When did Republicans become so terrified of our political system?
Whether it’s Tennessee or Florida or Montana or Virginia, whether it’s defending the indefensible in Donald Trump, the party that once gave us Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower has become a complete embarrassment to America.
What happened in Tennessee this week is almost incomprehensible in the 21st century.
A Republican majority expelled two elected Democrats for participating in protests calling for gun control laws in the aftermath of a school shooting in Nashville.
The two who were expelled happen to be African-American.
There was a third Democrat who was brought up for expulsion, but Republicans came up short of the two-thirds required for expulsion.
She was white.
They claimed she had been less aggressive and obnoxious in her protest than the other two.
Yeah, right.
The speaker of the Tennessee House, Republican Cameron Sexton, told a Knoxville radio station that the actions of the three Democrats was an “insurrection” equivalent to or worse than that at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.
Of course, when a Republican member was found to have sexually abused three teenage girls in 2019, Sexton refused to expel him. He was not only a Republican, he was white.
And we wasn’t arguing against gun control.
Even in Tennessee, something like 80 percent of voters support common sense gun laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people.
This may take a long time, but it won’t end well for Republicans.