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gloria johnson
'Run, Gloria, Run!' Tennessee Three Democrat Urged to Challenge Sen. Blackburn in 2024
"Honestly, Tennesseans deserve someone who will stand up to corrupt special interests, fight for lower costs so that every family can build a good life, and that's not Marsha Blackburn," said state Rep. Gloria Johnson.
Jul 23, 2023
Politico's Friday reporting that one of the "Tennessee Three"—Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson—is considering a run next year for the seat held by GOP U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn generated excitement across the Volunteer State and throughout the country.
Welcoming the "amazing news" that the Democrat may try to challenge the first-term Republican, Victor Shi, the youngest elected delegate for President Joe Biden in 2020, tweeted that "Tennessee deserves so much better than Marsha."
Johnson, who represents District 90, "is a friend, she has fought time and time again for Gen Z and young people (as both a teacher and state rep.)," Shi added. "She is the perfect person to be the next U.S. senator from Tennessee."
Kyle Tharp of the newsletter FWIW simply said, "Run, Gloria, Run!"
"I'm taking a serious look at the race and having conversations with folks that are hungry for better leadership in Washington," Johnson told Politico. "Honestly, Tennesseans deserve someone who will stand up to corrupt special interests, fight for lower costs so that every family can build a good life, and that's not Marsha Blackburn."
Johnson is expected to make a decision about whether to run by the end of the summer. Politico noted that she would not "have the primary field to herself. Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental activist and her party's 2020 Senate nominee, has filed to run again. Three years ago, she bested James Mackler, the candidate preferred by national Democrats, and then lost to incumbent Bill Hagerty by 27 points."
The former teacher has previously confirmed she is weighing a Senate run, telling the Chattanooga Times Free Press in late May that "there have been a whole lot of people, very serious people, asking me to do it. And so I told them I would seriously consider doing it."
"It needs to be done. People want somebody who will stand up for Tennessee families, and they just don't feel Marsha's doing the job. There's a lot of issues with Marsha, I believe. Mainly, what I hear is she's not voting for Tennessee families," Johnson added.
In April, Johnson and two of her Democratic colleagues in the Tennessee House of Representatives faced a GOP-led expulsion effort over the trio's protest for gun control legislation on the chamber floor in the wake of the Covenant School shooting.
Tennessee Republicans ultimately declined to oust Johnson, a white woman in her 60s, but they expelled Reps. Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson —though local councils swiftly voted to send both younger Black men back to the chamber.
The multiday battle garnered intense media attention and elevated the Tennessee Three to national platforms. Asked by reporters at the time why she was spared expulsion, Johnson said: "I'll answer your question; it might have to do with the color of our skin."
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GOP Cynically Recast Progressive State House Protests as 'Insurrection'
"It's as if they learned a word on January 6th for the first time and never figured out what it meant," quipped one critic.
Apr 28, 2023
Progressives are pushing back this week against Republicans' conflation of peaceful protests by Democratic state lawmakers defending their constituents' rights with the deadly insurrection effort on January 6, 2021 by supporters of then-President Donald Trump in service of subverting a presidential election.
After seven protesters were arrested Monday in the Montana legislature following Republican lawmakers' silencing of state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D-100) over her impassioned defense of transgender and nonbinary children, a group of GOP legislators accused her of "encouraging an insurrection."
"Peaceful protest is not insurrection."
Although the demonstration was entirely peaceful, the Republicans—members of the Montana Freedom Caucus—blasted what they falsely called "the violent protesters" and urged "immediate disciplinary action" against Zephyr, who is transgender.
"They want to ring alarm bells and they want to compare this to January 6," Andy Nelson, the Democratic Party chair in Missoula County, Montana—which includes Zephyr's district—told the Associated Press. "There's absolutely no way you can compare what happened on Monday with the January 6 insurrection. Violence occurred that day. No violence occurred in the gallery of the Montana House."
\u201cA violent attack on the Capitol to overturn an election was an insurrection. Peaceful protests by legislators in Tennessee and Montana were not insurrection. Efforts to conflate them are cynical, wrong, and dangerous to democracy.\u201d— Noah Bookbinder (@Noah Bookbinder) 1682627952
It's not just Montana. Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee called it an "insurrection" and a "riot" when Democratic Reps. Justin Jones (D-52), Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson (D-90) took to the well of the legislative chamber to support thousands of Nashville-area students rallying outside for gun control measures following the March 27 Covenant School massacre. Republicans voted to expel Jones and Pearson from the legislature over the protests, though they were swiftly reinstated by municipal councils.
Republicans "are trying to dismiss the integrity and sincerity of what all these people are calling for," Tennessee Democratic Rep. John Ray Clemmons (D-55) told the AP. "They're dismissing what it is just to avoid the debate on this issue."
"My colleagues across the aisle have spent so much time trying to silence the minority party that anyone speaking up and amplifying their voice probably strikes them as insurrectionist, even though it doesn't resemble anything like it," he added.
