[ The expulsions of two Black lawmakers, following large student
protests for gun control, are part of a sweeping generational battle,
in which “Republicans around the country are pushing for laws to
make it more difficult for young people to vote.”]
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BEHIND THE EXPULSIONS OF TWO STATE REPRESENTATIVES IN TENNESSEE –
GOP SUPER-MAJORITIES ARE UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY IN STATES  
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Sue Halpern
April 10, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ The expulsions of two Black lawmakers, following large student
protests for gun control, are part of a sweeping generational battle,
in which “Republicans around the country are pushing for laws to
make it more difficult for young people to vote.” _

On April 6th, representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and
Justin Pearson left the state capitol after House members voted to
expel Jones and Pearson for joining a gun-reform protest., Photo by
Cheney Orr / Reuters // The New Yorker

 

To understand why Republicans around the country are pushing for laws
to make it more difficult for young people to vote, you need only to
look at the events of the past couple of weeks in Tennessee. On March
30th, three days after six people, including three children, were
killed at the private, church-affiliated Covenant School in Nashville,
by a person wielding legally purchased guns including two assault-type
weapons, more than a thousand high-school and college students walked
five abreast through the streets of the city to the state capitol to
demand gun reform. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they shouted, “Ban
assault weapons,” “Do your job,” and “We don’t want your
thoughts and prayers.”

It was thoughts and prayers, though, that had been offered by the
Republican governor, Bill Lee, in a pre-recorded video the day after
the shooting. “I am calling on the people of Tennessee to pray,”
he said. “Prayer is the first thing we should do, but it’s not the
only thing.” He added, “Clearly there’s more work to do,” but
that “the struggle is against evil itself.” The students, who are
all members of the shooter-drill generation, were incensed. In early
April, March for Our Lives
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a student-led gun-reform group, called for a nationwide student
walkout. In Nashville, crowding into the capitol, students chanted,
“You ban books, you ban drag—kids are still in body bags!” David
Hogg, one of the founders of March For Our Lives, wrote on Twitter,
where he posted a video of the students in Tennessee, “If voting
didn’t work, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us. We are
going to win, and they know it.”

The Nashville massacre was a rare case in which the supposed solutions
that committed Second Amendment supporters usually propose were in
place: the school’s doors were locked, there were armed staff
members in the building, and the shooter was under mental-health care.
Nonetheless, in response to the shooting, Senator Marsha Blackburn
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who has received more than a million
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from the N.R.A., along with the state’s junior senator, Bill Hagerty
(who has received around sixteen thousand dollars from the group after
two years in office) proposed federal
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to create a nine-million-dollar grant program that, in part, could be
used to train veterans and former law-enforcement officers to serve as
school security guards. In other words, Tennessee’s senators would
like to see more guns in schools. And it was Governor Lee who, two
years ago, pushed for N.R.A.-sponsored
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to allow most people over twenty-one to carry a handgun in public
without a permit. The Tennessee House is now poised to lower that age
to eighteen.

On March 30th, three Democratic members—Gloria Johnson, Justin
Jones, and Justin Pearson—now known as the Tennessee Three, stepped
into the well of the chamber without being formally recognized and led
the student protesters sitting in the gallery in the chant
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action, no peace,” demanding that lawmakers pass gun-reform
legislation. Jones and Pearson used a megaphone. On April 6th, their
Republican colleagues voted to expel both members for having violated
the decorum of the chamber. When Johnson was asked why they, and not
she, had been kicked out, she was blunt
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might have to do with the color of our skin.” (A representative who
voted to expel Jones and Pearson but not Johnson said that he did so
because she “did not participate to the extent that Jones and
Pearson did”—she did not use the megaphone.) Van Turner, the
president of the Memphis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., called the
expulsion, which happened in a statehouse located on Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., Boulevard, two days after the fifty-fifth anniversary of
King’s assassination, a “political lynching.
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Together, Pearson and Jones represent more than a hundred and thirty
thousand constituents.

