knoxville college student. He refused to support her, leaving her and me in poverty while he married into the Black aristocracy.
We ultimately moved to Buffalo, New York, in search of a safer existence, but until then, my mother found a way for us to survive in the Tennessee of the 1930s and 1940s. In her 2003 memoir, “Black Girl From Tannery Flats,” she called it her “Southern Strategy.”
What she had learned was that good white people would protect you from the bad ones. That was her Southern Strategy. My grandfather’s murderer represented white evil. And my mother could call her father’s murderer a liar because present in the court was Mrs. Clifford Grote, a member of one of the most powerful Chattanooga families, a family that represented the other side of white Tennessee. She employed both my mother and grandmother. Even though my mother was unmarried, Mrs. Grote pulled strings to get her an apartment in the projects. When my grandmother became schizophrenic (the family version was she was under a HooDoo curse), the Grotes were there to support her. They lived in a plantation-styled estate, columns and all. I remember there being an elevator that connected the floors. Mrs. Grote called me G.W. because I was born on February 22, sharing a birthday with the first president. Family members still call me by that name.
They weren’t the only good white folks. When my mother’s boyfriend, a pretty boy with “good hair,” was caught in bed with a white woman at the Read Hotel where he worked, another employer, a white man named Herbert Spencer, helped to get him out of town safely. When my mother was stabbed during a race riot on a Knoxville bus, her employer, a white woman, insisted that she receive a settlement from the bus company. “You’d do it for me,” she said. My mother also used this strategy in Buffalo. When it came time for my younger brothers to be ensnared in the criminal justice system, she warned the cops assigned to the ritual that young Black men must maneuver that she worked for Judge Sedita, a member of an important Italian American family. His brother Frank was mayor. The cops backed off.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Earlier this month, the president spoke to them by phone after they were subjugated to expulsion votes in the Tennessee Statehouse for peacefully protesting in support of stronger gun safety laws following the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. During that call, the president thanked them for their leadership in seeking to ban assault weapons and standing up for the democratic values,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday.
“And the three lawmakers thanked the president for his leadership on gun safety and for spotlighting the undemocratic and unprecedented attacks on them in a Tennessee Statehouse.”
She added: “The president looks forward to continuing that discussion when they all meet with him on Monday.”
The three lawmakers captured national attention in the wake of the March 27 Nashville mass shooting, as the nation watched Tennessee Republicans’ unprecedented use of political power to expel two of the Democrats. National Democrats have rallied around the events, and the White House has seized on the opportunity to do the same — repeatedly weighing in on the events.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited Nashville almost two weeks ago, where she met privately with the three representatives and later spoke to a packed room full of students, less than 24 hours after Tennessee Republicans booted the two Black lawmakers from office.
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One of the first laws passed by the Tennessee General Assembly this year regulates drag show performances, criminalizing “adult cabaret entertainment” that takes place in public or in front of minors. Conservatives backing the legislation believe the performances expose minors to inappropriate sexual themes — a claim that advocates reject. Republican state Sen. Jack Johnson, who sponsored the Tennessee legislation, said the legislation was meant to “ensure that children are not present at sexually explicit performances.”
In response, Memphis-based theater company Friends of George’s filed a federal lawsuit claiming the law violates First Amendment rights. A federal judge agreed the law is “vague and overly-broad” in an order that temporarily blocked it from taking effect. Tennessee’s law has drag performers “eat the proverbial mushroom to find out whether it is poisonous,” wrote U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker in the order issued March 31, the day before the law was set to take effect.
For now, drag performances can evade the law’s scrutiny due to an extension of the order. Once that extension expires May 26, however, first-offenders would face a misdemeanor, while any subsequent violations would be a felony. Although the law doesn’t explicitly ban drag shows, its broad language could leave performers like DuBalle at risk.
