The drama in Tennessee over lawmakers expelled from the legislature for protesting in favor of gun restrictions on the floor of the House, only for one of them to be reappointed to the seat, can be framed in several ways. It can be seen as a lawmaker punished for abusing the rules of the legislative body. It's also obviously a partisan battle between majority Republicans and opposition Democrats. It has been presented in racial terms, since the ejected members are black. But the confrontation also represents deep and growing disagreements between rural and urban Americans who hold divergent values, prefer very different laws, and inevitably clash in an excessively centralized country.
"The contentious ouster of Tennessee state lawmakers Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis is the latest skirmish in a longstanding power struggle between Republicans who control the state's politics and Democrats in charge of its fast-growing cities," Ginger Adams Otis wrote this week for The Wall Street Journal. "Tennessee is an extreme example of a polarized power dynamic playing out in many parts of the U.S. where red states contend with blue cities."
