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Post by aj2hall on Apr 12, 2023 14:23:31 GMT
An opinion from one of the young men expelled www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opinion/justin-pearson-tennessee.html MEMPHIS — In January, my former high school classmate Larry Thorn was shot dead. Larry was sweet and beloved and a coach and secretary at a Shelby County, Tenn., middle school when he was killed on Jan. 10, just a month before I took my seat in the State House. In February, in only 10 days, 20 people were shot in mass shootings in Memphis, the community I represented. And on Monday, five people were shot dead at the Old National Bank in Louisville, Ky.
In the wake of the March 27 Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville that took six precious lives, including that of 9-year-olds Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney, our people are traumatized. They want action.
Following the school massacre, I walked into work in the State House each day seeing hundreds of young protesters, many with signs that asked, “Am I next?”
We were traumatized, too. We wanted action, too. And the difference was — it was literally our job to act.
Yet, Republican legislators refuse to take meaningful action.
Instead, some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus. But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.
In this season of rebirth and renewal, I stood beside my people with hope. For God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”
Last week, the people of Tennessee and the nation witnessed an assault against democracy when my colleague Justin Jones and I, both young Black Democratic men, were expelled from office for allegedly breaching decorum on the House floor. My former colleague, a 60-year-old white female Democratic representative, Gloria Johnson, had also joined our peaceful protest against gun violence but narrowly survived expulsion. Mr. Jones has since returned to the House after a vote by the Nashville Metropolitan Council. I’m hoping the Shelby County Board of Commissioners similarly puts me back in the House on Wednesday.
There is something amiss in the decorum of the State House when G.O.P. leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from “hanging by a tree” as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr. Sherrell later apologized for his comment) feel comfortable berating Mr. Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience. This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.
I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced. We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans — Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer — are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight.
In such a hostile environment for democracy, I’m inspired by the late civil rights fighter and congressman John Lewis, who in 1965, when demonstrating for voting rights in Selma, Ala., endured a police beating that almost took his life. In 2016, after the tragic Pulse Nightclub massacre that killed 49 people, he led a sit-in on the U.S. House floor for 25 hours to protest the inaction of lawmakers in the pockets of the National Rifle Association.
My mother, a schoolteacher, and my father, a pastor, instilled in me the hope that justice is possible for all. When I was 15, I attended a Memphis City School Board meeting with my parents to give a speech demanding access to quality textbooks and classes that white peers in their school districts had. These were resources that increased their opportunities for a good college education — chances that Black students, too, deserved.
A few years ago, I helped lead a coalition of community activists in the fight against the construction of the Byhalia Connection crude oil pipeline project in my late grandmothers’ community in southwest Memphis, where, according to a 2013 study, the risk of cancer is four times higher than the national average. Both of my grandmothers died from cancer. Our coalition killed the project before it killed more of us. We fought and we won.
Unchecked gun violence, environmental racism and denial of basic health and human services should enrage us all, and compel us to action.
It’s not just our individual voices that were sanctioned and silenced last Thursday. It was the voices of the nearly 135,000 Tennesseans we represented — many who are desperate for protection from the absence of many common-sense gun safety laws in our state. Since the Covenant School shooting, the Republican supermajority in the State House has done little but advance a bill that would allow teachers to carry guns in school and propose a $140 million budget increase to pay for the presence of armed guards in public schools, further militarizing them without adequate evidence that this makes schools safer.
Besides expanding already expansive gun rights, Republican-led statehouses across the country are proposing and passing staggering numbers of bills that serve a fringe, white evangelical agenda that abrogates the rights and freedoms of the rest of us. They’re passing legislation to control the intellectual freedom of writers and educators, proposing laws that would restrict the bodily autonomy of transgender children and people who can become pregnant, and curtailing even our right to vote. Combined with a shrinking social safety net as people lose access to resources to meet basic health, housing and food needs, we have a nation in pain and peril.