And yet there is a touch of irony in the way a law attempting to quash drag has brought the art to the forefront, DuBalle said. While the law itself hasn’t packed the house — Atomic Rose is already standing-room only for brunch — it has tripled the number of youth attendees each Sunday, according to Charlie Barnett, the general manager.
Attendees gushed over the drag queens, eager to tip before performances were really underway.
“This is what the world needs more of,” said Jennifer Iverson, explaining why she brought her young daughter to the show Sunday. “Everybody is so nice, and people are so friendly, and I can’t see anything wrong with it all, in any way, shape or form.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Pearson responded with a warning message to the Republican supermajority in the state House and a rally cry to his supporters.
“The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us: You can’t expel hope, you can’t expel justice, you can’t expel our voice and you sure can’t expel our fight,” Pearson said.
“We look forward to continuing to fight,” he said. “Let’s get back to work.”
Pearson is expected to return to work Thursday when the full state House will convene.
Ahead of the vote, supporters gathered at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, located where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and marched toward the council meeting.
GOP leadership was angered by the Democrats’ protest and swiftly removed them from the chamber in an unusually partisan process. A third targeted member, Rep. Gloria Johnson, escaped expulsion by a single vote. Johnson suggested the vote went in her favor because she is white and Pearson and Jones are Black.
Republicans’ actions have propelled Nashville onto the national stage and drawn criticism from Democratic leaders including President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama.
Their ouster has also handed Tennessee Democrats a major organizing opportunity and the party is now attempting a political comeback in the deep red state.
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“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we have to take advantage of,” state Sen. London Lamar, a Democrat who represents parts of Memphis, said in an interview.
A blue turnaround in Tennessee seemed like a pipe dream just a few weeks ago — and maybe still does. Democrats are outnumbered, out-resourced and hamstrung by a legislative map drawn to favor Republicans. It’s also a state that suffers from one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country.
Party insiders and organizers are the first to concede just how bad they have it.
“Nothing changes the fact that these districts are highly gerrymandered,” said Lisa Quigley, a former chief of staff to Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat who didn’t seek reelection after his district was effectively eliminated in redistricting last year. “It’s going to take some really smart organizing all over the state, because none of us vote very well.”
But if there was ever a moment when the party stood a chance, it’s now. The state Democratic Party has been flooded with donations and interest since the GOP started moving against three Democrats for participating in a gun safety protest on the state House floor, and ultimately expelling two of them last week for violating decorum rules. Their stunt angered Republicans who wanted to see them promptly punished, invoking a rare removal process marked by its partisanship and accusations of racism.
Former Gov. Phil Bredesen, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Tennessee, called the GOP vote “a great overreaction.”
“I always thought one of the principles of leadership is to be careful. You can have fights, but don’t make martyrs,” Bredesen, who served until 2011, said in an interview. “Apparently Republicans missed that concept.”
Most Republicans have avoided commenting on the spectacle outside of last week’s removal proceedings, where they admonished the Democrats for disrupting the process. House Speaker Cameron Sexton, during a radio interview, called the floor protest to an “insurrection” akin to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Their actions are and will always be unacceptable, and they break several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor,” Sexton said on Twitter early last week. “Their actions and beliefs that they could be arrested on the House floor were an effort, unfortunately, to make themselves the victims.”
Sexton, a longtime lawmaker believed to have aspirations for governor, has not tweeted since.
On the day that state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two Black millennial freshmen, were kicked out of the Legislature, 33,000 people called into the state party office looking to get involved, Democratic Party Chair Hendrell Remus said. So far, nearly 10,000 have signed up to volunteer, he said in an interview, and hundreds of people have expressed interest in running for office — many in districts where Republican lawmakers ran unopposed in the midterms. More than half of Republican lawmakers serving in the statehouse today were uncontested in November.
Democrats are targeting a handful of competitive districts where they believe strong candidates can pick off Republican incumbents. Those include the newly drawn 5th Congressional District encompassing parts of Nashville, which Rep. Andy Ogles won last year.
