Editor’s Note: Tennessee Rep. Justin J. Pearson is a Democrat and former community activist in Memphis. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
Republicans who instigated my removal from the Tennessee House last week, along with and that of my legislative colleague Rep. Justin Jones, apparently failed to anticipate the nationwide backlash that their actions would engender. Democracy prevailed and the rule of law has won.
This week, I plan to retake my seat. After a vote Wednesday by the Shelby County Commission, I hope and fully expect to once again represent the beautifully diverse jurisdiction of District 86 in Memphis in Tennessee’s Assembly — as I did until Thursday of last week, when Republicans voted to remove me and Rep. Jones.
The unprecedented and partisan move by the chamber’s Republican supermajority to expel me from my duly-elected position temporarily silenced the voices of my constituents and flouted their right to be represented in the House. But it failed — as it did for Rep. Jones, when he was sent back to the House on Monday following a vote by the council of his district in Metro Nashville.
This should be a chastening moment for revanchist forces in Tennessee’s legislature and across the country. Over the long haul, the undemocratic machinations employed to oust us from office are destined to fail. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once famously said that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Events this week demonstrated, more than ever, that this is indeed the case.
The stated reason for my expulsion was that I, Rep. Jones and another Democratic colleague, Gloria Johnson, “breached decorum” by peacefully walking side by side to the well of the House Chamber to acknowledge rampant gun violence that has victimized and traumatized grieving children and families across our state and around the nation.
If decorum was breached, it was by the heavy-handed Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House, which denied us the chance to speak during regular order, cut off our microphones, later disabled our voting machines and revoked our access to the building.
My colleagues and I exercised our First Amendment rights and joined chants from the floor during a recess hastily called by House Speaker Cameron Sexton in a further attempt to silence us and our constituents.
We followed the directive of Article 2, Section 26 of the State Constitution to oppose policies injurious to the people who elected us. As a result, we were put on display in that very House to “stand trial” for our alleged offenses.
The spectacle was a gross miscalculation by Republicans in the chamber. It turns out that most Americans care deeply about democracy. Most people care about equality and progress. And over two-thirds of Americans — including four out of 10 Republicans — support the kind of common sense gun safety laws that Rep. Jones, Rep. Johnson and I were protesting in favor of, in the wake of the senseless March 27 Covenant School massacre.
And yet, calls for common sense gun reform measures fall on deaf ears in our legislature where a Republican supermajority is wildly out of step with most people’s values.
