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After Calls to Resign, Feinstein Seeks Judiciary Replacement

Recuperating U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California asked Wednesday to be temporarily replaced on the Judiciary Committee, shortly after two House Democrats called on her to resign after her extended absence from Washington.

In a statement, the long-serving Democratic senator said her recovery from a case of shingles, disclosed in early March, had been delayed because of complications. She provided no date for her return to the Senate and said she had asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ask the Senate to allow another Democratic senator to serve in her committee seat until she was able to return.

“I intend to return as soon as possible once my medical team advises that it’s safe for me to travel,” Feinstein said. “In the meantime, I remain committed to the job and will continue to work from home in San Francisco.”

Feinstein’s decision to seek a committee stand-in during her recovery comes amid increasing anxiety within her party that her lengthy absence has damaged Democratic efforts to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees for federal courts in a narrowly divided chamber.

She is the oldest member of Congress, at 89.

California Rep. Ro Khanna, one of two Democratic House members who called Wednesday for Feinstein to resign, said in a statement Wednesday: “This is a moment of crisis for women’s rights and voting rights. It’s unacceptable to have Sen. Feinstein miss vote after vote to confirm judges who will uphold reproductive rights.”

Khanna, a California progressive, wrote on Twitter that Feinstein should step aside. She announced in February that she would not seek reelection in 2024, opening up her seat for the first time in more than 30 years.

“We need to put the country ahead of personal loyalty,” wrote Khanna, who has endorsed the Senate campaign of Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee. “While she has had a lifetime of public service, it is obvious she can no longer fulfill her duties.”

Not long afterward, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota tweeted that he agreed with Khanna.

Feinstein, he wrote, “is a remarkable American whose contributions to our country are immeasurable. But I believe it’s now a dereliction of duty to remain in the Senate and a dereliction of duty for those who agree to remain quiet.”

The senator, who turns 90 in June, has faced questions in recent years about her cognitive health and memory, though she has defended her effectiveness representing a state that is home to nearly 40 million people.

If Feinstein decides to step down during her term, it would be up to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the vacancy, potentially reordering the highly competitive race.

Newsom declined through a spokesperson to comment on Khanna’s statement.

Before the calls for her resignation, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged in remarks to CNN that Feinstein’s absence has slowed down their push to confirm nominees in the closely divided panel.

“I can’t consider nominees in these circumstances because a tie vote is a losing vote in committee,” Durbin said.

Feinstein has had a groundbreaking political career and shattered gender barriers from San Francisco’s City Hall to the corridors of Capitol Hill.

She was the first woman to serve as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and the first female mayor of San Francisco. She ascended to that post after the November 1978 assassinations of then-Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk by a former supervisor, Dan White.

In the Senate, she was the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. She gained a reputation as a pragmatic centrist who left a mark on political battles over issues ranging from reproductive rights to environmental protection.

 
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Second Expelled Black Lawmaker to Return to Tennessee House

The second of two Black Democrats expelled from the Republican-led Tennessee House will return to the Legislature after a Memphis commission voted to reinstate him Wednesday, nearly a week after his banishment for supporting gun control protesters propelled him into the national spotlight.

Hundreds of supporters chanted and cheered as they marched Representative Justin Pearson through Memphis to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meeting, where officials quickly voted 7-0 to restore his position.

“The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us: ‘You can’t expel hope. You can’t expel justice,” Pearson said at the meeting, his voice rising as he spoke. “You can’t expel our voice. And you sure can’t expel our fight.”

Pearson is expected to return to the Capitol on Thursday, when the House holds its next floor session.

Republicans expelled Pearson and Representative Justin Jones last week over their role in a gun control protest on the House floor after a Nashville school shooting that left three children and three adults dead.

The Nashville Metropolitan Council took only a few minutes Monday to unanimously restore Jones to office. He was quickly reinstated to his House seat.

The appointments are interim, and special elections for the seats will take place in the coming months. Jones and Pearson have said they plan to run in the special elections.

Accusations of racism

The House’s vote to remove Pearson and Jones but keep white Representative Gloria Johnson drew accusations of racism. Johnson survived by one vote. Republican leadership denied that race was a factor, however.

