Tennessee state rep calls vote to expel him and two others 'an assault on democracy'
In the Tennessee House of Representatives, Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones spoke before a vote on whether he and two other Democrats should be expelled from the body after taking part in a gun control protest on the chamber floor last week. The protest occurred days after a school shooting in Nashville that left six people dead, including three children. Jones said, “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.”
Video Transcript
JUSTIN JONES: There comes a time where people get sick and tired of being sick and tired. And so I came as a representative to this well. And so today, we are brought to here, where members are responding in the most extreme measure, not because of what we did, but because by breaking the quorum, we broke the glass of your false power for the world to see.
We broke the glass of this chamber that someone called sacred. One of the members on the other side of the aisle was in tears and said, I've never seen such a breach of this sacred chamber. And I thought to myself, that representative has obviously never read history, because it is in this chamber if you walk around this Capitol, you'll see bullet holes when representatives got into conflict. You'll see duels take place on this house floor debating whether people like me should be treated like equal citizens under law.
This is not a temple. This is a place where we're supposed to wrestle for our democracy, and wrestle ideas, and give voice to 78,000 constituents each of us represents. But for so long, this body, drunk with power, has modeled for the world what we know as nothing less than authoritarianism.
And today is the climax of that behavior. That a week after a mass shooting plagued our community, the most direct action this legislative body takes, or should I say my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are taking, is to expel us for speaking about the issues of weapons of war on our streets. We called for you all to ban assault weapons and you respond with an assault on democracy.
That is why the nation is watching you today. And I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that no matter what you vote, you have the votes, but you will not be victorious, because there are generations of young people who see what is going on. There are young people that as you try and beat us down, they are rising up to take back this state from the extreme forces that have sought to take away the democratic process, the deliberative process. On last Thursday when thousands gathered here, tried to silence members from talking about the issue of gun violence because they were afraid that a conversation would remind people that there is complicity of this body in what happened at Covenant Elementary School.
