White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the Tennessee House of Representatives "undemocratic" for attempting to expel three Democratic lawmakers who staged a protest from the floor, the Daily Caller reported. The trio was demonstrating in favor of a gun grab following the school shooting that killed six.
Anti-gun protesters stormed the Tennessee state capitol on March 30, three days after a transgender individual shot three children and three adults at The Covenant School. Reps. Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Pearson were involved in fueling the contentious demonstration.
State GOP lawmakers accused the Democrats of an attempted "insurrection," engaging in "disorderly behavior," and "did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives." Despite conduct unbecoming of state lawmakers, Jean-Pierre sided with the three in the vote to expel.
"The fact that this vote is happening is shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent," Jean-Pierre said Thursday. "Across Tennessee and across America, our kids are paying the price for the actions of Republican lawmakers who continue to refuse to take action on stronger gun laws," she claimed.
"The President will continue to call on Congress to take action to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require safe storage of firearms, eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and require background checks for all gun sales, and state officials must do the same," Jean-Pierre said. This is predictable rhetoric from a Democratic administration.
However, what Jones, Johnson, and Pearson did to protest was out of line. The Democrats chanted anti-gun protest slogans from the House floor, disrupting the normal business of the chamber, The Tennessean reported.
For this, the two freshman congressmen were ousted, Jones in a 72-25 vote and Pearson in a 69-26 vote. Johnson narrowly kept her job after failing to get the two-thirds majority vote needed to expel her.
"What is happening here today is a farce of democracy," Jones said in a diatribe. "What is happening here today is a situation in which the jury has already publicly announced the verdict," he added.
"What we see today is just a spectacle. What we see today is a lynch mob assembled to not lynch me, but our democratic process," Jones said. He and Pearson were the two youngest black lawmakers and therefore defaulted to charging racism.
Johnson echoed their claim that the move was motivated by racism as she was spared, Fox News reported. "It might have to do with the color of our skin," she claimed.
Moving onto the second default argument for Democrats, Johnson said that the vote was "fascism" on the part of Republicans. "I feel like North Korea has more democracy than we do in the state of Tennessee, and it's terrifying to me that we're in this march to fascism," Johnson claimed.
The two ousted lawmakers will now leave their seats vacant with the move effective immediately, according to CNN. Because the next general election is more than 12 months away in November 2024, a special election will be held to fill their seats.
With each passing day, it becomes more clear that there has been a seachange in America. School shootings are a symptom of that problem, but the solution is to strip law-abiding Americans of their right to bear arms provides further proof of the issue.
Moreover, the way politics is conducted has become yet another symptom of the degrading culture. This type of demonstration is unbecoming of lawmakers while the substance is also antithetical to the Second Amendment protections in the U.S. Constitution -- and Biden's White House supports all of it.
