Two of 'Tennessee Three' expelled, how Tyre Nichols' death rattled Memphis: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Tennessee Republicans expel two House Democrats for leading pro-gun reform protest

Tennessee Republicans have expelled two House Democrats for leading a pro-gun reform protest in the wake of the Nashville shooting. Plus, the Supreme Court sides with a 12-year-old transgender girl fighting West Virginia's sports ban, USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer looks at the controversy surrounding a report that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted undisclosed gifts for decades, a report outlines horrific sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Baltimore, and Commercial Appeal Access and Equity Reporter Micaela Watts talks about how the death of Tyre Nichols rattled Memphis, as covered in the latest episode of States of America.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Friday, the 7th of April 2023. Today, Tennessee lawmakers reach a boiling point in the wake of the Nashville shooting. Plus, the Supreme Court sides with a 12-year-old girl fighting West Virginia's ban on transgender athletes joining girls' sports teams, and what's next for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after he reportedly accepted gifts for decades without disclosing them.

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Tennessee House Republicans yesterday expelled two Democratic lawmakers from the General Assembly for breaking House rules and mounting a gun reform protest on the chamber's floor. The move comes 10 days after a shooter opened fire at a Nashville school, killing six people. After hours of fiery debate yesterday, the state's House expelled representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. The House failed to reach the votes needed to expel a third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, from the chamber. Pearson and Jones walked up to the podium during a floor session and began using a bullhorn to lead gun reform chants. Thousands of Tennesseans have marched on the state capital three times in the 10 days since the mass shooting.

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The Supreme Court yesterday sided with a 12-year-old transgender girl who's challenging a West Virginia ban on transgender athletes joining girls' sports teams. The high court decision temporarily blocks the state from enforcing the prohibition. West Virginia approved the ban in 2021 requiring public schools to create sports teams based on sex assigned at birth. The case is one of several dealing with school sports ban for transgender students. A federal appeals court in New York, for example, is set to rehear a challenge to a policy in Connecticut that allows transgender girls to compete on girls' sports teams. Meanwhile, officials in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee have created similar laws to West Virginia's ban on transgender athletes joining girls' sports teams.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury gifts from a prominent Republican donor for more than two decades without disclosing them. How big of a deal is that? I spoke with USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer to find out. Josh, welcome to 5 Things.

Josh Meyer:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So according to this report, what gifts did Justice Clarence Thomas accept for decades and who bankrolled all of this?

Josh Meyer:

All of the trips and other perks that Clarence Thomas got were bankrolled by billionaire and GOP mega donor, Harlan Crow, who lives in Texas and likes to travel, has his own jet and a super yacht. So Crow has taken Thomas, and his wife Jenny oftentimes, on trips around the world in his Bombardier Global 5,000 jet, also, a week each summer at Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks. He's also taken Thomas to Bohemian Grove, which is this all male, very, very exclusive enclave in California. They have a weekly gathering every summer. So there's a lot of questions being raised about whether or not this underscores whether Thomas should have been doing this, whether he should have reported it, and whether there's enough transparency and guidelines in place at the Supreme Court, at least, to give other people a heads-up that he is engaging in this kind of activity.

Taylor Wilson:

Josh, what other ethics controversies have hung over Justice Thomas before?

Josh Meyer:

So these disclosures of the latest ethics controversy to dog Thomas. Over the years he's faced tough questions about his incomplete financial disclosure forms, appearances at other political gatherings of wealthy conservative donors and influencers, and of course his wife's connections to some of the election deniers and parties that were trying to help former President Donald Trump stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

Taylor Wilson:

You mentioned ethics rules. What are lawmakers saying this week in the wake of this, about a potential overhaul to court ethics laws?

Josh Meyer:

That's a good question. This happens all the time. Whenever there's disclosures about this kind of alleged unethical activity, or at least lack of transparency, people in Congress, especially Democrats, rushed to the microphone to say that we need more ethics guidelines and more rules. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who's a longtime advocate for more transparency and accountability on the Supreme Court, issued a series of fairly angry tweets saying that the ProPublica story underscores why an overhaul of court ethics laws and requirements is urgently needed. He said a picture is worth a thousand words in reference to a photo of Clarence Thomas sitting around at a very posh resort at Crow's Adirondacks Resort, smoking cigars with other influencers.

You have other people, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, saying that this really shows that we need an overhaul of the courts. And it's important to note that Van Hollen is on an appropriations committee that does help control the purse strings for the Supreme Court. So maybe finally we might get some traction on this. But a lot of people that have been watching this for decades say not to hold your breath, that they've been trying to get reforms in the Supreme Court transparency and ethics guidelines for decades, and that the Supreme Court, unless they go along with it, you're not going to really get very far with them.

Taylor Wilson:

And as far as Clarence Thomas himself, do we have any sense of what to expect after this report?