The expulsions last Thursday made Tennessee a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy. In the span of a few days, the two politicians had raised thousands of campaign dollars, and the Tennessee Democratic Party had received a new jolt of support from across the U.S.

Political tensions rose when Pearson, Johnson and Jones on the House floor joined hundreds of demonstrators who packed the Capitol last month to call for passage of gun control measures.

As protesters filled galleries, the lawmakers approached the front of the House chamber with a bullhorn and participated in a chant. The scene unfolded days after the shooting at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Tennessee. Their participation from the front of the chamber broke House rules because the three did not have permission from the House speaker.

Support for Pearson has come from across the country, including Memphis. During a Monday rally in support of Tyre Nichols, who died in January after he was beaten by police during an arrest, backers of Pearson said the commission was “on the clock.”

“You’ve got one job — to reinstate Justin Pearson,” activist LJ Abraham said.

Pearson grew up in the same House district he was chosen to represent after longtime state Representative Barbara Cooper, a Black Democrat, died in office. It winds along the neighborhoods, forests and wetlands of south Memphis, through the city’s downtown area and into north Shelby County.

Before he was elected, Pearson helped lead a successful campaign against a planned oil pipeline that would have run through neighborhoods and wetlands, and near wells that pump water from the Memphis Sand Aquifer, which provides drinking water to 1 million people.

He gained a quick reputation as a skilled community activist and gifted public speaker.

Political divisions deep

Should Pearson join Jones in returning to the Tennessee Capitol, they’ll do so when political divisions between the state’s few Democratic strongholds and the Republican supermajority were already reaching a boiling point before the expulsions.

Republican members this year introduced a wave of punishing proposals to strip away Nashville’s autonomy. Others have pushed to abolish the state’s few community oversight boards that investigate police misconduct and instead replace them with advisory panels that would be blocked from investigating complaints.

Lawmakers are also nearing passage of a bill that would move control of the board that oversees Nashville’s airport from local appointments to selections by Republican state government leaders.

Particularly on addressing gun violence, Republicans have so far refused to consider placing any new restrictions on firearms in the wake of the Nashville school shooting. Instead, lawmakers have advanced legislation designed to add more armed guards in public and private schools and are considering a proposal that would allow teachers to carry guns.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Cameron Sexton’s office confirmed this week that a Republican lawmaker was stripped of a top committee assignment more than a month after he asked during a hearing if “hanging by a tree” could be added to the state’s execution methods. The speaker’s office declined to specify the reason for removing him from the committee.

Representative Paul Sherrell was taken off the Criminal Justice Committee and transferred to another, and was “very agreeable” to the change, Sexton spokesperson Doug Kufner said.

Sherrell, who is white, later apologized for what he said amid outcry from Black lawmakers, who pointed to the state’s dark history of lynching. Sherrell said his comments were “exaggerated” to show “support of families who often wait decades for justice.”
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Ouster of State Lawmakers Draws Nation’s Eyes to Tennessee 

In an episode that fuses simmering conflicts in the United States over race, gun control, and the country’s deep political divide, Republican legislators in Tennessee have come under widespread criticism following a vote Thursday to expel two Democratic members from the state’s House of Representatives.

The expulsion votes came just days after the two lawmakers, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, interrupted a House session to demand that lawmakers implement stronger gun control laws. Jones and Pearson are both Black men.

A motion to expel Representative Gloria Johnson, who participated in the protest with Jones and Pearson, failed by one vote. Johnson is white.

The eyes of the nation are especially focused on Tennessee’s Legislature because of the House Republicans’ exercise of raw political power in ousting Jones and Pearson, the race of the expelled lawmakers, and, the topic of their protest — gun control.

Intense emotions

The expulsion vote took place amid already intense emotions in Nashville, Tennessee’s state capital. On March 27, a person armed with several semi-automatic weapons stormed The Covenant School, a small private Christian elementary school a little more than 5 miles from the Capitol building. The shooter killed three 9-year-old children and three adults before being shot to death by police.

Officials said the killer at Covenant had legally purchased the weapons used in the attack.

