Key takeaways from the Tennessee House session where Republicans expelled two Black Democrats

The Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Black Democrats Thursday afternoon, while sparing a third white colleague of that fate, after the trio of lawmakers led a protest on the House floor last week.

State representatives Justin Jones of Nashville, Justin Pearson of Memphis and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, launched their protest on Thursday, March 30, demanding that the chamber move to enact gun control legislation in the wake of the deadly school shooting days earlier in Nashville that claimed the lives of seven people, including three children.

Citing their “disorderly behavior,” House Republicans introduced a motion on Monday to expel all three of the Democrats.

The highly unusual move marked the third time since the Civil War that a House member was expelled in Tennessee. In 2016, then-Rep. Jeremy Durham, a Republican, was removed from the House over allegations of sexual misconduct with at least 22 women. In 1980, then-Rep. Robert Fisher, also a Republican, was expelled after being convicted of soliciting a bribe in exchange for attempting to block pending legislation.

Here are the key takeaways from yesterday’s expulsions.

Race takes center stage in expulsion proceedings

According to House rules, a two-thirds majority vote of members is required in order to expel a lawmaker. Given that 75 of the seats in the chamber are currently held by Republicans and 23 are held by Democrats, the GOP had a healthy head start on that goal.

Three separate votes were held Thursday on whether to expel each lawmaker. No Democrat voted in favor of doing so, and the two Black representatives, Jones and Pearson, were ousted by votes of 72-25 and 69-26, respectively, while Johnson, who is white, held on to her seat when a majority of lawmakers (65-30) voted to let her remain.

Asked Friday by CNN's Alisyn Camerota why Johnson believed she did not have the same fate as her colleagues, she replied, “I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young Black men.”

Johnson added that she believed Jones and Pearson had been treated differently than she ahead of the votes.

“In listening to the questions and the way they were questioned and the way they were talked to ... it was completely different,” Johnson said, adding that there was a permeating “idea that you have to almost assimilate into this body to be like us.”

Speaking to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Friday, Jones accused House Republicans of trafficking in “racial rhetoric and racism.”

“This is the consequence of a body that wants to suppress not just our vote, but the votes of our districts that are majority Black and brown," he said. “I represent one of the most diverse districts in Tennessee, and so now those 78,000 people have been silenced.”

Pearson, one of the two lawmaker’s expelled, told reporters that this is “what happens when you lose democracy.”

“It is no coincidence that the two youngest Black lawmakers in the state of Tennessee and one of two women are on trial today. That is not accidental,” he said. “It’s starting in Tennessee, but it won’t end here.”

Other national leaders shared these same sentiments.

“So this attack on democracy is also a racist attack, as the third lawmaker, Rep. Gloria Johnson, is white,” Bernice King, the daughter of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., tweeted shortly after the expulsion votes. “A disastrously amoral day for Tennessee House Republicans in a state reeling from a school shooting.”

Olivia Julianna, director of politics and government affairs for the group Gen-Z for Change, called the voting results “outright racism.”

“Tennessee Republicans just expelled two black men from the legislature for protesting, but allowed the white legislator who did the same to keep her seat,” Julianna tweeted. “We stand with the Tennessee three.”

Republicans, in their own defense, said their actions had nothing to do with race, but instead were to uphold the rule of order for the House.

“Our members literally didn’t look at the ethnicity of the members up for expulsion,” Majority Leader William Lamberth of Portland told the Associated Press.

Pushing back more pointedly, Republican Rep. Gino Bulso of Brentwood accused the three Democrats of “effectively [conducting] a mutiny” with the protest.

Accusations of hypocrisy

One of the most contentious moments during Thursday’s six-hour House session came when Republican Rep. Johnny Garrett of Goodlettsville chastised the three Democratic lawmakers and moved to play a seven-minute video of the previous week’s protest.

Democratic Caucus Chair John Ray Clemmons of Nashville argued that the footage shot on the House floor was itself a violation of the chamber’s rules that prohibit House members from recording or live streaming ongoing proceedings.

