Ousted Tennessee lawmakers want their seats back

Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, newly expelled from the Tennessee Legislature, said on Sunday that they hoped to get their seats back.

“I do hope to continue to serve District 86,” Pearson said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Jones echoed those sentiments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in confirming he also wanted to return to office.

“We will continue to fight for our constituents,” he told host Chuck Todd.

Pearson, a Democrat from Memphis, and Jones, a Democrat from Nashville, were expelled on Thursday by Republicans, who have a supermajority in the state House of Representatives.

“Our voters have been disenfranchised,” Pearson said. “This is one of the greatest tactics of voter disenfranchisement and voter oppression that I have ever witnessed. It is not only unprecedented — it is historical in nature.”

The Shelby County Board of Commissioners will appoint a temporary replacement for Pearson, and it is expected that it will indeed be Pearson. The same is true with Jones and the Nashville Metropolitan Council. What happens next in the Legislature is anybody’s guess.

“I’ve already heard,” Pearson said on “Meet the Press,” “that people in the state Legislature and in Nashville are actually threatening our Shelby County commissioners: Do not reappoint me or they’re going to take away funding that’s in the governor’s budget for projects that the mayor and others have asked for.”

Pearson and Jones had participated in a protest in favor of gun reforms at the State Capitol following a shooting last month at the Covenant School in Nashville that left six people dead, including three children. Republicans also considered ousting a third lawmaker involved in the protest, Gloria Johnson, but failed to do so.

Johnson suggested after Jones and Pearson were expelled and she was not that the reason might have been that they are African American and she is not.

“I am a 60-year-old White woman, and they are two young Black men,” Johnson said.

For his part, Pearson said on Sunday that he’d never felt welcome in the Legislature because of his race, and also because of his progressive politics.

“It has always been a toxic work environment to work in the Tennessee State Capitol,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

In justifying their expulsion, Republican Rep. Gino Bulso said the three Democrats had “effectively conducted a mutiny.”

Democrats have noted that because of the expulsion proceedings, Pearson, Jones and, to a lesser extent, Johnson have become far more famous and potentially far more influential than they likely would have ever been.

“I think the most resounding message we’re hearing from the White House, and across the world and people across this nation, is that this attack on democracy will not go on unchallenged,” Jones said on “Meet the Press.”

For his part, Pearson said he wanted to get back to the Legislature to continue to fight for changes in gun laws.

“We can never forget that it was tragedy that brought us to this moment,” he told ABC host Jonathan Karl.