The three, all Democrats, led an anti-gun demonstration that included a bullhorn from the well of the House last week. They were joined by a boisterous crowd in the gallery and effectively cut off government proceedings that were ongoing.
The incident followed the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville last week.
Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson lost their House seats, while Gloria Johnson barely managed to maintain hers. The vote to expel Jones was 75-26, Pearson was ejected by a 69-26 vote, and Johnson’s expulsion failed with a 65-30 tally.
Johnson is believed by many to have been spared because she did not use the megaphone during last week’s demonstration. The resolution to expel the three alleged they “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives through their individual and collective actions.”
Before the votes were held, each voted against a school safety bill that would provide armed guards for every Tennessee school.
Earlier this week, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton asserted that the votes to expel the representatives were not over peaceful protests over gun control. Rather, he said the action was taken due to the breaking of “several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor.”
Jones had a decidedly different take on the proceedings. When given a chance to speak before the vote, he declared, “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.”
The protesting legislators, dubbed the “Tennessee Three,” led a chant of “no action, no peace” on the House floor on March 30. Hundreds of anti-Second Amendment demonstrators entered the statehouse and joined in the protest, effectively ending legislative proceedings.
Jones, 27, and Pearson, 28, utilized a megaphone and pounded on the House lectern as they delivered emotional speeches and exchanged comments with the rowdy band of protesters.
“We don’t want to be up here, but we have no choice but to find a way…to disrupt business as normal, because business as normal is our children dying,” Pearson told the boisterous crowd. It was nearly an hour before normalcy returned to the House floor.
Most of the crowd later dispersed peacefully, but one woman was handcuffed and escorted out of the gallery by state troopers. Court records say she refused to comply with commands and pushed an officer. She was charged with assault on a first responder, disorderly conduct, and disrupting a meeting or procession.
A physical confrontation between two lawmakers also ensued.
In a tweet, Jones said “there comes a time when you have to do something out of the ordinary. We occupied the House floor today after repeatedly being silenced from talking about the crisis of mass shootings.”
The gun control issue took center stage in Tennessee following the tragic shooting at Covenant School in which six innocents lost their lives. The hot-button issue is only made worse, however, when civil decorum is lost and institutions descend into chaos.
Anti-gun extremists do not see either law or reason when they rally against the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. What are truly common sense solutions to keeping citizens safer fly out of the window and are replaced by emotionally charged arguments that do next to nothing to solve the issue.
Indeed, the reaction of protesters in Nashville is to punish law-abiding Americans for exercising basic freedoms afforded at the nation’s founding. And while reasonable people may disagree on the level of protest carried out in Tennessee as well as the resulting expulsions, fundamental constitutional liberties are not up for debate.