After the vote, Johnson, a former special-education teacher who, in
2008, lived through a school shooting
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Knoxville, said
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“To the nation, keep watching. We are losing our democracy. We need
to make sure we stamp out this march to fascism. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely.” Though she was quoting the nineteenth-century
British historian and politician Lord Acton, the absolute power she
was referring to is the Republican super-majority that controls the
Tennessee legislature. Republicans also control both the executive and
judicial branches of the state government. This has created a
formidable xxxxxx against sensible gun reform in Tennessee
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In a crucial way, the outcome of the April 6th expulsion vote was
preordained in 2010. That year, Republican lawmakers used the
redistricting provision that follows every census to gerrymander the
state in such a way that it packed Democrats into a smaller number of
districts. Not surprisingly, the election of 2012 delivered
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Republicans their super-majority in both houses of the legislature.
This essentially gives them the power to do as they please, such as
expelling duly elected legislators and, in 2020, passing a
criminal-justice-reform bill that, among other things, makes it
a felony
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pitch a tent outside the capitol overnight, punishable by up to six
years in prison. (That bill was passed in response to weeks-long
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by racial-justice activists, who were protesting police overreach and
advocating the removal from the capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford
Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux
Klan
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Justin Jones was an organizer of those protests.)

Less than twenty-four hours after the expulsions, the Tennessee
Republican Party was using the event as a fundraising opportunity
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“Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for
having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige
of the State of Tennessee,” an appeal read. Meanwhile, Democrats,
led by Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, raised nearly half a
million
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for reëlection campaigns for Jones and Pearson in a special election
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can take place anytime within the next hundred days or so, at the
discretion of the governor. Both Jones and Pearson are expected to
be reinstated
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week for the interim—Jones was voted back in on Monday, by the
Nashville Metropolitan Council, and Pearson is due to be voted back in
on Wednesday, by the Democrats who control the Shelby County Board of
Commissioners—but G.O.P. leaders have threatened to withhold funds
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projects in the Memphis area if Pearson is reinstated, according to a
Shelby County commissioner.

The assault on democracy in Tennessee is also a reminder of how
quickly the swirl of politics can overtake grief
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I asked a friend, David Dark, a progressive evangelical and an
assistant professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University, a
private Christian institution in Nashville, what was not being
reported. He told me that Dick Koonce—the husband of Katherine
Koonce, the head of the Covenant School, who was killed in the
shooting—who is the executive director of Charis Ministries, a
social-services agency, “is grieving and challenging his own
friends, family, and co-congregants” to think of the shooter’s
family, too; as Koonce wrote in a statement, “honoring Katherine
compels us to remember a seventh family, equally wounded in the loss
of someone dear to them.” Dark himself is concerned about what he
termed “for-profit transphobia,” adding, “That story needs to
surface, but I fear it’s already sunk to the bottom of the
Internet.” (The Nashville police said that the shooter, Audrey Hale,
apparently identified as transgender
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a detail that has led much right-wing coverage of the tragedy.)

Dark also told me, in an e-mail, “The prophetic task is to dramatize
the moral contradictions we are otherwise compelled to abide as
normal. During Holy Week, they tried to deny the Tennessee Three, but
they ended up magnifying them. Our local beloved community is now
international news, just as it was when Rev. James Lawson, Diane Nash,
John Lewis & others staged the lunch-counter sit-ins. A friend
messaged me to say that Tennessee is going off the rails. No, I say a
select number of white people in Tennessee are going off the rails
loudly and publicly. Millions of others are waking up. Just watch. We
live in hope.”

_[SUE HALPERN [[link removed]] is
a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of, most recently,
the novel “Summer Hours at the Robbers Library
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* Tennessee Three
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* state legislatures
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* Gun Control
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* voter suppression
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* youth vote
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* Black voters
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* African Americans
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* Racism
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* South
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* Republican Party
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* 2024 Elections
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* Tennessee
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* Student protests
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