May 12 (Reuters) – The Republican speaker of Tennessee’s House of Representatives on Tuesday stripped Democratic lawmakers of all committee assignments as punishment for their role in boisterous protests during last week’s special session on redistricting.
The move came five days after the Republican-controlled Tennessee House approved a new congressional map dismantling a Black-majority district in the U.S. House of Representatives built around the predominantly African American city of Memphis.
Last Thursday’s vote, likely to result in flipping the Democratic-held seat to the Republicans in November’s midterm elections, came as several Southern states moved to leverage the recent U.S. Supreme Court vote that severely weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act.
The House floor vote in Nashville was met with raucous protests by activists yelling from the balcony of the visitors’ gallery and from Black lawmakers who stood at the front of the chamber linking arms in prayer as protesters sounded air horns and chanted slogans against the new map.
Opponents of the redrawn congressional district compared the undoing of the majority-Black district as a throwback to the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination in the Deep South.
In a letter to Tennessee’s House Democratic leader Karen Camper, the speaker, Cameron Sexton, said House Democrats were being removed from all standing committees and subcommittees as discipline for “instigating and encouraging” disruptions and “disorder on the House floor” during last Thursday’s vote.
As examples, he cited lawmakers for “interlocking arms in the well of the House”, for “blocking aisles on the House floor” and for using “prohibited props and noisemakers.”
Of the 99 seats in the Tennessee House, Republicans hold 75 and Democrats 24.
At least one House Democrat, Representative Justin Jones, posted online a copy of the individual letter he received serving notice of his committee and subcommittee removals, referring any questions to Camper.
“This is the same pattern of racial discrimination and authoritarian abuse we have come to expect,” Jones, who is Black and represents Nashville, said on social media.
Democratic leader Camper, who is Black and represents Memphis, later posted an open letter to her Facebook page decrying the redrawing of the Memphis-area congressional district as “one of the most troubling abuses of power this legislature has seen in recent memory.”
“When Democrats stand up, speak out, and expose what is happening in this chamber, the response from this supermajority is retaliation,” she wrote. “We are hurt. We are disappointed. But we are not intimidated.”
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Ross Colvin and John Mair)
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