Vice-president Kamala Harris was in Nashville on Friday to meet with a group of lawmakers who were expelled this week for their participation in a gun control protest on the Tennessee statehouse floor.
After meeting with former representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in private, Ms Harris was appearing at an event on Friday afternoon for the expelled legislators at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville.
Both of the expelled lawmakers are Black, while a white colleague who joined them in their protest, Gloria Johnson, was able to hang onto her seat in a closely contested vote on Thursday. She was also part of the meeting with the vice-president.
“They chose to show courage in the face of an extreme tragedy,” the vice-president said at Fisk of the so-called “Tennessee Three.”
“A democracy allows for places where the people’s voice can be heard and honoured and respected,” vice-president Harris continued. “They understood the importance, these three, of standing to say that people will not be silenced. To say that a democracy hears the cries , hears the pleas, hears the demands of its people, who say the children should be able to live and be safe and go to school and not be in fear.”
During her speech, the vice-president called on Tennessee lawmakers to pass new gun laws restricting access to assault weapons and providing mechanisms to seize guns from dangerous people.
“When a community or family knows, shouldn’t we listen?” she told the crowd, to whoops of approval. “Assault weapons, these are weapons of war. These are weapons that were designed to kill a lot of people quickly. No place on the streets of a civil society.”
She also condemned lawmakers for expelling two duly elected representatives, arguing, “A democracy says you do not silence the people.”
Prior to Ms Harris’s appearance at Fisk, Nashville Metro Council member Zulfat Suara argued from the podium the Tennessee GOP chose “only to expel the young, gifted and Black legislators.”
“Help me make sense of this,” she told the crowd, The Tennessean reports. “We are reeling from the deadliest school shooting in our state’s history.”
“The challenge will be: Don’t just celebrate the Tennessee three,” Rev Davie Tucker, a prominent local pastor, added at the event, according to the paper. “What consequences are you willing to live through to make a difference? We need some fighters. Will you join us in the fight?”
Joe Biden also spoke with the expelled lawmakers earlier in the day, according to the White House, and invited them to visit the Oval Office.
“The President thanked them for their leadership in seeking to ban assault weapons and standing up for our democratic values,” the White House told The Independent in a statement. “The officials thanked the President for his leadership on gun safety and for spotlighting the undemocratic and unprecedented attacks on them this week in the Tennessee statehouse.”
The White House was part of a chorus of critics who condemned the Tennessee Republican party’s effort to expel the lawmakers as racist and antidemocratic.
The trio quickly garnered national attention after they took to the House of Representatives floor following the Nashville shooting, where six people, including three 9-year-old students, were killed at a private Christian elementary school in late March.