They have their eye on state legislative districts outside Memphis, Knoxville and Clarksville. Long term, the party sees opportunities around the southern suburbs of Nashville in Rutherford County.
Democrats are also placing their hopes on winning a lawsuit challenging the new redistricting maps, where they say a victory would create much-needed political openings.
“Had we not been gerrymandered to shreds, then this supermajority couldn’t have existed to be able to expel our members,” Remus said.
Jones triumphantly returned to the Legislature on Tuesday, leading a march of more than 1,000 people to the Capitol steps after being reinstated by the Nashville city council. Pearson is expected to be reinstated to his seat on Wednesday and return to work the following day.
Jones, Pearson and Rep. Gloria Johnson, the third Democratic lawmaker who participated in the same floor protest but escaped expulsion by a single vote, together represent a new class of elected officials in Tennessee. They’ve come from activist circles and push progressive causes like criminal justice reform, gun safety and climate change. Organizers are aiming to recruit more candidates in that model.
“They are the least favorable Democrats in the House and they have created the most change and impact for being themselves,” said Tequila Johnson, executive director for the Equity Alliance, a grassroots group focused on increasing civic engagement in Black communities.
After his return to the Legislature on Tuesday, Jones thanked Republicans for “awakening the people of this state,” particularly young people.
“No expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us but only galvanize and strengthen our movement,” Jones said to loud cheers from his supporters packing the galleries.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“The state would swing left-right, left-right, Republican-Democrat, Republican-Democrat,” Carter recalled about Tennessee’s political tradition, before turning away from me and raising her voice toward a group of official-looking people in suits headed into the Capitol who perhaps could address gun violence: “Guys, think about the children!”
The day after Easter was gorgeous here, a city that knows from both Christianity and renewal. Every trip I make seems to bring more cranes, more scooters, just a few food trucks shy of being indistinguishable from Austin.
The weather and Bird-riding tourists, however, masked what has been a searing spring in Tennessee, a horrific school shooting in Nashville that begot days of protest and the stunning defrocking of a pair of young, Black lawmakers who carried those demonstrations, bullhorn in hand, onto the floor of the House chamber.
This turn of events has yanked this future-focused city back to the present and the past and, for the state and the country, spotlighted what Tennessee was and what it has become.
To some, the echoes are evocative of Jim Crow, as white leaders suppress Black agency and a multiracial group of next-generation activists respond with hymns, marches and Black Power salutes that would recall Diane Nash and Stokely Carmichael were it not for all the iPhones.
However, for people like Carter, and some in Tennessee’s leadership ranks, these new days of political rage only remind them of what the state had been more recently: a model of competition and competence.
Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.
That this convergence is taking place here for all the world to see is sadly ironic.
From 1970 to 2018, Tennessee traded the governorship between the two parties. In fact, Gov. Bill Lee is the first GOP governor in the state’s history to succeed another GOP governor. In those same years, Tennessee sent a succession of lawmakers to Washington who emerged as national leaders, effective local politicians or both, a bipartisan litany that includes Howard Baker, Al Gore, Lamar Alexander, Jim Sasser and Bill Frist.
The state’s tripartite nature — what they call the three Grand Divisions — between East, Middle and West Tennessee demanded coalition-building. The sheer width of the state, stretching from Appalachia to the Cotton South, meant the presence of a robust Republican Party descending from Unionists, long preexisting 20th century realignment, alongside an equally strong Democratic Party that absorbed rural white voters and big-city Black voters alike. There were moderates and conservatives within both parties.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), today the longest-serving House member in the delegation, helped father Tennessee’s lottery as a state senator in the early 2000s, no easy task in the Bible Belt.
“I sat on the Republican side of the aisle, nurtured them, worked with them and eventually got six or seven of them to vote for the lottery,” Cohen recalled. “They were my friends.”
