Statehouse One-Acts: What’s It Like To Voluntarily Suck So Bad?
something something something Rocky Top
If you’re up on your state nicknames (or read the subhed, I guess), you might have guessed that this week’s brief is all about Tennessee.
As an erudite consumer of this missive, you may recall that Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature tipped from “banal Republican-ness” to “silencing and expelling two Black lawmakers because they didn’t sit down and shut up when they were told to” back last spring (although the Tennessee legislature has been no stranger to scandal in years prior).
Which is when my interest in the place upgraded from “meh electorally uninteresting” to “just so evil I can’t ignore them” for the first time in almost five years.
Here’s a quick version of what went down last spring/summer, because that was a long time ago and maybe you don’t live there/skipped the newsletter those weeks/christ on a bus there’s so much happening how can I be expected to remember anything from more than a week ago???
Even folks who aren’t erudite readers of this missive might recall the “Tennessee Three” – one white woman and two Black men lawmakers – who were targeted by Republicans for ejection from the Tennessee House in April 2023 for the crime of Being Loud For A Little While Because They’re Mad That Kids Keep Getting Shot In Schools.
You might even remember that the two Black men – Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson – were ejected from the body; meanwhile, the white woman got just enough GOP votes to keep her House seat. (SO WEIRD RIGHT)
You may or may not also recall that these expulsions were not only a grotesque abuse of GOP House members’ power as a legislative supermajority, but also that they were completely pointless.
Both expelled members were reappointed to their House seats by their local governments within days, and they both won reelection to their seats in landslides just a couple of months later.
Then, in an August 2023 special session where absolutely nothing was done to improve gun safety in the Volunteer State, the House Speaker implemented expansive new floor rules intended to drastically limit members’ speech during debate on legislation.
Jones was the only member these new House rules were used against: the Speaker ruled him in violation, and the GOP-controlled House voted to prohibit him from speaking on the House floor at all for the remainder of the special session.
[[doodly do doodly do doodly do]]
Fast forward to this January, when the Tennessee legislature reconvened.
A super normal part of any legislature reconvening is the adoption of the rules that will govern each chamber – committee compositions, floor procedures, parliamentary particulars, etc. There’s not typically a lot of change in these rules in any given chamber from session to session.
Except that Tennessee GOP House Speaker Camerion Sexton seems to be a little tired of certain Democrats getting … well, he didn’t actually say “uppity,” but … did he really have to?
The new House rules proposed by Sexton and approved by the Republican supermajority (75 R/24 D, specifically) are reminiscent of those he imposed on the special session back in August.
Restrictions include:
Lawmakers will be limited to just five minutes per bill to introduce (on the House floor or in committee) or debate any side of a bill.
Also, while lawmakers are prohibited from bringing charts or signs or any other visual aids into committee hearings, but they can bring guns.
A lawmaker gets three “strikes” for being “out of order” or going off-topic.
On the second “strike,” the lawmaker’s speaking time in bill debate will be reduced from five minutes to two.
On the third “strike,” the House could vote to ban the member from speaking for two legislative session days.
It’s not overtly stated in the rules, but presumably after that third strike, Republicans will just vote to expel you from the chamber.
Points of order and parliamentary inquiries must be registered with the House parliamentarian and posed only by a party’s floor leader.
The parliamentarian is expected to give an immediate answer instead of the question receiving open debate.
The Speaker can now call on lawmakers in whatever order he chooses, rather than based on who asked to speak first.
The Speaker now decides which bills will be debated for how long, up to 60 minutes, giving each party up to 30 minutes to talk and allowing caucus leaders to decide who speaks.
Under previous rules, each lawmaker could speak for five minutes on each bill, enabling Democrats to keep debate going for up to two hours.
In most cases, though, Republicans used a procedure known as “calling the question” to close debate and hold a vote – Democrats rarely got to fully mini-filibuster any legislation anyway.
In a state legislature with GOP supermajorities, floor debate is really Democrats’ only tool for meaningfully registering their opposition to a bill.
And Speaker Sexton effectively took it away from them.
He also made it harder for the public to access and for the media to cover House proceedings.
One-half of the public House gallery will only be available via tickets distributed by (mostly Republican) lawmakers.
So… yeah, Tennessee’s legislative session kicked off just great in January.
But, since Tennessee keeps basically volunteering to be worse than it already somehow is, we have a brand new awful Republican thing to talk about.
The Tennessee GOP’s latest move?
Usurping local government power to make themselves feel better.
As I mentioned above, the expulsion of Justins Jones and Pearson was pointless to the point of absurdity, because the Tennessee constitution provides for local governments to swiftly appoint folks to fill legislative vacancies before a special election is held months later to fill the vacancy for reals.
So the city governments of their respective cities – Nashville and Memphis – immediately appointed the ousted lawmakers to fill the vacancies created by their bullshit expulsions from the House.
I mean, it makes sense, yeah? The actual leaders of the cities from which Jones and Pearson hail knew the two hadn’t been expelled for any legitimate reason, so why not just return them to the offices to which they’d been legitimately elected less than a year before?
In a practical sense, this totally legal move put a lot of House GOPers in the possibly uncomfortable position of confronting the folks they expelled mere days after doing so.
Republicans were also reminded that their racist expulsion stunt was totally pointless.
The voters who elected both Jones and Pearson re-returned them to office in the special elections held a couple of months later, but maybe Republicans thought they’d have, like, a little breathing room to enjoy the aftermath of swinging their … ah, gavels around?
Look, I don’t know what’s going on in these people’s heads. All I know is that
House Republicans ejected two Black men from the chamber last spring for what they deemed “disorderly behavior.”
Those two Black men returned to the House as Republicans’ colleagues mere days later after they were reappointed by their local governments to fill their own vacancies.
Now Republicans want to strip the power from local governments to appoint an interim legislator of their own choosing to fill a vacancy due to “expulsion of a member for disorderly behavior.”
That’s the real kicker here – Republicans don’t want to change how all interim vacancies are filled in the legislature.
They just want to change the specific kind of vacancy-filling that forced them to face as equals two men they’d disrespected just days earlier.
This measure – HB 2716 – has passed the House and awaits a committee assignment in the state Senate.
Tennessee’s upper chamber hasn’t had the kind of drama and moral corruption that’s plagued the House over the past year, so the Senate may or may not move this one forward.
… never mind that a House attorney told lawmakers that the bill is unconstitutional.
And in Tennessee, that may actually matter – the state’s Supreme Court is appointed, not elected.
While Republican lawmakers might not be able to rely on a friendly high court to enable their end-run around the state constitution, they could amend the documents itself to make such a change.
But that would take two years, as all amendments in the state must pass in two legislative sessions and then go before voters for ratification.
At this rate, Tennessee Republicans will be on to whole new levels of racism and corruption by then, and this will all be just a quaint memory.
Tomorrow: NO MORE TENNESSEE I SWEAR