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U.S.|If Tennessee’s Legislature Looks Broken, It’s Not Alone

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/tennessee-house-republicans.html
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TENNESSEE HOUSE EXPULSIONS

 * What to Know
 * Justin Pearson Is Reinstated
 * Justin Jones Returns to House
 * A Symbolic White Suit
 * Behind the Ousting

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IF TENNESSEE’S LEGISLATURE LOOKS BROKEN, IT’S NOT ALONE

State legislatures around the country — plagued by partisan division,
uncompetitive races and gerrymandering — reflect the current pressures on
democracy.

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The Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted on Thursday
to expel Representatives Justin J. Pearson, center, and Justin Jones, behind him
and to his right in a white suit. An attempt to expel a third Democratic
lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, right, failed by one vote.Credit...Jon Cherry for The
New York Times


By Michael Wines

Published April 13, 2023Updated April 14, 2023, 4:28 p.m. ET


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WASHINGTON — There are 99 legislators in the Tennessee House of Representatives,
the body that voted on Thursday to expel two of its Democratic members for
leading an anti-gun protest in the chamber.

Sixty of them had no opponent in last November’s election.

Of the remaining House races, almost none were competitive. Not a single seat
flipped from one party to the other.

“We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political
science professor and expert on state politics at Middle Tennessee State
University in Murfreesboro. “In a normal two-party system, if one party goes too
far, usually the other party stops them. They put the brakes on.”



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In Tennessee, he said, “there’s nobody to put on the brakes.”

And not just in Tennessee.


Image

A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Covenant School shooting in
Nashville.Credit...Jon Cherry for The New York Times


Nationwide, candidates for roughly four of every 10 state legislative seats run
unopposed in general elections.

And across the country, one-party control of state legislatures, compounded by
hyperpartisan politics, widespread gerrymandering, an urban-rural divide and
uncompetitive races, has made the dysfunction in Tennessee more the rule than
the exception.

The lack of competition means incumbent lawmakers face few consequences for
their conduct. And their legislative actions are driven in large part by the
fraction of partisans who determine their fates in primary elections, the only
political contests where they face serious opposition.

Those forces, intensified by the Supreme Court’s open door for gerrymandering
and the geographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into
rural ones, are buffeting legislatures run by both parties: Republicans have
total control of legislatures in 28 states (including Nebraska, which is
nominally nonpartisan) and Democrats in 18.

That control has enabled both parties to enact legislation advancing their
policy agendas, as would be expected, especially at such a partisan moment. Both
parties, to differing degrees, have abused their ability to gerrymander.



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But it is Republican-run states, many experts say, that are taking extreme
positions on limiting voting and bending or breaking other democratic norms, as
Tennessee did in expelling two lawmakers last week.

Before Thursday, there had been only two expulsions from the Tennessee House
since the Civil War.


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Nashville Council Returns Justin Jones to Tennessee House

By The Associated Press and Reuters

1:46Nashville Council Returns Justin Jones to Tennessee House

Within an hour of the Metropolitan Nashville Council unanimously voting to
temporarily appoint Justin Jones back to the seat, the young lawmaker had
returned to take his place in the Republican-controlled
legislature.CreditCredit...Jon Cherry for The New York Times

Steven R. Levitsky, a Harvard University government professor and the author
with Daniel Ziblatt of the book “How Democracies Die,” said one-party rule in
Democratic states like Illinois has typically led to corruption and abuses of
power.

But states controlled by Democrats, he said, have not tried to limit voting,
restrict civil liberties or push back on democratic norms the way
Republican-controlled states have in recent years.

“Only one party, I think, is flirting with authoritarianism right now,”
Professor Levitsky said.

Republican leaders in Tennessee said they had expelled the Democratic lawmakers
not just for last week’s protests but also for a pattern of grandstanding and
disruptions that they said was the real assault on the ability of the
legislature to function democratically.



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“My people deserve to be heard as well, and you can’t have that with folks in
the well with a bullhorn,” Representative William Lamberth, a member of
Republican leadership, said after the expulsions. Since then Representative
Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis have been reinstated by
their local governing boards ahead of special elections later this year.

Victor Ashe, a Republican and former mayor of Knoxville who served in the
legislature when Republicans were a minority in the 1980s, said the legislature
had become more contentious and his party more extreme since then. In the heat
of partisan combat, he said, “some people don’t think about ‘This is not
democracy.’”

Referring to Republicans and some Democrats in the legislature, he said: “They
just have a different mind-set. Once you’re elected, the idea that your opponent
doesn’t have to be your enemy seems to have vanished.”

The expulsions come at a time when the legislatures in Tennessee and other
states have pushed at the traditional limits of political power.

