Tangle - The expulsion of two Tennessee Democrats.

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Tennessee’s legislators. On Wednesday, Tennessee lawmaker Justine Pearson was reinstated to the state House after a unanimous vote from the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson was the second of two Democrats to get voted back into office after being expelled by Tennessee state Republicans for leading a gun control protest that spilled into the state capitol and disrupted proceedings.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here. You can view the trailer for our new YouTube channel here. Today’s clickables: Quick hits (2:16), Today’s story (4:06), Left’s take (7:18), Right’s take (10:27), Isaac’s take (14:00), Listener question (17:04), Under the Radar (19:19), Numbers (20:07), Have a nice day (20:46)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about what happened in Tennessee with two, well, really three legislators there and some of the response to it and the latest on their status in the state house. Before we jump in, though, a couple notes.

First of all, I am aware that our website crashed for a little while this morning. I know I got a few emails from people who were having trouble clicking links in yesterday's newsletter and some in the podcast episode description. Everything should be up and running now. If you want, you can find the links to our YouTube trailer in today's episode description as well, and also in the newsletter from yesterday. Second, wow, I don't know really what to say. In 24 hours, our brand new YouTube channel has already generated over 6,000 views, more than 3,000 subscribers, close to 400 comments, all of which were actually very nice, even with the technical difficulties. I am continually

amazed by this community and what we are building. So thank you all so much for the support on this launch. There is obviously more to come soon. And in the meantime, you can again check out the YouTube trailer with a link in today's episode description. And if you want to support the podcast, the YouTube channel, any of the projects we talked about that are coming yesterday, please do become a subscriber. You can do that by going to readtangle.com slash membership. There is also a link to subscribe in today's episode description. All right, with that out of the way, we're going to jump in today with our quick hits. First up, federal authorities arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman,

for the leak of highly classified U.S. documents earlier this year. This was a story we covered earlier this week. Number two, San Francisco police arrested a tech executive in connection with the fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee. Police say the suspect, Nima Momeni, knew Lee personally. Number three, the Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court to intervene in a court ruling that allowed the FDA's approval of Mifepristone to stand but imposed restrictions on how it could be shipped. Separately, the Florida State Legislature passed a six-week abortion ban. Number four, the Biden administration proposed a new rule to extend Medicaid access to approximately 600,000 DACA recipients.

Number five, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he will return to the Senate on Monday after five weeks away while recovering from a fall. Growing outrage after Tennessee's Republican-controlled House voted to expel two Democrats. State Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were expelled on a party-line vote after they led a gun reform protest in the House chamber last week in response to the school shooting in Nashville that left six people, including three children, dead. The Nashville City Council has voted unanimously to reinstate one of the Tennessee state representatives expelled last week for joining gun violence protests.

On Wednesday, Tennessee lawmaker Justin Pearson was reinstated to the state house after a unanimous vote from the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson was the second of two Democrats to get voted back into office after being expelled by Tennessee state Republicans for leading a gun control protest that spilled into the state capitol and disrupted proceedings. The drama began days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people, including three children. Representative Pearson from Memphis and Representative Justin Jones from Nashville were joined by Representative Gloria Johnson, and they led chants with a megaphone and told citizens in the Capitol building to protest. Hundreds of schoolchildren, teens, and parents

gathered at the Capitol to call for tighter gun control measures, and protesters lined the hallways and chanted at the state's Republican-dominated legislature as they entered the Capitol building for a vote on an education bill. Republicans in Tennessee have continued to loosen gun control regulations in recent years, and during proceedings for the education legislation, protesters screamed from the gallery that children are dead and implored the legislators to act. Pearson, 29, and Jones, 27, temporarily stopped proceedings while shouting power to the people and no justice, no peace through a megaphone. In Tennessee, state legislators can be expelled with a two-thirds vote from their chamber. Days later, Republicans did just that.

