NASHVILLE — As teenagers and demonstrators flooded the Tennessee state legislature last week to call for lawmakers to toughen access to guns after a deadly shooting at a Christian school, three Democrats headed to the well of the House chamber.
Holding a hand-drawn sign calling to “protect kids, not guns” and speaking through a megaphone, State Representatives Justin Jones, Justin J. Pearson and Gloria Johnson led chants and called on their colleagues to pass stricter gun laws, forcing the legislative proceedings to a temporary halt.
Now, in what would be an extraordinary act of retribution for the protest, Republicans are poised to vote on Thursday to oust the three Democrats from the General Assembly and carry out the first partisan expulsion in the state’s modern history.
The House of Representatives has voted only twice since the Civil War to expel a member, once in 1980 after a sitting lawmaker was convicted of soliciting a bribe and again in 2016 after the House majority whip faced allegations of sexual misconduct while in office.
Despite the absence of any criminal charges or investigation, Republicans argue that the expulsions are warranted because the protest flouted the rules of procedure and decorum, with the House speaker going so far as to invoke the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. And with Republicans holding a supermajority that provides the necessary two-thirds majority for expulsion, Democrats have little recourse to stop the vote.
The three lawmakers, who represent districts in the state’s three largest cities, have already lost ID access to the State Capitol and have been stripped of any committee assignments they had.
Thursday’s vote comes as the Republican-dominated legislature has remained largely unmoved by thousands of protesters calling for tighter gun laws after a former student killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at the Covenant School on March 27.
Senior Republicans have said that they will punt most legislation dealing with guns to 2024, though some conservative lawmakers have signaled an openness to measures that would allow the authorities to confiscate guns from those who are deemed by a judge to be at risk of harming themselves or others.
The expected votes also highlight the bitter tensions between hard-line conservatives from rural districts and increasingly marginalized city liberals, after months of the legislature gerrymandering Democratic-leaning areas and muscling through conservative priorities, including measures aimed at limiting the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the state.
In interviews on Wednesday, the three Democrats did not rule out the possibility of legal challenges. They will also retain the ability to run for their seats in special elections should they be expelled from the legislature.
Even as they acknowledged violating House rules by speaking out of turn, the Democrats warned that after recent instances in which the state legislature was reluctant to expel colleagues facing accusations of misconduct or criminal charges, such a vote was an affront to their constituents, who will temporarily lose representation in the legislature.
“They’re trying to silence the voice of the people that have different ideas in them, and to me that’s incredibly scary,” said Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville. “That is going to have a chilling effect, not only on the people in Tennessee, but across the country, when they see in the states with supermajorities that they can just expel members for a few minutes of speaking when they don’t have permission.”
Mr. Jones, a longtime community organizer in Nashville, had become a familiar presence among sit-ins and protests at the State Capitol before his election and once faced a temporary ban from the building after the police said he threw a cup of liquid toward a lawmaker while protesting the display of a bust of a Confederate general.
“My community is still grieving here in Nashville,” Mr. Jones said. “And a week after this mass shooting, the first major action from the Republican supermajority is to expel and oust three of us for demanding action on gun violence.”
In resolutions filed separately for each lawmaker, Republicans charge that the lawmaker “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House and “generally engaged in disorderly and disruptive conduct.” The measures do not cite any other consequence of the protests.
Appearing on a radio show last week, Speaker Cameron Sexton invoked the riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 when describing the protests in Nashville, which consisted of a peaceful crowd of teenagers and demonstrators. Mr. Sexton later said he was referring only to the three lawmakers in his comparisons to the mob of rioters that tried to stop the certification of the presidential election.
“Their actions are and will always be unacceptable, and they break several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor,” Mr. Sexton said in a statement this week. “Their actions and beliefs that they could be arrested on the House floor were an effort, unfortunately, to make themselves the victims.”
By Monday afternoon, he had revoked the lawmakers’ ID access that allows them into the building after hours and stripped two of the lawmakers — Ms. Johnson and Mr. Jones — of their committee assignments. Mr. Pearson, having barely begun his tenure after winning a special election for a Memphis district in late January, had not yet received a spot on a committee.
“We have to think about the power of peaceful protests to help create change, and to say that our peaceful protest deserves our expulsion because we were advocating for gun laws and gun control is just asinine,” Mr. Pearson said. In a letter to his colleagues, he defended his actions and declared, “if this House decides to expel me for exercising our sacred First Amendment right to help elevate the voices in our community who want to see us act to prevent gun violence, then do as you feel you must.”
In a series of posts on social media on Wednesday, Ms. Johnson said she was told by top House officials that she would lose her health benefits upon expulsion, unless she chose to resign ahead of the vote. (“Heavens to Betsy, all this does not mean I am considering resigning-NEVER,” she wrote. “I am ready to have my hearing in the public view.”)
The retribution has galvanized the hundreds of protesters already frustrated over the inaction on gun laws, with some of them arriving at the State Capitol with signs demanding “justice for the Tennessee Three” this week. During a Monday session where chanting in the halls overshadowed the proceedings inside, Republican leaders singled out individual protesters who were yelling out “do your jobs” or “cowards” to be escorted from the gallery by the police.
A procedural vote hours later descended into chaos as the crowd chanted “fascists” and a scuffle broke out between lawmakers on the floor. Mr. Jones, filming the proceedings on his phone, said another lawmaker pushed him and took his phone. A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirmed that a police report had been filed for “misdemeanor simple assault for an incident that occurred on the state House floor.”
Some Republicans outside the legislature have watched the proceedings with slight bewilderment, questioning why the House leaders would choose to target two young Black representatives and one of just 11 women in the 99-seat House over a protest on the chamber floor.
“Instead of dealing with the whole gun issue and the red flag issue and other things, we’re worried about three members of the House minority,” said Victor Ashe, a former Knoxville mayor, state legislator and an ambassador under the Bush administration. The violations of House rules, he added, “don’t rise even remotely to the level of expulsion.”
After thousands of students — many of them not yet old enough to vote — marched out of class on Monday to call for action on stricter gun laws, demonstrators were expected to return to the Capitol on Thursday and protest the looming expulsion of the three Democrats.
Eliza Fawcett contributed reporting.