In a small victory for our people clamoring for change, Gov. Bill Lee announced Tuesday that he would sign an executive order strengthening background checks for buying firearms and called for Republican lawmakers to support a red flag law.
I was elected early this year by the people of Memphis and Millington to stand up for all of us against encroachments on our freedoms.
I will continue to fight with and for our people, whether in or out of office. We and the young protesters are the future of a new Tennessee. Those who seek to silence us will not have the final say.
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Post by onelasttime on Apr 12, 2023 18:11:49 GMT
And in other news….
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Post by onelasttime on Apr 12, 2023 18:48:25 GMT
So both are back in. Good!
Most of the time these days the Republicans are their own worst enemy.
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Post by hop2 on Apr 12, 2023 20:21:45 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Apr 13, 2023 13:47:42 GMT
www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/tennessee-house-republicans.htmlWASHINGTON — There are 99 legislators in the Tennessee House of Representatives, the body that voted on Thursday to expel two of its Democratic members for leading an anti-gun protest in the chamber.
Sixty of them had no opponent in last November’s election.
Of the remaining House races, almost none were competitive. Not a single seat flipped from one party to the other.
“We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. “In a normal two-party system, if one party goes too far, usually the other party stops them. They put the brakes on.”
In Tennessee, he said, “there’s nobody to put on the brakes.”
And not just in Tennessee.
Nationwide, candidates for roughly four of every 10 state legislative seats run unopposed in general elections.
And across the country, one-party control of state legislatures, compounded by hyperpartisan politics, widespread gerrymandering, an urban-rural divide and uncompetitive races, has made the dysfunction in Tennessee more the rule than the exception.
The lack of competition means incumbent lawmakers face few consequences for their conduct. And their legislative actions are driven in large part by the fraction of partisans who determine their fates in primary elections, the only political contests where they face serious opposition.
Those forces, intensified by the Supreme Court’s open door for gerrymandering and the geographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into rural ones, are buffeting legislatures run by both parties: Republicans have total control of legislatures in 28 states (including Nebraska, which is nominally nonpartisan) and Democrats in 18.
That control has enabled both parties to enact legislation advancing their policy agendas, as would be expected, especially at such a partisan moment. Both parties, to differing degrees, have abused their ability to gerrymander.
But it is Republican-run states, many experts say, that are taking extreme positions on limiting voting and bending or breaking other democratic norms, as Tennessee did in expelling two lawmakers last week.
Before Thursday, there had been only two expulsions from the Tennessee House since the Civil War.
Steven R. Levitsky, a Harvard University government professor and the author with Daniel Ziblatt of the book “How Democracies Die,” said one-party rule in Democratic states like Illinois has typically led to corruption and abuses of power.
But states controlled by Democrats, he said, have not tried to limit voting, restrict civil liberties or push back on democratic norms the way Republican-controlled states have in recent years.
“Only one party, I think, is flirting with authoritarianism right now,” Professor Levitsky said.
Republican leaders in Tennessee said they had expelled the Democratic lawmakers not just for last week’s protests but also for a pattern of grandstanding and disruptions that they said was the real assault on the ability of the legislature to function democratically.
“My people deserve to be heard as well, and you can’t have that with folks in the well with a bullhorn,” Representative William Lamberth, a member of Republican leadership, said after the expulsions. Since then Representative Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis have been reinstated by their local governing boards ahead of special elections later this year.
Victor Ashe, a Republican and former mayor of Knoxville who served in the legislature when Republicans were a minority in the 1980s, said the legislature had become more contentious and his party more extreme since then. In the heat of partisan combat, he said, “some people don’t think about ‘This is not democracy.’
Referring to Republicans and some Democrats in the legislature, he said: “They just have a different mind-set. Once you’re elected, the idea that your opponent doesn’t have to be your enemy seems to have vanished.”
The expulsions come at a time when the legislatures in Tennessee and other states have pushed at the traditional limits of political power.
