Tennessee expulsions boomerang on GOP
Tennessee legislators Justin Pearson, left, Gloria Johnson and Justin Jones at a rally on Wednesday, in Memphis, Tenn. Credit: AP/Patrick Lantrip
A Tennessee elected official named Justin Jones has achieved, at age 27, what had to be easiest of political martyrdoms in America. The Republican House majority at the state Capitol made Jones a celebrated cause by expelling him — only to see the freshman lawmaker promptly returned to office.
Jones along with two colleagues had joined a demonstration, in which a megaphone was used, on the floor of the House, to protest the state’s inaction on gun control.
The Tennessee House is headed by GOP Speaker Cameron Sexton, who commands an overwhelming 76-24 partisan majority. That's key to the why and how of Jones' story. For local perspective: Sexton's majority is even more lopsided than Democratic Speaker Carl Heastie’s 104-48 edge in the New York Assembly.
Sexton and his crew voted to throw out Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson, and fell just one vote short of ejecting Rep. Gloria Johnson, another Democrat who took part in the disruption.
But the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County is a deep-blue island in the red state. And that council had the power to fill the vacant legislative seat pending a special election. This week the body unanimously sent Jones right back to the legislature, in a procedural counterpunch that reverberated through the Democratic side of an ever-more-polarized U.S. body politic.
After all the noise, nothing is about to change regarding the state’s radically permissive gun laws, a perpetual issue made especially newsworthy in Nashville by an armed attack last month on a Christian school that killed three adults and three children.
The useless expulsion of Jones — and of Pearson, who's also been reinstated — only created some quick theater.
Upon his return to the House floor, Jones declared: “Today we stand as witness to the resurrection of a movement of a multi-racial democracy, that no unjust decision will stand.”
Celebrity is finding its way to Jones, with all the collateral buzz about his speaking style, his “trademark white suit” and hair pulled back in a ponytail.
He could thank his Republican antagonists.
Legislative caucuses everywhere are a special kind of institution. Their internal meetings address members’ solidarity far more than they handle how to govern.
When the majority is that vast, the ruling party becomes hard to distinguish from the legislature itself. Even if they knew that banishing rival members would boomerang as it did — resulting in nothing real — these politicians, in groupthink mode, chose to throw their weight around because they could.
Last year in New York, Democrat Heastie’s conference initiated a highly unorthodox move — a residency challenge after the fact — to deny GOP Assemb. Lester Chang the seat to which he’d been elected in Brooklyn. Wisely, the majority didn’t go through with it, undoubtedly aware of the blowback it would bring. Perhaps the Democrats wouldn’t have seen fit to discuss it at all if not for their collective sense of partisan turf. They’d been embarrassed when they lost the seat.
For legislators as a group, party unity is the most valued of political currencies. They circle wagons. When they do, it can make for stories like that of the Tennessee Three which in turn drive online fundraising to their opponents.
This is how the show goes on now — while none of it brings any changes anywhere in the way we are governed.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
