04/13/23
4/13/2023How important is it to maintain decorum in a legislative body? And how serious must a disruption of decorum by members be to justify their expulsion from that body?
Pundits and politicians alike are asking those questions after the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two Democratic members last Thursday. A week earlier the two, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, had helped lead a protest on the House floor against gun violence, together with a third Democratic representative, Gloria Johnson.
At least one of the three legislators had commandeered the microphone system and, without recognition from the chair, used a bullhorn to lead gun control advocates in the House balcony in the chant “no justice, no peace.” Those actions violated Tennessee House rules.
The expulsion resolutions charged each of the three legislators with “disorderly behavior” and bringing “disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives.”
The spark for all the drama was even more dramatic: a school shooter in Nashville the previous week had killed three 9-year-old students and three staff members. (Each of the three Democratic protest leaders represented parts of different Tennessee cities: Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville.)
The Tennessee Constitution requires a vote of at least two-thirds of the entire membership of the state’s House or Senate to expel a duly elected member. The House expelled a member in 2016 over sexual misconduct allegations; it expelled another member in 1980. Prior to that, no expulsion had occurred since Civil War days.
But Representatives Johnson, Jones, and Pearson were not charged with criminal or civil violations, and none was under investigation for any such acts.
Republicans hold enough seats in the Tennessee House of Representatives to meet the two-thirds requirement and then some. The vote to expel Jones was 72 to 25, and the one to expel Pearson was 69 to 26. So both motions succeeded winning the approval of at least two-thirds (67) of the 100 House members.
The vote to expel Johnson came in at 65 to 30, just short of the two-thirds majority. So she retained her seat.
One Republican voted to retain Jones, three to retain Pearson, and seven to retain Johnson.
Johnson is white. Jones and Pearson are black. The Republican majorities of the House claim that race played no role in their votes.
Johnson disagrees. In an interview following the expulsions, she said the two black representatives’ expulsions and her retention “might have to do with the color of my skin.”
Do ya think?
What the three protesters did comes under the heading of civil disobedience—breaking rules with non-violent resistance to try to right a wrong. Jones, Pearson, and Johnson were all expressing their dismay with the failure of the Tennessee Legislature to take any action to prevent more shootings like the one in the Nashville school and so many before.
A key principle of civil disobedience, as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and their many followers, calls for protesters to refrain from violent acts while doing their protests. Jones, Pearson, and Johnson followed that rule during their disruption of the Tennessee House proceedings.
The question then becomes what form of punishment did they deserve?
Legislative bodies have several options in such situations. They can officially chastise the violators. They can censure them. They can remove them from legislative committees.
Expulsion stands as the ultimate punishment—the nuclear option, to use a term prevalent in legislative parlance.
Democrats across the nation, and a number of independents and Republicans as well, condemn the Tennessee House for choosing expulsion, the extreme punishment. And the fact that two black members were expelled but not the white one who performed similar acts creates damning optics for the body as well.
Decorum in legislative proceedings and campaign appearances alike has lost its grip in recent years. U.S. Representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” to President Obama during a State of the Union message to a joint session of Congress. Several Republican Representatives booed or taunted President Biden during his similar speech this past January. And disruptions pepper the candidates of both parties during their public appearances at campaign events these days.
Little progress is gained by such actions. And the three Tennessee representatives who disrupted the Tennessee House had no real hope of flipping that body’s non-response to the Nashville shootings. But the First Amendment guarantees the right of assembly and petition in America for the redress of grievances.
Jones, Pearson, and Johnson, like others who engage in peaceful civil disobedience, no doubt expected some type of response from the Republican House leaders for their actions.
Expulsion, however, in the eyes of many observers inside and outside Tennessee went far beyond the bounds of appropriate retaliation. It drew national attention to the failure of leaders to put meaningful controls on the private possession and use of military-style firearms.
In that respect Jones, Pearson, and Johnson may have achieved much more than they expected from their brief commandeering of the Tennessee House proceedings.