In Tennessee, which was previously known for its relatively moderate, pragmatic political culture, the legislature took aim at the state’s center of Democratic support: Republican lawmakers created a gerrymander last year that split Nashville’s Democratic-held congressional district, which has represented the city since Tennessee became a state, into three — extending well outside the city and into typically Republican areas.
The legislature also unilaterally passed a law cutting the size of Nashville’s metropolitan council in half, to 20 members from 40, but a judicial panel temporarily suspended the action on Monday.
Elsewhere, Republican-led legislatures in North Carolina and Wisconsin passed laws stripping power from incoming Democratic governors after Roy Cooper was elected in North Carolina in 2016 and Tony Evers in 2018.
In Missouri, the legislature is trying to take over the police department in St. Louis, one of several moves aimed at leaders of Democratic cities. Many of those actions explicitly revoke cities’ longstanding authority to enact local laws that might run counter to G.O.P. legislation on priority issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights, law enforcement or guns.
Republican legislatures in Ohio, Arkansas, Florida and several other states are considering actions this year that would limit the ability of citizens to get ballot initiatives before voters, particularly on issues like abortion and gerrymandering. Enacting barriers to voting — broadly aimed at young voters and members of minority groups that lean Democratic — has become part of the standard Republican playbook.
Still, Mr. Ashe said Democrats couldn’t blame Republicans for their plight in red states, having lost the ability to compete for much of the Republican electorate during the Obama years and after.
“Democrats are also culpable,” Mr. Ashe said. “They haven’t been able to find good people to run.” Tennessee Republicans built their majority, he noted, by fielding candidates even in contests where they were doomed to lose.
Jim Cooper, Nashville’s longtime Democratic representative in Congress, said he agreed. “Local Democrats have done a terrible job in recent decades,” said Mr. Cooper, who represented Nashville for 20 years before retiring in January after the legislature gerrymandered his district. “We’re not good at fighting back. For example, we didn’t go out and recruit anti-Trump Republicans, because we liked having a small tent.”
That sorting into political tribes, where party loyalty is more important than local or state issues, has only cemented one-party control in state legislatures. In sharp contrast to past decades, “it’s pretty much what a voter thinks of the president that is going to dictate how a voter casts their ballot in a state legislative election,” said Steven Rogers, a Saint Louis University political scientist who has studied the issue. “What legislators do themselves doesn’t really matter that much anymore.”
In Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s most extreme gerrymanders has cemented Republican rule of the State Legislature since 2012, lawmakers have used legal maneuvers to keep Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, from filling appointed state government positions.
There’s another reason state legislators in Tennessee — and many other states — so often face no opposition: Few people want to run, or can afford to.
At an annual salary of $24,316, “it’s like a nothing job,” said Mr. Cooper, the former congressman. “It can ruin your day job.”
“The sad reality is that good people don’t want to run for office anymore,” he said. “So we shouldn’t be surprised by what we get when the fringe 10 or 15 percent of the state legislature can run everything.”
Still, some political experts and Nashville voters said the expulsion debacle had the potential to reboot some competition. Most pointed to the wave of national publicity that elevated the two expelled Democrats to national figures and reinvigorated — if only briefly — the party’s political energy.
“If there’s any hope for the state Democratic Party living again, it’s going to come from a rejection of that sort of inevitability of extremist control” on issues like the mass shooting in Nashville, said Keel Hunt, a political columnist and a former top aide to Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee Republican governor and senator.
Courtney Taylor, 33, a Nashville native, lives in the district represented by Mr. Jones and voted for him in part because of his advocacy for social justice issues. For all the pain of the past week, she said, she was glad that for a few days at least he was able to shake up the legislature’s status quo.
“There has been this whirlwind of stress,” she said. “A lot of people are feeling like they have their hands tied. There is a sense of helplessness and frustration.” She said it was important to force the legislature to listen.