“We also saw on that video that that recording was made by somebody on the House floor that is also questionably a violation of the House rules and ethics rules,” Clemmons said.

After some back-and-forth debate, GOP House Speaker Cameron Sexton directed the House clerk to read the expulsion resolution for Jones, the first lawmaker expelled. A week prior, Sexton likened the House protest, in which the three Democrats approached the podium last week with a bullhorn chanting, “No action, no peace!” to an “insurrection.”

Critics have called out Sexton for those comments.

“To liken the protest to an insurrection is to use hyperbolic language,” Susan Haynes, an associate professor of political science at Lipscomb University in Nashville told Yahoo News.

“Insurrection is a crime. ... The three Tennessee Democratic lawmakers broke House rules, but did not rebel or rise up against the authority of the U.S.”

Keith Boykin, a national political commentator and author, invoked the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol when reflecting on Thursday’s vote.

“The Republican Party today made it clear as day that a peaceful Black man with a megaphone is more threatening to them than a thousand violent white men with deadly weapons,” Boykin tweeted.

Despite Democrats claiming that they were raising their voices on behalf of their constituents, Tennessee Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison told CNN Thursday evening that Jones and Pearson had a history of disrupting House floor proceedings.

“It’s not possible for us to move forward with the way they were behaving in committee and on the House floor,” Faison said. “There’s got to be some peace.”

Garrett, who began Republican arguments against Jones, reiterated his view that “rules here are for order.”

“This is just not about one specific instance or one specific rule that may have been broken,” he said. “We owe that to the constituents that we represent across this state.”

When Pearson took the podium, he challenged members of the House to recognize the origins of the United States.

“You, who celebrate July 4, 1776 — pop fireworks and eat hotdogs — you say to protest is wrong because you spoke out of turn, because you spoke out for people who are marginalized ... in a country built on people who speak out of turn, who spoke out of turn to build a nation,” Pearson said. “I come from a long line of people who resisted.”

Democrats seek to highlight inaction on gun reform

While Republicans sought to keep the focus of Thursday’s proceedings on the disruption that protest had caused in the House and the rules that it had broken, Democrats attempted to keep a spotlight on the issue of gun reform legislation.

“We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy. That is why the nation is watching you today,” Jones said, challenging his Republican colleagues.

Johnson said during her time addressing the chamber that she joined the protest because she understands what it’s like to grapple with the effects of a school shooting having experienced one herself as a teacher more than a decade ago at Central High School in Knoxville, where in 2008 a student fatally shot a 15-year-old classmate during a dispute.

“That is why I walked up into the well, to stand with my other colleagues who were tired of having their voices cut off when we are trying to speak about violence in our classrooms, violence in our churches, violence in our restaurants and our grocery stores,” she said. “It was in my heart. It was compelling me to come forward and address this issue. I stood with them because we all feel our voices are being silenced. And something had to be said.”

As some Republicans made the case that measures passed in the chamber since the Nashville shooting would help increase school safety, Democrats countered that they didn’t nearly go far enough.

“This is a part of what I think is a symptomatic problem of not addressing root causes,” Pearson said. “The root cause that each of us have to address is this gun violence epidemic due to the proliferation of guns."

President Biden released his own statement late Thursday, slamming Republicans for focusing on the House protest instead of meaningful action to prevent another school shooting.

“Today’s expulsion of lawmakers who engaged in peaceful protest is shocking, undemocratic and without precedent,” Biden said. “Rather than debating the merits of the issue, these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee. ... Our kids continue to pay the price.”

Growing concern over supermajority chambers

The expulsion of two elected Tennessee House members was, in part, made possible by the fact that Republicans hold a supermajority in that chamber, meaning they can push through most bills, rules changes and other orders of business unilaterally. As Thursday’s proceedings showed, that includes sanctioning, reprimanding and expelling colleagues for a wide array of reasons.

