A national scandal exploded in Tennessee last week when the state House expelled two Black Democrats, state Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, and state Rep. Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, for violating House rules on decorum.
Both men, along with a white Democrat, were demanding action on gun control following a Nashville elementary school shooting the week before. But with a vote of their supermajority, Republicans easily tossed out Jones and Pearson.
Technically, the same thing could happen in Georgia, since the rules of the Georgia House and Senate also let the chambers expel a member with a two-thirds vote. Realistically, that won’t happen, since Republicans in Georgia don’t have a supermajority in either chamber. A two-thirds vote to expel a member for a gun safety protest would simply not happen.
Above and beyond the vote count, the tone of politics in the Tennessee and Georgia legislatures is different, too.
Unlike Rep. Pearson in Tennessee, who described being ostracized by his colleagues for wearing a traditional African garment to his swearing-in ceremony there, the diverse freshman class in Georgia said they largely had positive experiences joining the General Assembly.
The AJC’s Maya T. Prabhu described the largely collegial chamber that new House Speaker Jon Burns oversaw this year. Included in the piece is Palestinian-American state Rep. Ruwa Romman, D-Duluth, who is the first Georgia lawmaker to wear a hijab for House proceedings.
“I did worry for a little while if I would even be allowed on the House floor (wearing a hijab,)” Romman told Prabhu, since members are typically not allowed to wear head coverings. “To leadership’s credit, nobody batted an eye, nobody asked a question. I thought this was a fight that I was going to have to have on the first day. It was totally opposite. The thing I thought would ostracize me ended up being the reason that people wanted to chat with me.”
That kind of collegiality might create the kind of space where members could find common ground on the toughest issues we’re facing in our communities. But it hasn’t happened on gun laws, with Democrats in Georgia running into the same brick walls as Democrats in Tennessee when it comes to their efforts to pass even basic gun safety measures.
When state Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, introduced a bill to require that guns be locked away from children, she got a subcommittee hearing, which GOP leaders called “a conversation.” But the bill never got a committee vote or consideration on the House floor.
Au, a physician, rose to national prominence in 2021 in the wake of Georgia’s own mass shooting — seven people gunned down in Asian spas across Metro Atlanta.
But instead of tightening gun laws since then, Georgia Republicans have loosened them, passing a bill the next year that eliminated the requirement to have a license to carry a gun in Georgia. That’s on top of earlier laws to allow people to carry weapons in public parks, bars, churches and college campuses.
Polling has consistently shown that Georgians want more thoughtful gun policies than that, as do most Americans.
But you don’t need a poll to hear the worry in parents’ voices when they talk about sending their kids to schools just like the one in Nashville, where they hope, but don’t know, that their children will be safe.
And I don’t need a poll to know that an issue has broken away from regular politics when I hear about it on the sidelines of baseball and soccer games and in the carpool lines where moms don’t talk politics, but they know a system is broken when it’s incapable of doing more to solve a problem that is so obvious.
That’s exactly what Georgia Tech’s basketball coach Brent Key said after the Nashville shooting. His mother is a third-grade teacher. His four-year-old daughter was in a school play when the shooting happened.
He wanted to talk to reporters to make a plea to lawmakers to do something.
“It’s the most heartbreaking thing in the world to think about your daughter going to school. She’s supposed to be safe and protected,” he said through tears.
“As long as people sit there, bicker, and argue, more and more kids are gonna die because it hasn’t changed. So something’s got to change.”
Instead of gun restrictions to deal with the crisis, Georgia Republicans talk about strengthening mental health services. And they passed a major overhaul to expand access to mental health care last year, with nearly unanimous support. The follow-up bill stalled in the Senate this year.
They also suggest getting schools, including children, to do more to protect themselves.
When Gov. Brian Kemp signed a series of school-related bills into law Wednesday, one of them was House Bill 147, which will now require “intruder alert” drills at all public schools in the state.
The “intruder” is defined as someone who possesses or is suspected of possessing a weapon. The idea of keeping that weapon away from the person carrying isn’t part of the conversation.
The politics of guns are changing, even slightly, in Tennessee at least.
The Republican governor there, Bill Lee, took the unusual step this week of signing an executive order to strengthen measures to keep weapons out of the hands of mentally ill people like the school shooter in Nashville. A close friend of Lee’s wife died in the shooting the same day the two friends were supposed to meet for dinner.
And amid a national backlash, Reps. Pearson and Jones have been reinstated by their own local delegations, both promising to do something, anything, to pass new gun safety measures as long as they have their seats.
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