In Tennessee, which was previously known for its relatively moderate, pragmatic
political culture,the legislature took aim at the state’s center of Democratic
support: Republican lawmakers created a gerrymander last year that split
Nashville’s Democratic-held congressional district, which has represented the
city since Tennessee became a state, into three — extending well outside the
city and into typically Republican areas.



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The legislature also unilaterally passed a law cutting the size of Nashville’s
metropolitan council in half, to 20 members from 40, but a judicial panel
temporarily suspended the action on Monday.

Elsewhere, Republican-led legislatures in North Carolina and Wisconsin passed
laws stripping power from incoming Democratic governors after Roy Cooper was
elected in North Carolina in 2016 and Tony Evers in 2018.

In Missouri, the legislature is trying to take over the police department in St.
Louis, one of several moves aimed at leaders of Democratic cities. Many of those
actions explicitly revoke cities’ longstanding authority to enact local laws
that might run counter to G.O.P. legislation on priority issues like L.G.B.T.Q.
rights, law enforcement or guns.

Republican legislatures in Ohio, Arkansas, Florida and several other states are
considering actions this year that would limit the ability of citizens to get
ballot initiatives before voters, particularly on issues like abortion and
gerrymandering. Enacting barriers to voting — broadly aimed at young voters and
members of minority groups that lean Democratic — has become part of the
standard Republican playbook.

Still, Mr. Ashe said Democrats couldn’t blame Republicans for their plight in
red states, having lost the ability to compete for much of the Republican
electorate during the Obama years and after.



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“Democrats are also culpable,” Mr. Ashe said. “They haven’t been able to find
good people to run.” Tennessee Republicans built their majority, he noted, by
fielding candidates even in contests where they were doomed to lose.

Jim Cooper, Nashville’s longtime Democratic representative in Congress, said he
agreed. “Local Democrats have done a terrible job in recent decades,” said Mr.
Cooper, who represented Nashville for 20 years before retiring in January after
the legislature gerrymandered his district. “We’re not good at fighting back.
For example, we didn’t go out and recruit anti-Trump Republicans, because we
liked having a small tent.”

That sorting into political tribes, where party loyalty is more important than
local or state issues, has only cemented one-party control in state
legislatures. In sharp contrast to past decades, “it’s pretty much what a voter
thinks of the president that is going to dictate how a voter casts their ballot
in a state legislative election,” said Steven Rogers, a Saint Louis University
political scientist who has studied the issue. “What legislators do themselves
doesn’t really matter that much anymore.”


Image

In Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s most extreme gerrymanders has cemented
Republican rule of the State Legislature since 2012, lawmakers have used legal
maneuvers to keep Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, from filling appointed state
government positions.Credit...Samantha Madar/Wisconsin State Journal, via
Associated Press


There’s another reason state legislators in Tennessee — and many other states —
so often face no opposition: Few people want to run, or can afford to.



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At an annual salary of $24,316, “it’s like a nothing job,” said Mr. Cooper, the
former congressman. “It can ruin your day job.”

“The sad reality is that good people don’t want to run for office anymore,” he
said. “So we shouldn’t be surprised by what we get when the fringe 10 or 15
percent of the state legislature can run everything.”


Image

The Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville. Cities like Nashville and Memphis have
become Democratic islands in a sea of rural Republican strongholds.Credit...Jon
Cherry for The New York Times


Still, some political experts and Nashville voters said the expulsion debacle
had the potential to reboot some competition. Most pointed to the wave of
national publicity that elevated the two expelled Democrats to national figures
and reinvigorated — if only briefly — the party’s political energy.

“If there’s any hope for the state Democratic Party living again, it’s going to
come from a rejection of that sort of inevitability of extremist control” on
issues like the mass shooting in Nashville, said Keel Hunt, a political
columnist and a former top aide to Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee
Republican governor and senator.



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Courtney Taylor, 33, a Nashville native, lives in the district represented by
Mr. Jones and voted for him in part because of his advocacy for social justice
issues. For all the pain of the past week, she said, she was glad that for a few
days at least he was able to shake up the legislature’s status quo.

“There has been this whirlwind of stress,” she said. “A lot of people are
feeling like they have their hands tied. There is a sense of helplessness and
frustration.” She said it was important to force the legislature to listen.

“It makes you feel a little less alone and a little less like you are screaming
into the void to have someone actively take notice and stand with you.”

Jamie McGee and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Nashville. Research
was contributed by Susan Beachy, Kitty Bennett, Jack Beggs and Alain
Delaqueriere.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.







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COMMENTS 157

If Tennessee’s Legislature Looks Broken, It’s Not AloneSkip to Comments
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