Concerns over supermajorities wielding too much power are not limited to Tennessee, of course.

A recent Senate win for Republicans in Wisconsin this week gives them a supermajority as they now control 22 of 33 senate seats, giving them enough power to impeach officials, including the Democratic governor. In North Carolina, a woman who won a House seat as a Democrat by 20 in the last election, switched to Republican, giving the GOP a supermajority in the House.

With the precedent set to expel members from Thursday’s Tennessee House session, some critics question whether having Republicans or Democrats wield an overwhelming majority in legislatures elsewhere will have lopsided effects in the future.

Author and political analyst Jeff Greenfield noted in Politico, “In the coming weeks and months, the Nashville battle may well be just a footnote as legislatures exercise their powers over everything from the makeup and reach of the courts to the traditional powers of a governor, to the will of the voters who vote for ballot propositions.”

What’s next for the expelled Democrats?

A special election will be called to fill the two seats vacated by the expulsion of the two Democrats. But Jones and Pearson are both eligible to run again, Carrie Russell, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, told Yahoo News. The winner of that election will fulfill the remainder of the term before having to run for reelection in 2024.

In the interim, local governing bodies in each district can appoint temporary representatives, according to the Tennessee Constitution, and, once again, they can select Jones and Pearson for that role.

Early indications point to both Jones and Pearson receiving the temporary appointments. At least 27 members of Nashville’s 40-seat Metropolitan Council, in Jones’s district, pledged their support online.

“Many believe that the council will vote to send Representative Jones back to the State House,” Russell said. “Similarly, sources in Memphis report that Pearson would similarly be elected by Shelby County government officials as the interim successor.”

Members of the Legislature are not allowed to fundraise during a legislative session, but within hours of his expulsion, Jones had reactivated his campaign fundraising website.

At least one of 13 county commissioners in Shelby County have already pledged to reappoint Pearson. It remains unclear if or when a special meeting would be called on behalf of this appointment.

House Speaker Sexton offered a cautious reception if Jones and Pearson were to return to the House.

“We all understand we won’t agree on every issue or every vote, but we will continue to work together on issues where we have common ground,” Sexton told Yahoo News. “A majority of our legislation has always been bipartisan, and I do not expect that to change.”

But as clips of both men were posted on social media throughout the day Thursday, a common refrain about Pearson emerged from Democrats: A political star had been born.

The political legacy of the expulsions

And while Jones and Pearson appear poised to win back their seats in the Tennessee House, the move to expel them in the first place may have longer-lasting implications. Jana Morgan, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, believes that the expulsion of the two Democrats could prove politically damaging for Republicans in the long term.

“It is likely Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are receiving plenty of positive feedback from their core constituencies (and probably the gun lobby as well), which seems to be reinforcing their resolve,” Morgan, co-author of the book “Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence,” told Yahoo News in an email. “But beyond the diehards, the expulsion votes seem to be backfiring.”

Morgan added that Thursday’s efforts have only further galvanized supporters for the expelled lawmakers “in an effort to show that their voices will not be so easily silenced.”

Echoing this assessment, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said she believed that Republicans likely energized a youth base to do more organizing than ever before.

“Republicans may think they won today in Tennessee, but their fascism is only further radicalizing and awakening an earthquake of young people, both in the South and across the nation,” Ocasio-Ortez tweeted Thursday evening. “If you thought youth organizing was strong, just wait for what’s coming. Gen Z don’t play.”

But some critics are hesitant to overstate the effects of an expulsion.

Thomas Goodman, an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Law at Rhodes College in Memphis, believes that while expulsions could deter “voicing of dissident opinions” in some states, with rules in check, there shouldn’t be major issues.

Goodman told Yahoo News that, under the best circumstances, legislators “would continue expressing their opinions and offering dissent, but through mechanisms that do not disrupt parliamentary procedures.”

Cover thumbnail: George Walker IV/AP