The coalition that backed the lottery, which has poured over $8 billion into education funding, reflected the state’s political makeup: There were Black lawmakers, a few moderate Republicans, an exurban conservative who knew her Nashville area constituents wanted more money for schools and a rural conservative Democrat who was nudged along with the promise of some road projects by the state’s Republican governor, Don Sundquist, who signed the bill. That exurban conservative was Marsha Blackburn and the rural Democrat was Lincoln Davis, both of whom would join Cohen in Congress.
Through this period, Tennessee was drawing international attention for its success luring auto companies to the state, a bipartisan effort that transformed the state’s agriculture-heavy economy and is well told in Keel Hunt’s “Crossing the Aisle.”
The success and the leadership became self-reinforcing.
Alexander, now retired in Tennessee and writing his memoir of service from Presidents Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, reminded me of how it was that a heart surgeon and Nashville scion named Frist gave up medicine for politics.
“I asked him why he’d give that up,” Alexander remembered. “He said, ‘I can fly to Chattanooga, cut a heart out and maybe save one person, but if I’m senator I might be able to help a million people.’ And thanks to what he did with George W. Bush on PEPFAR he did just that. So we had a competitive system that attracted really talented people with purpose.”
Which isn’t to say the Tennessee volunteers of yesteryear were all statespeople whose like we won’t see again. This being politics and humans being all too fallible, there were ample sins of the bottle, flesh and purse. If the Sheraton still towering over the state Capitol could talk, well, it wouldn’t be telling stories of public-spirited, bipartisan bonhomie. Take, for example, how Alexander became governor in the first place: by being sworn in early after the outgoing Democrat, Ray Blanton, was found to be selling pardons. Then, more recently, there was the FBI sting Operation Tennessee Waltz (how’s that for a mission name?) that netted seven lawmakers for accepting bribes.
The old boys were also, well, old boys. There’s yet to be a female governor here, and racial minorities have been all too scarce outside the state’s large cities.
What there was, though, was competition and accountability.
Statewide races were hotly contested, as were many legislative and congressional campaigns and, with the right conditions, moderate Southern Democrats could carry the state in presidential races (or fall achingly short).
And accountability came from middle-of-the-road voters, business leaders invested in Tennessee’s success and a robust press corps, led by the two-newspaper towns across the state.
That was then.
Now, the voters are confined to safely red or blue districts and are animated by the same partisan impulses down the ballot that have made Tennessee a deep-red state in federal races. Candidate quality, cyclical changes in the economy and local issues are moot, at least when compared to party label.
“We don’t have elections anymore, we have censuses,” Jeff Yarbro lamented.
A state senator from Nashville, Yarbro, 46, grew up a farmer’s son in rural West Tennessee before picking up degrees at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He’s precisely the sort of Southern Democrat who in earlier generations would have run for governor by now. That’s no longer an option given Tennessee’s tilt, so, disheartened by what the Legislature has become, he’s leaving to run for mayor this year.
That may be the only other office left given that through redistricting Tennessee Republicans “cracked” the Democratic-heavy congressional seat anchored in Nashville, splitting the state capital into three, GOP-heavy seats.
This has been well-documented. What’s been less covered is how the Republican majority did much the same in state legislative seats across smaller cities. Yarbro is now the farthest-east Democratic senator in the state. In fact, there’s six Senate Democrats left in the 33-member chamber: three from Nashville and three from Memphis.
One of them is the Senate Democratic leader, Raumesh Akbari, who’s not yet 40 and has great promise but is setting her sights on succeeding Cohen in the lone remaining U.S. House seat held by a Democrat.
“I’d prefer my district be more competitive,” Akbari told me, noting that it’s 89 percent African American. It would be hard enough for a Black woman to win statewide, but it’s made even more difficult when she hails from a nearly all-Black seat and is therefore easy to portray as a representative for only her community. (This is why, in hindsight, Bobby Rush may have done Barack Obama a favor by thrashing him in the 2000 primary for Rush’s heavily Black Chicago House seat.)