“It makes you feel a little less alone and a little less like you are screaming into the void to have someone actively take notice and stand with you.”
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Apr 13, 2023 18:42:24 GMT
Tennessee GOP infighting, name-calling each other racists.. also blaming the guy who broke ranks by voting to save Rep Johnson.. Tennessee State Rep. Scott Cepicky, however, argued that the circumstances were so dire that Republicans needed to stay united against the Democrats no matter what. "If you don't believe we're at war for our republic, with all love and respect to you, you need a different job," he said. "The left wants Tennessee so bad because, if they get us, the southeast falls and it's game over for the republic. This is not a neighborhood social gathering. We are fighting for the republic of our country right now!" www.rawstory.com/tennessee-republicans-2659851986/
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Post by aj2hall on Apr 14, 2023 11:25:13 GMT
The Republicans, the Speaker in particular might regret their move to expel the young men and closer scrutiny heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-13-2023The speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, which recently expelled two young Black lawmakers who have since been returned to office, is also in trouble. Judd Legum of Popular Information first chased down that speaker Cameron Sexton is living in Nashville rather than the district he represents. With more digging, Legum has turned up that Sexton apparently bought a $600,000 home in Nashville and hid that purchase, keeping his name off the documents and keeping his wife’s signature obscure. He has argued that he could legally continue to represent Crossville, his alleged place of residence, because so long as he has a “definite intention of returning,” Tennessee law okays lawmakers living elsewhere. But the purchase of a $600,000 home in Nashville seems like a pretty permanent abandonment of Crossville. Legum also notes that Sexton has been drawing $313 a day to commute back to his district while he is not, in fact, commuting back to his district. Since 2021, he has claimed $92,071 in expenses, likely enough to cover his mortgage. The Republican lawmakers in Tennessee may come to regret the attention they’ve drawn to themselves and their habits of governance.
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Apr 14, 2023 15:09:43 GMT
Welcome to our new world of guns.. Doctors were forced to perform an emergency c-section and deliver a premature baby after a pregnant woman was shot by a Walgreens worker who suspected her of shoplifting, WKRN reported. According to police, the employee recorded two women with his cell phone as they left the Nashville store and started loading items the worker believed they hadn't paid for into a car. Officers said one of the women pulled out a can of mace and sprayed the employee.
The worker then pulled a semi-automatic pistol and began shooting, saying he was afraid for his life because he didn't know if the women were armed, the report said. One of suspected shoplifters, a 34-year-old woman, was seven months pregnant and was shot multiple times by the employee, according to the report. Both the woman and her baby are in critical but stable condition after the c-section was performed, WKRN reported. www.rawstory.com/walgreens/
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Post by Merge on Apr 14, 2023 21:42:57 GMT
Welcome to our new world of guns.. Doctors were forced to perform an emergency c-section and deliver a premature baby after a pregnant woman was shot by a Walgreens worker who suspected her of shoplifting, WKRN reported. According to police, the employee recorded two women with his cell phone as they left the Nashville store and started loading items the worker believed they hadn't paid for into a car. Officers said one of the women pulled out a can of mace and sprayed the employee.
The worker then pulled a semi-automatic pistol and began shooting, saying he was afraid for his life because he didn't know if the women were armed, the report said. One of suspected shoplifters, a 34-year-old woman, was seven months pregnant and was shot multiple times by the employee, according to the report. Both the woman and her baby are in critical but stable condition after the c-section was performed, WKRN reported. www.rawstory.com/walgreens/The employee, of course, will be cleared of any wrongdoing. Gun culture says that it’s OK for citizens to kill each other over property crimes.
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blue tulip
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 2,984
Jun 25, 2014 20:53:57 GMT
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Post by blue tulip on Apr 17, 2023 17:06:52 GMT
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Apr 17, 2023 18:01:30 GMT
^^^^.....welcome to the party of christian family of values..