With a supermajority, they voted to expel Pearson and Jones. The lawmakers voted 72 to 25 to expel Jones and 69 to 26 to expel Pearson. They cited disorderly behavior in the proceedings and said the two lawmakers broke House rules on conduct and decorum. The vote to expel Johnson failed by one vote, 65 to 30. Both Pearson and Jones are Black and Johnson is white, which resulted in accusations of racism. Asked why she thought she survived the vote while the other two legislators didn't, Johnson said it might have something to do with the color of our skin. The single legislator who voted to expel Jones and Pearson, but not Johnson, cited Jones and Pearson's use of a megaphone in the chamber.

Expulsion of lawmakers from state legislative bodies is extremely rare. In Tennessee, only eight lawmakers have ever been expelled in the history of the state, including six Confederates who refused to affirm the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people in the 19th century. One other was convicted of bribery in the 20th century, and one was expelled more recently for sexual misconduct. However, in the weeks following the expulsion, both lawmakers were reinstated to the House by local officials. First, the Nashville Metropolitan Council restored Jones in a unanimous vote, and then the Shelby County Board of Commissioners did the same for Pearson. Neither lawmaker missed a vote during

their absences. Today, we're going to explore the controversy with views from the left and the right, and then my take. First, we'll start off with what the left is saying. Many on the left opposed the expulsions, arguing that it was undemocratic and dangerous. Some say the right was being racist by expelling Jones and Pearson. Others say this episode is part of a larger Republican authoritarian streak to neutralize opposition. In the New York Times, Charles M. Blow said that Tennessee Republicans exposed their authoritarian streak. The same Tennessee House of Representatives that had resisted expelling a Republican member accused of sexually assaulting three teenage girls and who was recording apologizing to one

of them, never specifying for what, expelled two young Black representatives, he said, halting House proceedings by protesting the chamber's intransigence on gun legislation. The lawmakers were furious, and somehow this is what crossed the line. Several legislators ludicrously compared the protests to the deadly insurrection of January 6, 2021, when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, assaulted police, and destroyed property in an effort to derail the democratic process. These Republicans wanted to bring these Black members to heel and wanted to demonstrate the power of the proverbial whipping post, to publicly shame, signify dominance, and try to force submission. In CNN, Representative Justin Pearson wrote about why Republican attempts to expel him backfired. 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, Pearson said. The spectacle was a gross miscalculation by Republicans, and it turns out most Americans care deeply about democracy. The Republican lawmaker who authored the expulsion told me that he and his white conservative colleagues were enraged that I had the audacity to walk unbidden to the front of the chamber and acknowledge the grieving families. But legislators don't need permission to walk the well of the House. There is no sanction against

our peaceful actions during recess, and we are required by the Tennessee state constitution to object to policies injurious to the well-being of our constituents. The New York Times editorial board called it an undemocratic power play. Plenty of disruptive, disrespectful, and even potentially criminal behavior has gone entirely unaddressed. Indeed, just a few years ago, Tennessee Republicans declined to take action against a member of their caucus credibly accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls many years earlier, the board said. By contrast, Pearson and Jones were banished for using a bullhorn to lead demonstrators in chants for more gun control. The protest was rowdy but

peaceful. No property was damaged. No one was arrested or injured. When the Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton called for security to clear the chamber's galleries, the crowd left. Nonetheless, Sexton tried to claim the demonstration was at least equivalent and maybe worse than January 6th. Every institution has to balance debate and disruptive protests, but not every protest poses a threat or merits a punitive response. All right, that is it for the leftist saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right mostly supports the expulsion, though some argue it was excessive. Some say the legislators can legislate or be activists, but not both. Others say this was not an ordinary protest and they broke the House rules so they should be punished. In the American Conservative, Jude Russo said expel them all.

It makes no sense for members of government to engage in civil disobedience against the government of which they are members. All three legislators should be expelled, Russo said. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The premise of constitutional government is that policy is made and changed by elected representatives. And the premise of civil disobedience is that this ordinary legal

political process is not addressing a pressing need. If you are a member of government and think the political system has broken down, you have thrown your lot in with the extra political means, Rousseau said. In the case of the three Tennesseans, the contradiction is emphasized by the disruption of the assembly's normal deliberative process, he wrote. This departure may be just, but to insist on remaining part of the deliberative representative bodies is to evince a desire to work things out through politics, through making laws, through the power you have by the agreed-upon procedures of deliberative government. Pick one. Lawmakers are distinct from private citizens who do not hold political power.

