President Joe Biden spoke via conference call with three Democratic lawmakers from Tennessee who were targeted for removal from the state’s House of Representatives by Republican members after joining protests demanding urgent gun reform in the wake of last week’s mass shooting at a Nashville school.
The state’s GOP-controlled House voted to remove state Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson on 6 April. State Rep Gloria Johnson was spared by one vote.
The president “thanked them for their leadership in seeking to ban assault weapons and standing up for our democratic values,” according to the White House description of the call on 7 April. Mr Biden also invited the three lawmakers to the White House.
The officials thanked the administration for its “leadership on gun safety and for spotlighting the undemocratic and unprecedented attacks on them this week in the Tennessee statehouse.”
News of the call came as Vice President Kamala Harris travelled to Nashville’s Fisk University to meet with the outsted lawmakers and students rallying behind them in support.
In a statement following the votes on Thursday, Mr Biden said that rather than address the demands of thousands of Tennessee protesters who flooeded the state capitol demanding lawmakers take up gun control measures, “state Republican lawmakers called votes ... to expel three Democratic legislators who stood in solidarity with students and families and helped lift their voices.”
“Rather than debating the merits of the issue, these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence, and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee,” he said in the statement.
Last month, the president conceded that he had largely exhausted his ability to “do, on my own, anything about guns” after his ongoing demands to members of Congress to pass additional reform measures have faced overwhelming resistance from Republican lawmakers.
He said that the legislative branch “needs to act” if the US is to have any new laws governing the availability of high-powered firearms, particularly the military-style rifles that have become the weapon of choice for mass shooters in recent years.
“The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is bizarre. It’s a crazy idea. They’re against that. And so, I think the Congress should be passing the assault weapons ban,” he added.
Congress has either ignored or been unable to pass legislation responding to his nearly 70 public calls to revive a federal assault weapons ban or other reform efforts, according to an analysis from The Independent.
The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, which included the federal assault weapons ban, was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004, with several failed attempts in Congress to renew the ban after a series of massacres involving high-powered rifles that were previously impacted by the law.
