Abstract
Excerpted From: Rosie Fatt, The Use of Procedural Rules to Silence Minority Party Dissent in the Tennessee State Legislature and its Racially Discriminatory Roots, 32 Journal of Law & Policy 77 (2024) (240 Footnotes) (Full Document)
On April 6, 2023, the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two members for allegedly violating the chamber's rules of decorum. The members were both young Black legislators whose alleged infractions occurred during protests imploring the House to act on passing gun control laws in the wake of the Covenant School shooting on March 27, 2023, in Nashville, where six people, including three children, were killed. Three Democratic members took up the call to protest, in solidarity with their constituents, many of them students, who marched on the state capitol advocating for stricter gun control laws and criticizing the state legislature's failure to pass meaningful reforms. For these acts of solidarity with protestors, in an unprecedented move, the Republican supermajority in the Assembly drafted house resolutions to expel the three members. The group, coined by the press the “Tennessee Three,” included one white woman, Gloria Johnson, age 61, and two Black men, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, both 28. The members moving for the expulsion contended that the three had breached the House's rules of decorum and for this breach they should be expelled.
Understanding the anti-Black history running through Tennessee's legislature helps interpret the actions of its contemporary legislature and contextualizes the expulsions within a lineage of white silencing of Black legislators. From its admission to the Union in 1796, Tennessee had legal enslavement, and was one of the eleven states to secede from the Union during the Civil War. The Tennessee state legislature had Republican supermajorities in both of its chambers for the 2023 legislative session. Further, the proportion of Black people in Tennessee's state legislature was lower than the proportion of Black people in Tennessee's overall state population. Therefore, Tennessee serves as a useful case study for examining how procedural rules are utilized for anti-Black ends.
This Note argues that the expulsion of young Black legislators from the Tennessee General Assembly follows a historical pattern of systematic marginalization of Black representative power and that, without oversight, the ascent of Republican supermajorities in Tennessee, and across the country, threaten to utilize hyper- partisanship to continue silencing political adversaries. Part I describes the historical marginalization of Black legislators in the South. Part II discusses the post-Civil Rights Movement realignment of political parties in the South and the rise of Republican partisanship the Tennessee legislature. Part III examines how procedural rules are used in a racialized manner in Tennessee to silence political adversaries and discusses the larger meaning and consequences of majority censure in legislatures. Finally, Part IV argues for the necessity of democratic engagement and neutral oversight bodies that can develop objective procedural rules for state legislative oversight, to prevent procedural rules from being used as a silencing tactic against minority-party legislators.
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Recent high-profile expulsions have occurred across the United States and are a threat to democracy. The history of minority exclusion in state legislatures, beginning with Black legislators barred from taking their elected seats in the Georgia House, through to the present day, is a reminder of the precarity of pluralistic democracy. The proceedings leading up to the expulsion of Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson from the Tennessee General Assembly were not an aberration. They occurred because of the structural conditions of the assembly. The expulsions should be interpreted as a sanction made within a social network informed by individual motives and biases and occurring within an institution built and reinforced to keep out Black voices. The use of procedural rules, particularly expulsions, will continue to be used to limit the speech and representative power of Black legislators unless it is explicitly called out for its use as a weapon to silence political dissent and legislative controls are implemented through grassroots collective action to protect pluralistic democracy.
J.D. Candidate, Brooklyn Law School, 2025. MSc Sociology, University of Oxford, 2020. B.A., Sociology and American Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University 2018.