In Town Hall, former Connecticut Representative Gary Frank said the legislators were wrongly removed while fighting the wrong fight. Protesting wrongs is genuinely what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders did in the 1960s, Frank said, but they would have not protested the elimination of ropes and the cutting down of trees to stop the lynching of black folks by the Ku Klux Klan. They knew that it was due to the hate in the hearts of those evil people. The rope nor the trees were to blame. The same is true of guns, and removing any style of gun would not solve the problem. Today, we need more individual interventions, counseling, greater awareness, and an increase in mental health professionals,

Frank said. Still, the legislature's actions were wrong and excessive. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not remove a member of its body without a two-thirds vote on expulsion. Only the voters of that person's district could do that. When you are voted into a bipartisan political body funded by taxpayers, that institution has no right to remove you. In National Review, Charles C.W. Cook said the media and Democrats are lying about what happened in Tennessee. The two Democrats were not expelled for choosing to defy Republican-endorsed policies. They were expelled because they broke the rules of the legislature and they ground all legislative business to a halt. This dishonesty is typical

of what the press has done. Politico described the move as a boisterous protest. NPR described it as a raucous protest. ABC reported that the issue was that the legislators were participating in a gun control protest. They weren't. Instead, these corrupt euphemisms are being used to lionize people who were engaged in the sort of anti-democratic mob behavior that until about five minutes ago, we were all being encouraged to condemn. They were expelled for leading a mob onto the floor of the house, disrupting regular order, and shouting at colleagues through a bullhorn. You can think their punishment was too harsh, but you can't pretend it was a mere protest of the sort one might expect to see in the Nashville streets. All right, that is it for The Rightist Saying, which brings us to

my take. So if a legislative body is going to usurp the will of the voters and remove someone who has been democratically elected, the reasons need to be very, very good. That is my fundamental position coming into a story like this, and it's one I feel strongly about. In the wake of January 6th, when Democrats were calling for some Republican senators to be removed from office for abetting an insurrection, I objected, on the grounds that we needed explicit proof any of those Republicans encouraged or facilitated violence. The bar needs to be very high for expulsion, which is an extraordinary move. And not to state the obvious, but this was not January 6th, as plenty of

conservatives have tried to claim whether cheekily or not. Proceedings on the floor were interrupted for about five minutes. The only people on the floor were lawmakers. As far as I can tell, no property damage was done, nobody clashed with police, nobody was hiding in bunkers, no lawmakers were threatened, and no violence was committed. The education bill was passed easily after a brief recess and protesters left when they were told to. It's true that Pearson and Jones were disruptive, loud, and rambunctious. You can watch videos of the protests that are online. A big part of that probably has to do with their history as activists, which is an increasingly common resume bullet point of young lawmakers

on the left these days. There are videos and pictures of Jones standing atop police cars during riots in 2020 and even throwing a traffic cone through a window at a driver. Pearson, too, seems to have transformed from a moderate calling for the radical middle to a fight-the-man sounding civil rights activist. Of course, plenty of people changed from their early to late 20s. I know I certainly did. But there is always something unseemly about politicians who try to manifest new images and brands. All of this is worthy of call-out or criticism separate from the events that took place in Tennessee. But expulsion for this protest? I'm not convinced.

Jude Russo's piece in the American Conservative, under what the right is saying, was the most compelling argument I found in favor. He argued effectively that you can either be a legislator participating in the process or an activist fighting the process, but you can either be a legislator participating in the process or an activist fighting the process, but you can't be both. I think he's right. Pearson and Jones do need to choose, and while they are welcome to encourage or even invite citizens to protest and disrupt, they themselves shouldn't grind the legislative process to a halt. They are the legislative process. There is a reason this kind of thing is against the rules. And yet, the expulsion felt truly excessive. Apparently, a lot of people agreed.

