The Tyrants of Tennessee 

[Rat of the Week] 4/17/23 to 4/24/23

BY: Spencer Merritt

Last week, American democracy was attacked  by not one rat but a whole nest of them. The rats in question are Tennessee’s House Republicans.

What happened?

Outraged by their legislature doing nothing in the wake of six people — three adults and three students — being murdered in yet another school shooting on Mar. 27, thousands of young Tennesseans marched inside the state capitol to peacefully protest. During the demonstration, three Democratic lawmakers, now being called the Tennessee Three, joined the protestors. The Democrats were Justin Person, Gloria Johnson and Justin Jones. Jones represents Nashville, where the shooting took place. As punishment for supporting the peaceful protestors, state house Republicans voted to expel the three Democrats. Tennessee’s constitution requires a two-thirds majority to expel a member. Only Gloria Johnson was not expelled, which she says is because she is white, while Jones and Person are Black. All 75 of Tennessee’s House Republicans voted to expel Jones and 69 voted to expel Person. The Democrats’ meager 25-member bloc was powerless to stop their republican tyrants. 

Let’s be clear about what happened here. Over 100,000 constituents across two districts lost political representation — the foundation of American democracy —  because Jones and Person exercised their First Amendment right. The Constitution gives Americans the right to “peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” More than a thousand young Americans peacefully assembled, demanding an end to gun violence. In response, their government fired two of the only three people actually representing them. It’s no wonder why Representative Jones said, “We don’t have a democracy in Tennessee.”

Justin Jones is right

Expelling Jones and Person is hardly the first crime against democracy committed by Tennessee’s Republican rats. In fact, data shows that Tennessee is the least democratic state in the country. Jake Grumbatch, a political science professor  at the University of Washington, created an index measuring democracy in every state, and in 2022 Tennessee came in dead last. One of Grumbatch’s metrics was the amount of state and federal-level gerrymandering. Unsurprisingly, Tennessee is the most gerrymandered state in the county. Research from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project found that there is “not a single competitive seat in Tennessee”, meaning it is effectively impossible for Democrats to win a majority in Tennessee’s legislature. Thanks to Republicans, Tennessee is effectively under one-party rule, the sort of thing we associate with China and the former Soviet Union. 

Guess Who’s Back

Thankfully, democracy still lives in at least one place in Tennessee — Nashville. Nashville is in Jone’s district. Only four days after republicans expelled Jones the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted unanimously, 36-0, to send their man back to the legislature to fight another day. Within an hour of his reinstatement, Republican lawmakers had to watch Jones be sworn back into office. This resounding rebuke of this Republican act of tyranny is exactly what real representative democracy looks like. Upon his return, Representative Jones stood before the same Republicans who expelled him and said, “I want to welcome democracy back to the people’s house”