Ed. Note: Fault Lines alumni Mario Machado and Christopher Seaton, who will apparently fight with each other over anything, agreed to debate the following topic: Resolved: Tennessee’s House of Representatives was right to expel the “Tennessee Three.” Chris will take the affirmative and Mario will take the negative. Chris’ argument is below.
If I’d like to believe one thing about the politicians in Nashville representing my home state, it’s that they’re naturally averse to using the deaths of schoolchildren for political gain. When others in the State House attempt it, a consequence of that behavior should be some form of discipline. That is why, despite the cries of “Racism” at the top of the unduly passionates’ lungs, I stand with Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton and the Tennessee GOP’s attempts to expel Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson—the so called “Tennessee Three.”
My only critique is Tennessee’s Republican super majority didn’t try hard enough.
Let’s go back to the start of this controversy. On March 27 of this year, a transgender man opened fire at the Covenant Christian School in Nashville. The shooter took the lives of three children and three adults.
You won’t remember the names of the deceased, but you’ll remember those who attempted to profit off their passing. That would be Jones, Pearson and Johnson, who I’ll refer to as “The Justins and Jabba the Putz.” That’s because they led a mob of protesters a couple of days later into the State House and took over the floor of the chamber. Using a bullhorn, Jabba and the Justins were able to effectively shut down House business until cops restored order.
Do yourself a favor and watch the video shown during the “Tennessee Threes” respective hearings on their expulsions. This was not a peaceful protest. It was a mob demanding mob action and mob justice held back by some very ballsy Tennessee State Troopers.
The point isn’t to start splitting hairs over the definition of “insurrection” or recasting this as an incident of “good trouble,” as Nashville’s Justin Jones called the Three’s antics. This was the work of three politicians who would rather spend time at drag shows and dunking on Twitter than actually represent their constituents. That’s never befitting an elected official.
So my home state legislature decided to send a message: We will not tolerate House Members exploiting dead children for political gain. The Republican super majority moved to expel the Tennessee Three.
Our State House is full of well meaning but dumbass Republicans, and Gloria Johnson skated by one vote. The Justins were expelled, but returned when Nashville and Memphis city councils unanimously voted to send them back to the State House.
What should’ve been a message sent about fucking with the memories of the dead became the latest incident in which the national media got to say Tennessee Did A Racism. This little bit of fun and frivolity occurred when Jabba the Putz mobility scooted her bloated ass onto CNN and suggested the only reason she escaped expulsion was because she was a 60-year-old white woman.
Now the Justins are getting in trouble again on the House floor over personal attacks on colleagues during debates. Gloria is now reveling in her status as a rock star Retired Educator®* telling everyone who doesn’t agree with her on drag shows they’re racist and sexist.
This is what happens when you send politicians in to do the work of street fighters. Let’s fix this mess.
First, Tennessee needs to pass a law forbidding those expelled from office from ever holding public office again.
Second, vote to expel Jones, Pearson and Johnson again. And this time be dears and make sure you actually have the votes before the motions are made.
There’s one final person to expel. If you look at the voting records of the expulsion hearings, one Republican voted no on all three votes. His one vote was enough to let Jabba the Putz slither by and warble about racism.
Find that motherfucker and expel his ass too.
This is a message worth sending. We will not tolerate politicians who grandstand off the backs of the dead. Do it and you’re best advised to find work elsewhere. Tennesseans don’t want cosplay revolutionaries, they want people who will represent them.
Arguments regarding the expulsion disenfranchising voters or denying people representation are unfounded. Jones and Pearson were practically back in House chambers calling their colleagues racist and carting around replicas of children’s coffins within 48 hours. All I’m proposing is that if someone’s expelled, we make local legislators work a little harder at not sending us a vile grandstander to do the bidding of the public.
Screaming about this being a threat to democracy is completely unfounded when one considers this is a process provided for in the Tennessee Constitution as a means of disciplining members of the House and Senate, and that it was conducted in a completely democratic vote with all members who chose to participate doing so.
Frankly, the expulsion process should be used more often. We haven’t used it enough to distance our respectable elected officials from those who are casting votes for the Instagram and TikTok crowd.
When Tennessee moves to expel a representative again, they should make it stick.
Especially when it’s for grandstanding off the backs of the dead.
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What everyone glosses over about the whole circus is that Johnson and the Justins were demanding action on legislation that they had never even proposed. I’ve had people say “Well they knew stricter gun legislation had no chance of passage. That’s why they hadn’t introduced anything.” What happened to introducing legislation because you believe it is the right thing to do? If they’d had legislation, they could point to and say “We must consider (or adopt) this to prevent further bloodshed!” But they basically led a pep rally with nothing but slogans and platitudes.
