All that Tennessee Republicans achieved with the expulsion of two duly elected Democratic Party members of the Tennessee legislature was to provide raw material for social media-fueled outrage, help the Democratic fundraising arm and turn a pair of progressive young Black legislators into national political figures.
You’d have thought one of the older, wiser GOP leaders in that state with a sense of how communication works these days might have seen that one coming, and that Vice President Kamala Harris would be jumping on a plane for Tennessee for a can’t-lose trip for maximum personal and political benefit.
Apparently no one in the GOP was capable of looking this far ahead. The appetite of Republican lawmakers at all levels for self-destruction is boundless, and ultimately, destructive to the party and the union.
In Washington last week, many prominent Republican lawmakers stood behind a former president credibly accused of sending hush money payments to a sex worker (he has pleaded not guilty). Are Tennessee Republicans racist, or merely oblivious to the danger of looking that way before the outside world?
The backdrop to the extraordinary events in Nashville at the end of last week was the death of three children who had done nothing but attend class at their Christian school. An alienated, troubled and dangerous person with a grudge, a manifesto and an automatic weapon — a lethal combination, history teaches us — had allegedly killed three children and three adults and fired 152 rounds of ammunition, according to police.
Emotions were raw, to say the least, and high schoolers who deserve the protection of adults had started to feel like sitting ducks. So some in Nashville decided to protest the long-standing inability in this nation to prevent these shootings from happening. They arrived at the statehouse to exercise their right to protest in a free nation.
In essence, their raucous shouts from the gallery were taken up in the statehouse with three of the members, Justin Jones, Justin J. Pearson and Gloria Johnson, effectively joining the protests from the floor and sparking a measure of chaos.
Did they break house rules? No doubt. Did they deserve censure? Arguably. Did their actions as new legislators merit expulsion and the termination of their representation of their constituencies?
Absolutely not.
Sure, Republicans saw a double standard when it came to the Democratic Party’s very different view of the Jan. 6 riot by Trump supporters at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but the comparison was hardly accurate. No one in Nashville was hurt; this was a peaceful protest. Things would have calmed down. A cool, mature person could have persuaded Jones to put his bullhorn away, remind him of his new role and persuade him instead to start working on effective legislation.
And, stranger yet, an argument easily could have been made by Republicans that this shooting was effectively a hate crime against conservative Christians, potentially enabling them to awaken a historically unsympathetic segment of the nation to the need for sensible measures to ensure that lethal weapons do not find their way into the hands of emotionally disturbed people.
This could have been a watershed moment for gun control in America, given that moderate Republicans will have to be part of any broad national solution to this issue, however much Democrats tweet, shout and demonize the other side of the aisle.
Had the Tennessee Republicans been smarter last week, their state might just have found the right moment to enact common-sense red flag laws and other regulatory improvements that go at least some way toward keeping guns out of the wrong hands, while also preserving Second Amendment rights so important to so many in that conservative state.
The signs of intemperate overreach hardly were limited to Tennessee in the past few days. We saw progressives calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the grounds of a well-reported ProPublica story that he took undisclosed vacations and transportation from a rich, conservative friend and exploited the absurd loophole that allows the Supreme Court to police itself (or not).
Should Thomas have been on that luxury yacht for free? Absolutely not, whatever he was advised. He should apologize and change his ways. Should we be impeaching Supreme Court justices for not following rules that don’t exist, even if we think they should? Obviously not.
You might say this was just the usual noise from the so-called Squad. But the point is that algorithms are set to amplify that blather, hardening both sides and getting us nowhere.
The effect of partisanship of the judiciary also was clear in Wisconsin last week as a contentious election in the state to our north looked a lot more like a race within the legislative branch than a matter of who was best qualified for the judiciary.
We saw a progressive victory, very much akin to a political triumph and also the bitterest of concession speeches. Very few people, it appears, saw the obvious price paid for all of this by those who care about bipartisan trust in the Badger State in the rule of law.
Americans, it seems, are failing utterly to see how the other side thinks, let alone how they will react. But the consequences of this are greater now. The impact is monetized by hungry bots and partisans who well know the benefits for their personal branding or political fortunes.
Balance and reasonable rhetoric doesn’t pay anymore, except perhaps in delaying the moment when America rips itself apart while its kids still die.