Race is an inescapable factor in the current contretemps here, but it wasn’t until after Obama’s presidential election in 2008 that it became as defining to Tennessee politics as it is now.
There were rural white Democrats in the Legislature, and the congressional delegation included Davis, Bart Gordon and John Tanner. None of the three lawmakers returned after 2010, and gerrymandering and realignment eventually killed off nearly all their contemporaries in the state Capitol.
“In a lot of folks’ minds here, it made the Democratic Party Black,” Akbari said of Obama’s victory and the image of a Black family in the White House.
Memphis had long been to Tennessee what Chicago is to Illinois and New Orleans is to Louisiana: the heavily Black, ethically flexible big city that conservative candidates ran against but had to be watched on election nights because the size of their vote could determine elections. Cohen told me he used to host legislative visits in Memphis, replete with a night at the famed Peabody Hotel and plenty of ribs, to show lawmakers the city had assets worthy of state dollars and wasn’t the crime-ridden den of iniquity they may have imagined.
What’s striking today is that Nashville has become as much of a pariah as Memphis. Tennessee Republicans have for years been watching the city become Austin-ized, and the fuse was finally lit when city leaders spurned the state’s hope (and the RNC’s preference) to hold the 2024 Republican Convention in Nashville.
In addition to erasing the city’s congressional seat, legislative Republicans have also sought to halve the size of the metro government’s council (Nashville and Davidson County have a merged government) and shift control of the city’s convention authority and airport from the city to the state. They’re the kind of power plays the state’s Republicans used to, understandably, rage about when they were done by the state Legislature’s old Democratic leaders.
And that was before thousands of Nashville area residents and their children descended on the Capitol demanding new gun control laws in the wake of last month’s mass shooting, which prompted the floor protests and expulsion of state Reps. Justin Jones from Nashville and Justin Pearson from Memphis.
Nearly overlooked in the hurly-burly was, fittingly, a Twitter exchange between the GOP House speaker, Cameron Sexton, and a Democratic rival. Sexton posted video of the protesting lawmakers on the House floor, putting John Lewis’ catch phrase “good trouble” in quotation marks, and adding the accounts of local talk radio stations, the conservative Daily Wire and Fox News. When a Democrat replied by adding the Twitter accounts of CNN, a handful of local, Democratic-leaning websites and Resistance hero Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Sexton replied to her, this time with more conservative accounts cc’d.
It was a revealing look at what passes for online discourse, the role of dueling (local and national) partisan media outlets and the fixation with Twitter on the part of lawmakers. There’s still a handful of excellent local reporters whom I’ve read and followed for years, but those two-newspaper towns have long died and Gannett has done grave damage to nearly every major daily in Tennessee.
Information is gleaned from social media or national cable networks. “Everywhere you go, all you see is Fox News,” said Tanner, the old West Tennessee Democrat.
Republicans also lament how social media has warped the political culture.
“When you’re in Nashville, it’s all you hear,” said Johnny Garrett, a GOP state representative, of the faculty club-style chatter on Twitter. But Garrett noted how his colleagues often tell him that when they’re back in their districts “they don’t hear a lot that stuff, the social media.”
This tunnel vision is part of what convinced the Republicans they had to take such an extreme step last week. Bill Haslam, a former GOP governor, told me he was struck by how even some pragmatic Republican lawmakers were scared for their lives because of the protests and convinced they had to show strength.
“They told me ‘You don’t understand,’” Haslam said.
In fact, it was the GOP legislators who didn’t understand how badly their retribution looked outside their cloakrooms, which is all the more apparent now that the two Justins are being hailed as martyrs and reinstated this week by their local governing bodies.
What’s more depressing to leaders like Haslam, a pragmatic governor in the East Tennessee Republican tradition, is the response he and his predecessor as governor, Democrat Phil Bredesen, received when they wrote a joint op-ed in The Tennessean advocating for some incremental gun safety measures.