And the Democrats made their stand very clear when the White House invited Gloria and the Justins but not the relatives of the actual victims.
It was a show, a performance worthy of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
Exactly. This was the height of grandstanding and shouldn’t go unaddressed.
It’s theater Jabba and the Justins have performed their entire political careers. Without sending a message this won’t be tolerated it’s only going to get worse.
FWIW, I am also a proud but displaced native born Tennessean.
The three legislators behaved awfully. They grandstanded on the back of a tragedy just to make a show of themselves with no suggestion of an actual solution. They arguably risked starting a riot. I wouldn’t vote for any of the three for dog catcher.
That said, they are the duly elected representatives of their districts. The free choice of voters. The choice of the voters should be denied them only in extreme circumstances, and this stunt didn’t reach that bar. Censure them, take away privileges, take away committee seats, whatever. But expelling them was an infringement on the rights of the citizens that chose them. And that’s too far.
Not to mention the action backfired and turned them into heroes. A censure and the whole freak show would have been forgotten in a week.
Was any constituent really denied representation when the Justins were back at the State House within the week?
And they can’t be expelled again for the same offense.
This is why my policy proposal, while extreme, is the better course of action. Next time get rid of the grandstanders so the next appointed or elected officials think twice about ever going there.
An elected representative does reflect the votes of citizens, but that does not give the representative and their voters the right to override the decorum and process of the legislature, which also reflects the will of the voters; those voters significantly outnumber the number of voters for one representative. For example, in the summer of 2020, the Seattle City Council was holding a vote on some matter (I think it was labor-related), and the position of Socialist Council Member Kshama Sawant was in the small minority. What was her strategy to overcome this? To use her key to the Council offices to allow a bunch of socialist/anarchist activists to enter Council chambers and occupy it until the vote was either postponed or the Council voted the way she and the activists wanted. The Council took no action against her except an ineffective censure, and the left-wing voters for her city ward returned her in the fall.
I can’t tell you where the line is as to when a minority of voters vis a vis their choice of representative deserve to be punished and, yes, effectively disenfranchised, by having their choice nullified for attempting to override the majority of voters, but the Sawant stunt in 2020 crossed it, and this recent Nashville stunt crossed it too.
SHG, thanks for this debate. It’s an interesting exercise.
My opinion will matter here even less than my opinions matter to my teenage children. But you left the comment section open so I’ll walk my dumb ass through the door.
I don’t agree that the 3-plus buffoons should be punished over my moral outrage about their disgusting comments. But the mayhem they created in an important public place is unacceptable. They should be expelled for that outrageous action. The REPs expelled them surely knowing that they could not exclude these jerk-offs permanently. So the party in charge made the wing nuts go back to voters to regain entry. The wing nuts got the support they wanted. The REPs re-established order. And haters ‘r gonna hate.
That’s all. I’m getting back to trying to control my teenagers.
A major element that made this so ineffectual was that after getting expelled, the replacement vote for Justin Pearson under the Tennessee Constitution and election laws sent the decision back to the Nashville city council, which reacted to the expulsion by… immediately returning him to his seat. The city/county defied the legislature, implicitly endorsing the conduct that Pearson, Jones, and Johnson led, as well as endorsing the line that the legislature was racist to expel Pearson.
The superior state government could have taken action against the subordinate municipal government, for instance by dissolving the City Council (there being no right to municipal government), but didn’t have the will to do so, or were unwilling to live with the difficulty that would result from making the expulsion more effective. A sad chapter in tales of “writing checks that couldn’t be cashed.”
To combat the charge of racism for not ousting Gloria Johnson, she was the only one of the three who lawyered up for the expulsion hearing. The other two went in alone. Not smart. Though it’s probably racist in some way to suggest that not hiring a lawyer is dumb because reasons, so never mind.
My vote still goes to your counterpart. This benefitted the three far more than it sent a message to anyone willing to listen. Maybe they should have done it harder, but they didn’t.
Hey thanks for taking the time to read the debate and formulate an opinion on what we had to say! I really appreciate it!
And your secret is safe with me. I won’t tell Mario.
Wasn’t there something in the rules of debate about the word “motherfucker”?
There isn’t when motherfuckers with stones as big as Mario and I scrap.
We’ve bloodied each other so badly over the years at this point our mean-ass editor just counts who gets the fall now.
It’s the best.