That both legislators were returned to the Capitol without missing a vote with unanimous backing is a testament to this. In the end, it was a big misstep by Tennessee Republicans. They badly overreached and ended up martyring their political opponents without gaining any actual power, which is never good. As it usually does, the democratic process held up well, but it's unfortunate it was challenged this way in the first place. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to today's reader question.

This one is from Xavier in Madison, Wisconsin. Xavier said, what do you make of the Clarence Thomas story? So this was actually almost the topic of today's podcast. Unfortunately, the story got a little dated before we could get to it. In case you missed it, ProPublica released a report that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was receiving gifts, including luxury trips from Republican mega-donor Harlan Crowe every year. News of the gifts set off a firestorm, and Thomas eventually released a statement claiming he had consulted other justices and judges who said he did not have to report them. The donor, Crow, is then accused of being some kind of Nazi sympathizer for owning a bunch of fascist paraphernalia. I think the

accusations against Crow were baseless sme smears for whatever it's worth. There are two things, though, that are true at once about Thomas. First, he should not be accepting these gifts, full stop. Just a few months ago, I wrote a special Friday edition advocating for a Supreme Court code of conduct. If I got my wish, that code of conduct would include prohibiting judges from accepting single trips valued at $500,000 from political megadonors, of course. Second, though, is that Thomas didn't technically break any rules. Again, this is the problem. There are no good regulations on what Supreme Court justices can and can't do. Previously, justices were required to file disclosures of gifts they have received, but those disclosures include exemptions for gifts given by friends. Crow and Thomas are definitely friends. Last month,

the disclosures were bolstered, but lodging in personal vacation homes owned by friends was still exempt. It seems like these trips fell into that category. So, as far as I can tell, Thomas is right that he didn't have to disclose the trips, but he is a Supreme Court justice. His judgment, if you'll excuse the double meaning, is supposed to be among the best in the world. Sound judgment would have been to reject the gifts based on how it would look, especially at a time when trust in the court is eroding so swiftly. And if you were going to accept them,

the absolute bare minimum should have been to report them in public. All right, that is it for your questions answered, which brings us to today's Under the Radar story. The Department of Veteran Affairs, or the VA, is holding up the rollout of a $16 billion health record system that continues to face issues. health record system that continues to face issues. Officials from the VA and Oracle Corp, which acquired the company that runs the system, are renegotiating the contract to help provide the VA with a record system. This specific system is already used by the Department of Defense and is meant to provide seamless record-keeping for troops by the time they enlist until they die, but some in Congress are now calling to cancel the project. Just five of the VA's 170 locations have adopted the system since 2017. Wall Street Journal has the story on the problems,

and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, next up is the numbers section. The number of members of Congress that have been expelled since 1797 is just 20. The number of those from the Senate was 15. The total number of expelled members who were thrown out due to support of the Confederacy was 17 in 1861 and 1862. That means just three were thrown out for other reasons. Eight is the number of Tennessee lawmakers who have ever faced expulsion. The number who were thrown out due to supporting the Confederacy was six. The estimated number of Tennessee citizens represented by Jones, Pearson, and Johnson

combined was about 200,000. All right, that is it for our numbers section. And last but not least, our have a nice day story. A doctoral student from the United Kingdom is solving a problem in Ukraine many people overlooked, windows. Harry Blankets in Houston has created an easy to assemble plastic window for homes and buildings damaged by bullets and bombs in Ukraine. Right now, millions of people in Ukraine are living with insufficient protection and insulation. And Houston created a window out of polyethylene, PVC piping, pipe insulation, and duct tape to create four layers of insulation. It costs about $15 per square meter of window, and it can be built in 15 minutes. There was an old woman in Mykoliv

in southern Ukraine who had been sleeping in her bathtub for two months because it was the warmest place in her house, he said. We were able to get her back to some kind of normality after the windows went in. BBC has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, appreciate you tuning in. Don't forget to go check out the YouTube channel and I hope you guys have a great weekend. We'll be right back here on Monday. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by John Law. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova,

who's also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more on Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. We'll see you next time.