Josh Meyer:

I doubt he'll even respond to this. I mean, he seems impervious to the rising calls for him, maybe not to leave the court of course, but at least to recuse himself from some of these decisions where there might be a conflict of interest here. That's especially the case with the January 6th hearings before the court. Because Jenny, Thomas' wife, has been openly and aggressively advocating for the overturn of the 2020 election results. So people say that Thomas absolutely should recuse himself from hearing those cases. But so far he's basically said he's not going to do it and he's not really entertaining even any questions about that.

Taylor Wilson:

Josh Meyer, thanks so much.

Josh Meyer:

My pleasure always.

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Taylor Wilson:

A report this week from the Maryland Attorney General has outlined horrific sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Baltimore between the 1940s and 2002. The abuse victimized at least 600 children carried out by more than 150 Catholic priests and clergy members. The report comes after the state's legislature voted to end a statute of limitations for child sex abuse related civil lawsuits. It also outlines attempts by the church to protect abusers. Only one person has been indicted so far as a result of the investigation, but advocates and victims groups predict this will bring more survivors forward and spark a wave of new civil lawsuits.

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The Memphis Police Department's Scorpion Unit was established in 2021 to maintain peace in high crime hotspot neighborhoods. So how did Tyre Nichols, an unarmed black man, end up beaten to death by officers from that unit after an alleged traffic violation? For the premiere of the second season of States of America, a documentary series streaming on USA TODAY'S digital channel, USA TODAY partnered with The Commercial Appeal to investigate the brutal beating. How did what should have been a routine traffic stop go so horribly wrong? To find out more, I sat down with Micaela Watts, The Commercial Appeal reporter who led this eye-opening investigation. Micaela, welcome to 5 Things.

Micaela Watts:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

What was your immediate gut reaction when you heard about the Tyre Nichols traffic stop and his death earlier this year?

Micaela Watts:

Initially, it didn't raise too many alarms, and I realize that sounds a little insensitive, but Tyre was the fourth person killed by police within a two-month time span. So when I first heard about it, my more immediate thoughts were, okay, that's one more thing to keep up with. That's fine. Let's request the TBI files. Let's go ahead and get the reporting process started. In my case, I didn't really stop and marinate on it too long. But within about 24 hours after Tyre passed, we decided to start finding out more about who he was. And when I started talking to his friends and started getting a fuller picture of Tyre, that's when I became really, really, really concerned about what was about to happen in Memphis.

Taylor Wilson:

The incident drew immediate comparisons to the Rodney King beatings in the '90s but a crucial difference here is that the officers were Black. We've had a few months to digest this story and unpack all kinds of different layers. So as we're talking now in April, did you find that this was the latest example of systemic racism or is this more about police brutality?

Micaela Watts:

As one local organizer here, LJ Abraham, said, "There is no race within the police department." It's police and everyone else. And as for everyone else, if you happen to be Black and maybe live in a not so great neighborhood in Memphis, or even if you do, you're automatically set up to be more likely to have one of these traffic stops go wrong. And so what's crazy is we had a activist say that like look, this is normal. It doesn't necessarily matter what the race of the officer is, it's always about the race of the victim. And then later on during the work of the documentary, we talked to a former recruiting officer and he pretty much said the same thing and said look, we're all one race. We're blue. As soon as we walk in through the door, we're blue.

Taylor Wilson:

So Micaela, in this special, you talk about this history of trauma in Memphis. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Micaela Watts:

Sure. And it's really hard to explain to a national audience unless you've lived in Memphis, but there's always been a shadow over Memphis, and it's because we have a long historical legacy of oppression against Black people. We just do. This was a huge slave trading port during the Civil War and before the Civil War. Beyond that, the Reconstruction era, everything up to the civil rights era, the South has never, ever made it easy to be a Black person ever. And whether people want to admit it or not, the effects of that still linger today in our city. And so what you have in terms of a sense of trauma is you have this history, you have generations of families just set back by one systemic issue or another. And then on top of everything else, at the precipice of what looked to be forward momentum for the civil rights movement, Dr. King was murdered here.

Now, it wasn't a Memphian that did that, but nonetheless, we carry the scar of that in a very heavy and a very visible way. And so the way I always try to explain Memphis to anyone not from here is like, do we have some problems here? Absolutely. Do we have an incredible amount of oppression to overcome generally as a city? Absolutely. But there's also resilience here, and this is a proud city. The residents here are proud to be from Memphis. The joke is, we're not from Tennessee, we're from Memphis. And so yeah, that's our legacy. A painful past but still just resilience in spite of all of that.

Taylor Wilson:

Micaela Watts, thanks so much.

Micaela Watts:

Thank you.

Taylor Wilson:

The full episode of States of America exploring the death of Tyre Nichols and what went wrong in Memphis premieres tonight at 8 PM and 10:00 PM Eastern on USA TODAY Network's streaming channel. For a full list of platforms offering our free streaming channel, follow the link in our show description. The episode can also be found on USA TODAY'S YouTube channel.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every day of the week right here, wherever you get your audio. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2 of 'Tennessee 3' expelled, SCOTUS transgender ruling: 5 Things podcast