On The GOP’s Incomplete Victory In Tennessee

As we noted yesterday, the Tennessee legislature took action and expelled two of the three members of its House of Representatives who led a chaotic protest – really a riot or an insurrection, by definitions established on January 6, 2023 – on the floor last Thursday. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, a pair of urban machine Democrats from Nashville and Memphis, respectively, were voted out of the legislature for their role in the insurrection, while the third legislator, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, managed to escape expulsion by one vote.

There’s a reason Johnson survived, but it’s not the reason she and others are claiming. It turns out it’s not a good reason.

Johnson is still in the Tennessee legislature because unlike Jones and Pearson, she wasn’t screaming into a bullhorn and exhorting rioters to continue disrupting the legislative session while state troopers were outside fighting off lunatics who were attempting to break into the House chamber.

This was all as a result of leftist rent-a-mobs being ginned up to intimidate legislators into passing gun control.

Johnson made the case yesterday that factually her role in the riot was different than that of Jones and Pearson, then she changed her story…

So now it’s “RACISM” which explains why she survived. And she’s running her mouth about “FASCISM.”

Fox News had Cameron Sexton, who’s the Speaker of the House in Tennessee and who wanted Johnson gone, on to answer those charges.

We’d rather not criticize Sexton here, because what he did manage to do was terrific. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are radicals who don’t belong in a state legislature; they don’t respect the norms of a civilized society and think stupid histrionics with bullhorns while zealots threaten violence against their fellow legislators is justified as an effective means of social change, and it’s good and proper they find out otherwise.

Where Sexton screwed up, though, was in the order the resolutions expelling the three were voted.

He had Johnson going second. She needed to go third.

There was zero question Jones, the ringleader of the Tennessee insurrection – he’s part Filipino and part black, and he comes off as a gay, black version of Jim Jones, the 1970’s communist cult-preacher who led a thousand of his followers down to Guyana and then forced them to commit suicide, in the way he speaks – was going to get expelled. It was also very likely Pearson would be dumped as well. With a weaker evidentiary case against Johnson, the way to make the math work in getting a two-thirds vote for expulsion was to bounce Jones and Pearson first so neither could vote to save her.

Jones was already gone, but Pearson wasn’t. Without his vote against the expulsion, Johnson would have been cooked.

That’s a tactical error and a shame, because now the narrative – thoroughly dishonest, but it’ll be pervasive nonetheless – is that the white Republicans saved Johnson and not the two blacks because they’re racist.

And yes, there were a half-dozen weak Republicans who could have voted her out and didn’t, and because of their weakness the entire body is now being slandered as racist – by Gloria Johnson, the white leftist who threw her two black compatriots under the bus to keep her job.

She should have been bounced out of the House to avoid that perception and to take away that argument alone. Republicans willing to fight the Cold Civil War should understand that their immediate target has to be white Democrats first and foremost at every opportunity. Johnson, a mediocrity who’s been voted in and out of office for a decade and has little respect in the Tennessee House, should have gotten the bum’s rush just on the general principle that the white Democrats have to suffer anytime the Republicans become irritated.

Is that fascistic? Is it abuse of power? Is it “undemocratic,” as the usurper president Joe Biden, who regularly flouts the U.S. Constitution, babbled after the expulsions?

The correct response is these are the wrong questions. They would be questions to ask before the Cold Civil War began, before the post-republic stage of American history began.

When the 2020 presidential election ushered in a time when elections were about collecting ballots rather than winning votes, when Democrats trashed the idea of bodily autonomy by forcing people to undergo experimental medical treatments in order to work or attend school, when a former president is persecuted solely to affect the next presidential election and when thousands of Americans are held as political prisoners for the crime of petitioning the government for redress of grievances, and when an American faces 10 years in a federal prison for making a comical meme, we no longer care about these niceties.

Because in the post-republic, there are no rules. There are only opportunities. And when Gloria Johnson stood with rioters in the Tennessee capitol, she made herself a target of opportunity.

She should have been voted out, and the Republicans in the Tennessee House should have laughed at her when she attempted to save herself by claiming (rightly, but who cares?) that her role in the riot was minor compared to her two black comrades. Such arguments didn’t much benefit January 6 protesters who are rotting in the Chateau d’If prisons in Washington, DC right now; it didn’t matter that many of them never behaved violently. So why should anyone give a damn about Gloria Johnson’s problems?

Someone in the Tennessee legislature ought to bring a new resolution to get rid of Gloria Johnson based on her slanderous accusations of racism, and this time she ought to be expelled.

Because the Cold Civil War is a time for people like Gloria Johnson to experience the joys of FAFO – which for those of you not up to speed, means “f**k around and find out.” The days of nice-guy Republicans who put up with leftist agitation, name-calling and thug politics are over, and rightly so.