The killings prompted a flood of calls for tighter restrictions on firearms ownership. However, in largely rural and gun-friendly Tennessee, where the state government is dominated by Republicans, gun-control legislation is not likely to pass.

After the shooting, Republicans in the Legislature and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee focused instead on laws that would “harden” schools against attacks like the one at Covenant by, for example, mandating that doors be locked and requiring security measures at points of entry.

Competing narratives

On March 30, thousands of people converged on the Tennessee Capitol, where the Legislature was meeting, to demand action on gun control in response to the Covenant shootings. Many protesters entered an open gallery area above the House floor and began chanting.

With the House in session, Jones, Pearson and Johnson moved to the front of the chamber and joined the protesters. Using a megaphone, they at times led the crowd in chants.

Afterward, House Speaker Cameron Sexton compared the lawmakers’ actions to the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump. He also accused them of taking attention away from those killed at the Covenant School.

“What they did was try to hold up the people’s business on the House floor instead of doing it the way that they should have done it, which they have the means to do,” Sexton said. “They actually thought that they would be arrested, and so they decided that them being a victim was more important than focusing on the six victims from Monday. And that’s appalling.”

On Thursday, Sexton called votes on three separate bills to expel Jones, Pearson, and Johnson.

In remarks to the House as it debated the expulsion vote, Jones called the process “a farce of democracy.”

“What is happening here today is a situation in which the jury has already publicly announced the verdict,” he said. “What we see today is just a spectacle. What we see today is a lynch mob assembled to not lynch me, but our democratic process.”

Suggestion of racism

The votes fell largely along party lines. Republicans hold a supermajority in the 99-seat Tennessee House, and in the case of Jones and Pearson, were able to secure 72 and 69 votes in favor, respectively, clearing the requirement for a two-thirds majority for expulsion.

Only 65 lawmakers voted in favor of expelling Johnson, one shy of the necessary 66.

The fact that two Black men were expelled while a white woman was allowed to retain her seat sparked charges that the expulsions were racially motivated, including from Johnson herself.

Immediately after the votes, when asked why she thought lawmakers expelled her colleagues but not her, Johnson told a reporter, “It might have to do with the color of our skin.”

Such expulsions have been rare in the Tennessee House. It happened once in 2016, when a member was under investigation for serial sexual harassment, and once in 1980, when a member was found to have solicited a bribe. Beyond that, the most recent expulsions occurred in 1866, the year after the end of the Civil War.

Experts surprised

Experts told VOA that they were surprised by the severity of the penalty levied on Jones and Pearson.

“There are certainly lesser sanctions, which legislators use to penalize members who behave inappropriately either in decorum or in ethical [matters],” said Bruce Oppenheimer, professor emeritus in political science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

“The simplest one is a reprimand, which is saying, ‘You did wrong. You shouldn’t do that again,’” said Oppenheimer. “Stronger would be a censure, where you would have to stand and be admonished on the floor of the chamber by the presiding officer. … But it’s very rare for somebody to be expelled.”

Disproportionate penalty

Ken Paulson, the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told VOA that while it is not unusual for a governmental body to have rules to punish members when they deviate from its internal regulations, the penalty in Jones’ and Pearson’s case appeared excessive.

“The penalty is so disproportionate to the alleged crime that it really raises questions about motivation,” Paulson said.

He said that he did not expect the Tennessee expulsions to lead to other legislators in other states suddenly losing their seats. However, he said, it does send a worrying message.

“It does raise the question, ‘How low does the bar go?’” he said. “If a legislator does anything that involves action — not just speech — with which a state legislature is uncomfortable, what keeps them from removing those voices from the legislature? The real concern is that it gives some other supermajority legislatures ideas on how to deal with the other side.”

Practical effect limited

The practical effect of the expulsion may be limited by Tennessee laws that allow local governments to appoint individuals to vacant seats in the Legislature.

Officials in Nashville, which Jones represented before his expulsion, and in Memphis, where Pearson was elected, have signaled that they plan to simply appoint both men to their former positions, returning them to the Legislature.

Both would then be free to run in a special election, which the law requires be held to fill the empty seats.

“It’s likely that each of these people will be reelected,” Oppenheimer said.
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