\u201c@bozchron The republicans' misuse of words makes you think they need dictionaries until you realize they are intentionally conflating the definitions of words to further their agendas.\u201d— Bozeman Daily Chronicle (@Bozeman Daily Chronicle) 1682661303
Donald Trump Jr. and other Republicans also described a peaceful February protest at the Oklahoma State Capitol against a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth as an "insurrection."
"Tennessee. Oklahoma. Montana. The GOP seems to want to redefine the word 'insurrection' to include literally any peaceful protest they don't like," tweeted independent journalist and transgender rights activist Erin Reed, who is also Zephyr's partner. "It's as if they learned a word on January 6th for the first time and never figured out what it meant."
Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), asserted that "peaceful protest is not insurrection," and that such conflation "waters down the seriousness of the real insurrection we saw on Jan. 6, 2021."
Attorney and voting rights activist James Slattery tweeted, "I can't help but compare the recent Republican efforts to silence legislators in various states who are acting in good faith to advocate for their constituents—while at the national level the Republicans have done nothing to expel members of Congress who incited an insurrection."
\u201cBc if everything is an insurrection, nothing is, not even J6. Cynical af; false equivalence to both-sides attempted violent overthrow of government, essentially. Republicans are nihilists daring the rest of us to rescue America from them. Maybe they always were. Idk.\u201d— ProTip (@ProTip) 1682689851
According to a July 2022 Monmouth University poll, just 13% of Republican voters considered the January 6 attack an "insurrection"—down from 33% a year earlier. More than 6 in 10 respondents described the effort by Trump supporters to stop certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory as an act of "legitimate protest."
Legal experts say "insurrection" has a very specific definition.
"Disrupting things is a far cry from insurrection," University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt told the AP. "It's just a protest, and protesters are not insurrectionists."
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GOP State Rep Who Voted to Expel 'Tennessee Three' Resigns Over Sexual Harassment of Intern
"He needed to be expelled," said one critic.
Apr 20, 2023
Tennessee Rep. Scotty Campbell, the vice chair of the state House Republican Caucus and a leader behind the effort last month to expel three Democrats who joined a gun control protest, resigned on Thursday weeks after a state House investigation found that he had sexually harassed at least one intern.
Campbell's resignation was met with frustration from supporters of the "Tennessee Three"—state Reps. Justin Jones (D-52), Justin Pearson (D-86), and Gloria Johnson (D-90)—who said the District 3 representative should have been expelled last month for his conduct instead of being permitted to stay in the House and vote to remove the three gun control supporters from the Legislature.
Until deciding to resign after being confronted by a local media outlet on Thursday, "Rep. Scotty Campbell saw no consequences as a result of his actions," said HuffPost editor Philip Lewis.
\u201cAgain: TN House GOP Vice Chair Scotty Campbell (R-Mountain City) was found guilty of sexually harassing 19yo interns, saying he imagines them performing sex acts on each other \u2014 No consequences. \n\nBut the TN 3 speaking up for change = expulsion? \ud83e\udd14\nhttps://t.co/l6XIdAhnNl\u201d— The Tennessee Holler (@The Tennessee Holler) 1682012203
The state House Workplace Discrimination and Harassment Subcommittee alerted Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-25) on March 29 that it had determined Campbell violated House policy by harassing a legislative intern, telling the Republican leader that "discrimination in any form will not be tolerated."
\u201cAGAIN: The week before the TN 3 we\u2019re expelled, Speaker Sexton learned the @tnhousegop vice chair sexually harassed 1-2 teenage interns and did nothing. https://t.co/l6XIdAhnNl \n\nIs @TheJusticeDept paying attention yet?\u201d— The Tennessee Holler (@The Tennessee Holler) 1682014979
Instead of removing Campbell from his committee assignments, censuring him, or taking other actions to hold him accountable, Sexton did not respond to the panel's findings and moved ahead days later with an effort to expel the three Democrats, after which only Jones and Pearson were ousted. The two lawmakers were quickly reappointed by municipal councils in their districts.
"If you were in court and behaved like those three did, you would have been found in contempt of court," Campbell argued during a debate over the expulsion motion.
NewsChannel 5 in Nashville revealed the committee's findings on Thursday and confronted Campbell about them.
According to the investigation, Campbell made comments to a legislative intern about her and another 19-year-old intern about "imagining they were performing sexual acts on one another." The Legislature has also spent "potentially thousands of dollars" in taxpayer money to move one of the interns out of her apartment building, where Campbell also lived, and to place her "in a downtown hotel for the remainder of her internship."
Campbell told NewsChannel 5 that had only had "consensual, adult conversations."
Hours after the outlet reported on the harassment, however, Campbell announced his resignation.
"He needed to be expelled," said Bryan Langan, a gun control advocate and former Democratic Tennessee Senate candidate.
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