The three Tennessee state lawmakers who faced expulsion votes after participating in protests over last month’s school shooting in Nashville met with President Biden on Monday for what the White House billed as a conversation about “common-sense gun reform.”
Biden welcomed Reps. Justin Pearson, Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson to the Oval Office. Pearson and Jones, who are Black, were expelled by the Republican-led legislature after protesting on the house floor but later reinstated by local officials on an interim basis. Johnson, who is White, narrowly survived an expulsion vote. Vice President Harris joined them at the meeting.
“You’re standing up for our kids, you’re standing up for our communities,” Biden told the Tennessee lawmakers, adding, “What the Republican legislature did was shocking, it was undemocratic.”
“It’s just tragic to see what’s happening in your state, in particular your city, but also across the country,” the president said. “Nothing is guaranteed about democracy. Every generation has to fight … you are doing just that.”
Biden said his administration and Congress had “passed the most significant gun laws” in decades, “but there’s more to do.”
Harris visited Nashville this month to show the administration’s support for the “Tennessee Three” — all Democrats — and their calls for greater gun control.
After the White House meeting, Pearson said that “people power” can work to find solutions to the gun violence issues plaguing the country.
“We talked to the president about how this is a moral issue, an issue of conscience, an issue in the South where we are trying to build our multiracial democracy and challenge these extreme voices that rather than passing an assault weapons ban, they assaulted our democracy as we saw, we were expelled from the state legislature,” Pearson said. “So we talked to the president, vice president, about why it’s so critical for us to continue to lift up this movement in the South, to continue to try to lift up this multiracial movement, to reconstruct, too, that we’re experiencing right now in Tennessee. And as I was sitting in the Oval Office, I saw the bust of [the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.]. I saw the bust of Rosa Parks on the bus and Cesar Chavez. And what they did, all those people did it because they acted outside of the political paradigm of what was possible and they changed political realities.”
Jones echoed Pearson’s optimistic outlook on change happening in Tennessee and beyond.
“We can get common sense gun laws passed in the South,” Jones said. “We can get them passed in this nation. … It’s going to be a point where we are on the right side of history.”
The lawmakers came to Washington after a legislative session in Nashville that was deeply disappointing for them. On Friday, close to a month after the shooting at a Nashville Christian school, Republicans cut short the year’s session without taking any action explicitly on guns despite the extended presence of hundreds of students, parents and teachers calling for an assault weapons ban and other measures.
The March 27 shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville left three children and three staff members dead.
In a social media post before the White House meeting, Jones said the purpose of the session was to “lift up the call for an assault weapons ban” and “challenging the assault on our democracy.”
In June, Biden signed into federal law bipartisan legislation that he touted as the most significant gun-control bill in decades while acknowledging that it was well short of what he has advocated.
The law provided funding for mental health services and school security initiatives, expanded criminal background checks for some gun buyers, barred a larger group of domestic-violence offenders from purchasing firearms and funded programs that would allow authorities to seize guns from troubled individuals.
It did not include a reinstatement of a ban on assault weapons, which Biden has urged Congress to pass over the past year.
Jones told media in Tennessee that he will ask Biden to declare a public health emergency related to gun violence.
“I think that we need emergency response [because] we’re facing a crisis situation,” he said, according to WTVF. “In states like ours, we need help from our national leaders, because we’re in a state where the only action that our colleagues took in response to the mass shooting in Nashville was to expel the two youngest Black lawmakers and then to pass a law to protect gun manufacturers. That’s all they passed this session.”