Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, who was reinstated in the statehouse Monday, is calling for the Republican speaker of the statehouse to resign.
Jones, one of two Black Democratic lawmakers expelled from the GOP-controlled legislature last week for leading a gun-control protest in the capitol, called House Speaker Cameron Sexton an “enemy of democracy.”
“He is an enemy of democracy, and he doesn’t deserve to be in that office of a speaker of the house any longer,” Jones told CNN.
Sexton did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment. The speaker previously said that Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson “deserved expulsion” after they interrupted statehouse proceedings in protest of inaction on gun control following the deadly school shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville.
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Jones and another Black Democrat, Justin Pearson, were removed from the legislature in dramatic votes decried as voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression by Democrats. President Biden called the move “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent.” A third lawmaker who participated in the protest, Democratic Rep. Gloria Johnson, narrowly avoided expulsion by a single vote.
Johnson, who is White, later suggested that she was not expelled because of the color of her skin. Members of the Tennessee Black Caucus likened the expulsion votes to a “Jim Crow-era trial.”
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Sexton has denied accusations of racism, insisting that Jones and Pearson were removed to set a precedent that disrupting House proceedings would not be tolerated.
“In my house on the floor, since I’m speaker, we have rules, we have decorum, we have a process, we have procedures,” he told Fox News last week.
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“Imagine that that happened on the congressional floor during his State of the Union address and people took over in front of him, pulled out a bullhorn and started leading the people in chants, a protest from the congressional floor. I don’t think he would approve of that.”
Jones was sent back to the legislature on an interim basis Monday following a unanimous vote by the Nashville Metropolitan Council. State law permits local legislative bodies to elect interim representation in the statehouse when there is a vacancy. Pearson could be reappointed as early as Wednesday by the Shelby County Commission.
Special elections will be held for Jones and Pearson’s seats in the coming months. Both men have said they intend to run in their respective elections.
Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner, indicated that whoever is appointed to the vacancies by the Nashville and Shelby County governments “will be seated as representatives as the constitution requires.”
Fox News’ Bradford Betz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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