Garrett told me hadn’t even read it (though he did see the headline), and once one aspiring Republican candidate for governor — Knox County mayor and pro wrestler turned Ron Paul acolyte Glenn Jacobs — rejected the proposal, other ambitious Republicans followed suit, surely mindful of their viability in future primaries.
Haslam, I’m told by Republicans and Democrats alike, has been calling state lawmakers, urging them to work together on the gun issue and counseling restraint in the partisan wars.
Which until Tuesday was more than the current governor had done. Lee has been stunningly quiet as his state suffers tragedy and a self-inflicted black eye. A first-time elected official when he became governor in 2019, Lee has made a constitutionally weak governorship that much more limited by keeping an arm’s length from the press and largely deferring to a Legislature ever more animated by culture wars.
Haslam was careful to show respect to his successor, “one governor at a time,” and said Lee was eager to act. The governor didn’t say a word about the expulsions, but he finally addressed the gun issue Tuesday in Nashville, vowing to sign an executive order tightening background checks and urging lawmakers to pass the sort of red flag law proposed by Haslam and Bredesen that would make it harder for dangerous people to access guns.
Remarkably, none of the state’s major corporate actors have publicly pushed Lee to try to calm the state’s political waters.
Not that doing so may matter, given what drives today’s legislators — talk radio and the internet — said Cohen.
“Some of them wouldn’t even know who Fred Smith is,” he quipped, referring to the CEO of FedEx, one of Tennessee’s leading employers.
To Alexander, a protégé of Baker and mentor to so many Republicans in the state, it’s difficult to watch. That’s in part because he’s been alarmed about his state party’s drift since well before last week.
In farewell remarks he was to give to the state Legislature in 2020 before Covid-19 interrupted his plans, he planned to tell the lawmakers that competition produces results and a lack of it can be corrosive.
“One-party rule runs the risk of encouraging self-serving, narrow interests,” he was to tell the legislators according to a speech draft he shared with me. Do not, he was to warn, “adopt Washington, D.C.’s bad manners.”
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The governor made the announcement amid political turmoil in the state Legislature over a GOP-led ouster of two Democrats for leading a gun reform protest inside the statehouse this month. The Nashville Metropolitan Council, a body that has sparred with Republicans in the Legislature, reappointed one of the lawmakers, Rep. Justin Jones, to his seat on Monday. The second member, Rep. Justin Pearson, is also expected to be reinstated this week.
While some GOP states, including Florida and Indiana, have embraced red flag laws, such legislation faces long odds in Tennessee, a deep-red state with many Republican leaders strongly opposed to any effort that could be construed as limiting gun rights.
But Lee said that he’d been meeting with legislative leaders to discuss passing an order-of-protection law that would allow law enforcement to seek a court order confiscating firearms from people deemed a danger to themselves or others. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed similar legislation with bipartisan support.
“I think everyone — leadership from speakers, as well as other leaders — have expressed a desire to do something and move forward,” Lee said at the police precinct that responded to the March 27 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville that left six people dead, including three children. One of the adult victims was friends with Lee’s wife, Maria.
“I do believe we should get it done during this session,” Lee said.
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State lawmakers occasionally remove their fellow colleagues, but it’s often for cases involving criminal misconduct or major ethical lapses. Last week’s vote in Tennessee was exceedingly rare for its speed and partisanship. Nearly all of the Republican supermajority voted to oust Jones and Pearson, and the effort to remove Johnson fell short by a single vote.
GOP House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who likened their protest to an “insurrection,” led trial-like proceedings last week as Republicans admonished the group and urged them to repent for their outburst.
Despite Republicans’ attempt to keep him away, Jones likely won’t miss a day of work. The Nashville-area Democrat is expected to lead a march to the Capitol immediately following his reinstatement, returning to the statehouse just in time for the first full session since his removal.
