Joseph Sabino Mistick: Troubles in Tennessee

Political careers can turn on a dime, as the sudden fate of two Tennessee state legislators proved when they were expelled from the state House of Representatives. Reps. Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, both Democrats and both Black, were stripped of their elected positions by a Republican supermajority on April 6.

Their sin was staging a protest on the floor of the House calling for gun safety legislation after six people — including three 9-year-olds — were slaughtered in Nashville by a killer with an assault rifle. Rep. Gloria Johnson, who was part of the protest with her two colleagues, was not expelled, and the optics were horrible.

Johnson summed up the reason for her being spared like this: “Well, I think it’s pretty clear. I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young Black men. I was talked down to as a woman, ‘mansplained’ to. But it was completely different from the questioning that they got.”

While Jones and Pearson’s fortune changed swiftly and dramatically, it did not go as their Republican colleagues had expected. Within 24 hours of their expulsion, the two legislators became national figures, owning several news cycles and appearing on the Sunday political talk shows. And the Republican legislators who expelled them were ridiculed nationally.

Thanks to the Republican majority in the Tennessee House, another stone was placed upon the body of the national Republican Party, which is struggling to bear the weight of extreme positions on women’s health care rights, gun reform, voting rights and, now, again, civil rights.

It is a far cry from the civil rights support by Republicans in years past. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, although championed and signed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, passed the U.S. Congress with a majority of Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate. In the House, 80% of Republican members and 61% of Democratic members voted for the landmark civil rights bill.

The following year, when Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act (VRA) after the “Bloody Sunday” march on Selma, Ala., a majority of both parties in both chambers voted for that act, as well. Again, alongside their Democratic colleagues, Republicans were at the head of the fight for civil rights. And congressional Republicans also joined Democrats to reauthorize the VRA in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006.

But something has gone very wrong since then. Republican senators have blocked the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, both aimed at election and democratic reforms. And they continue to block the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after the late congressman and civil rights leader that many of them praised when he died in 2020.

The end of the Tennessee saga has not been written yet. The two expelled legislators were reappointed to their seats and now must run in special elections.

But, in my view, the national Republican Party has to finally and forever distance itself from the sort of thing that just happened in Tennessee.

That means passing the John Lewis Act now. Restoring and strengthening the Voting Rights Act, as Republicans have voted to do many times before, could send a necessary message that the party takes civil rights seriously. Refusing to do this will, I believe, guarantee that Republicans will continue to lose national elections.