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Apr 20, 2023 19:19:22 GMT
Well.... There is more to these perverts in the Tennessee House of Representatives...... One of the Republican House leaders who voted to expel three Democrats over a gun violence protest was recently found guilty of sexually harassing at least one teenage legislative intern by a secret ethics investigation.State Rep. Scotty Campbell, the vice chair of the House Republican caucus, suffered no consequences for making extremely vulgar comments and making inappropriate advances toward the 19-year-old intern, and a panel comprised of two Republicans and two Democrats concluded he had violated the policy against workplace discrimination and harassment, reported WTVF-TV. "I had consensual, adult conversations with two adults off property," Campbell said, when asked for comment. "I think conversations are consensual once that is verbally agreed to. If I choose to talk to any intern in the future, it will be recorded." A family member shared with the TV station an email from the victim, who declined to comment on the report, that provided a detailed account to officials at her university about her experiences with the GOP leader, who she said made sexually explicit comments about her and another intern he'd seen walking with her into the Capitol Towers apartment building. "[Campbell later] made comments about how ... he was in his apartment imagining that we were performing sexual acts on one another and how it drove him crazy knowing that was happening so close to him," the woman said. "I uncomfortably explained that that was not happening, and he insisted that he knew it was and asked me to tell him about it." The woman explained the other intern was simply her friend, and Campbell, a former talk radio host, described how sexually attractive he found her, and he made other comments about being "very, very lonely" and asked questions she found inappropriate. "He proceeded to ask how many men I've slept with," she told university officials. "I told him zero, and he insisted that I was lying and told me not to lie. He then proceeded to ask how many women I've slept with and said he bets girls go crazy over me." Then he offered to giver her cannabis gummies to see her tattoos and piercings, and then begged for "several hugs" when she declined. "I was getting progressively more afraid and uncomfortable," she told university officials. "He then reached out his hand towards me and grabbed me around my neck. I recoiled and said I felt sick and immediately left. That was the last night I ever spoke with or saw him. I blocked his number after that." Taxpayers paid an unspecified amount to protect the intern by moving her from an apartment building where the legislator also lived to a downtown Nashville hotel and shipped her furniture to another part of the state while she completes her internship, but Campbell denied the woman's allegations. "That's not true," Campbell insisted, and the TV station reported that he quietly answered "yes" when asked if the woman was making up the claims. However, the victim's email says she was told that Campbell had "admitted fully to his guilt," and Connie Ridley, director of legislative administration for the General Assembly, provided a memorandum from his personnel file to the TV station but said legislature policies prohibited her from sharing additional information. "No information concerning a complaint, investigation, lawsuit or the implementation of corrective action will be released to anyone not directly involved in such a matter," Ridley said. "The Legislature will comply with the confidentiality provisions of the Workplace Discrimination and Harassment Policy." www.rawstory.com/scotty-campbell-tennessee/
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Apr 20, 2023 19:46:06 GMT
Done with Tennessee... On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.” One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon. Though not considered in legislative session and not listed on the Legislature’s website, the proclamation holds an official stature: It was issued on Senate stationery and stamped with the Tennessee state seal. The proclamation’s wording closely follows that of a proclamation issued by Virginia’s Gov. Robert McDonnell in April 2010, with one striking exception. McDonnell’s proclamation in final form included a paragraph, inserted after protests to an earlier version, stating “that it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war.” www.rawstory.com/white-tennessee-lawmakers-speak-out-for-insurrection-in-honoring-confederate-history/
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Post by onelasttime on Apr 20, 2023 19:55:23 GMT
And there is this…. At least he resigned.
From the article..
”NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A member of GOP leadership in the Tennessee House of Representatives was recently found guilty of sexually harassing at least one legislative intern, likely two, by an ethics subcommittee acting in secret, NewsChannel 5 Investigates has learned.
About six hours after being confronted by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, Rep. Scotty Campbell gave up his seat in the Tennessee General Assembly. “
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