Hundreds of supporters gathered in downtown Nashville at a park near the Capitol ahead of the council vote. Under state law, local legislative bodies hold the power to reinstate ousted lawmakers — a process that typically takes several weeks — but Nashville council members voted to expedite it. A special election will be held to permanently fill Jones’ seat, a race that he’s expected to join and will likely take place later this summer.
Pearson, who represents parts of Memphis, is also anticipated to run for reelection. He’s expected to be reinstated by Memphis council members on Wednesday and return to the General Assembly the following day.
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The Louisville shooting comes just two weeks after three children and three adults were killed at a Christian elementary school in Nashville. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said that one of the victims, Cindy Peak, was friends with his wife Maria.
“What happened at Covenant School was a tragedy beyond comprehension. Like many of you, I’ve experienced tragedy in my own life, and I’ve experienced the day after that tragedy. … Cindy was supposed to come over to have dinner with Maria last night after she filled in as a substitute teacher yesterday at Covenant,” Lee said in an address the day after the shooting.
After both shootings, local police confirmed that the shooter was dead.
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When I covered the Tennessee Capitol from 2018 to 2021, the family-values espousing Republican House speaker had to explain why his text message trail included discussions of pole-dancing women and his chief of staff’s sexual encounters in the bathroom of a hot chicken restaurant.
After a Republican lawmaker was accused of sexually assaulting 15- and 16-year-old girls he had taught and coached, he was made chairman of the House education committee.
Protesters filled the halls week after week, year after year, calling for the removal of the bust of the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard, a piece of art featured prominently between the House and Senate chambers. Democrats pushed for its removal, while Republicans resisted.
A Democrat who declined to support the current speaker’s reelection had her office moved into a small, windowless room. In a twist of fate, that same Democrat, Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white woman, narrowly escaped expulsion on Thursday. (Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearce fared differently.)
And then, of course, there was the famous peeing incident, where a legislator’s office chair was urinated on in an act of intraparty retribution over shitposting. The actual identity of the Republican urinator is a closely-held secret among a small group of operatives who have bragged about witnessing it. But it’s generally accepted that former state Rep. Rick Tillis, a Republican and the brother of U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, did indeed have his chair peed on in the Cordell Hull legislative office building.
It wasn’t always quite like this.
There was a time before when one-upmanship wasn’t the organizing principle inside the Tennessee statehouse. Not so long ago, there was more balance in power and, with that, more comity in the chamber. But as Republicans have made bigger gains, they’ve also become more politically confrontational.
The modern Tennessee Republican Party was forged by Howard Baker and others in the 1960s and 70s by tapping into a bipartisan coalition of voters — bringing the GOP from near irrelevance within the state to soon producing some of the nation’s top Republican talent.
“This kind of scene Thursday was the last thing they would have wanted to see happen,” said Keel Hunt, an author of books on Tennessee politics who worked as an aide to then-Gov. Lamar Alexander, a Republican.
I’m reminded of an evening I was sitting in the House press corps box in April 2021, when the House honored Alexander — a Republican and champion of civility, now remembered for his moderate flavor of politics — after his recent retirement from the Senate. Moments later, Republican leadership brought far-right conservative commentator and MAGA firebrand Candace Owens onto the floor, describing her as one of the party’s leading thought leaders of the day, fighting against “creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny.” The Tennessee House passed a resolution thanking her for moving to the state.
The state party knows that it’s drifting. Some openly and proudly admit it. It’s also evidenced by Sen. Bob Corker’s decision not to seek reelection in 2018, and Gov. Bill Haslam’s opting out of running for Alexander’s open seat in 2020. Both Corker and Haslam know they were unlikely to have survived a primary in the state, had they stayed true to their own brands of more moderate conservatism. Corker’s Senate seat ended up going to Marsha Blackburn, a Trump loyalist, and Bill Hagerty, now in Alexander’s seat, handily won the GOP primary after securing his own endorsement from Trump.
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#Shocked #Whats #Happening #Tennessee
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
