Today is Wednesday, April 12, 2023. As expected, the other Black Tennessee representative, Justin Pearson, was reinstated today, just one week short of being expelled from the House, along with fellow representative Justin Jones. In a great opinion piece by Pearson himself for CNN online, the young, impassioned Democrat wrote frankly about his own expulsion and the terrible impact it had on those expelling him: autocratic repugnicans.

In his opinion, Republicans who instigated his removal from the Tennessee House last week are now sitting there with shit on their faces! He did not write this, by the way. He’s way too polite to say what he must be feeling about his rotten colleagues. He did write that the repugnicans in the House “apparently failed to anticipate the nationwide backlash that their actions would engender.” He cheered that “Democracy prevailed and the rule of law has won.”

In the second paragraph, Pearson mentions that he “will retake his seat after a vote held today by the Shelby County Commission, and that he will once again represent the beautifully diverse jurisdiction of District 86 in Memphis in Tennessee’s Assembly.”

Pearson goes on to write that “this should be a chastening moment for revanchist forces in Tennessee’s legislature and across the country.” Pearson then predicted that “the undemocratic machinations employed to oust us [he and Jones] from office are destined to fail.” The young representative then quotes the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King who once famously said that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” Pearson then says that “events this week demonstrated, more than ever, that this is indeed the case.”

What was clear to anyone who was following this dramatic story is what Pearson duly noted was instead a breach of decorum “by the heavy-handed Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House, which denied us the chance to speak during regular order, cut off our microphones, later disabled our voting machines and revoked our access to the building.”

In the end, Pearson accurately states that the expulsion move on the part of those ugly repugnicans “was a gross miscalculation in the chamber.”

The new superstar of Tennessee lawmakers indicated that “calls for common sense gun reform measures fall on deaf ears in our legislature where a Republican supermajority is wildly out of step with people’s values.” He went on to condemn the “aggressively gerrymandered legislature that ignores the wishes of constituents on combating gun violence.” He then writes poignantly about the three victims of the Covenant School violence on March 27, who will “never have a 10th birthday party. They’ll never go to a dance, graduate high school, fall in love or cast a vote. Their loved ones will never hug them again. Neither will the families of school custodian Mike Hill, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, or Head of Covenant School Katherine Koonce. They were all senselessly gunned down at that school in Nashville.”

Then Pearson went on to provide a surreal picture of what the gun laws of Tennessee permit, and what he states is nothing short of shocking: no wonder this state has suffered so many instances of gun violence now and in the past. He writes that “people in Tennessee aren’t even required to purchase a permit to publicly carry guns in the state.” Not even a fucking permit! It’s the Wild, Wild West in Tennessee, that’s for sure. He states that the “GOP-led legislature is considering lowering the age of permitless gun purchase and carry from 21 to 18.” The idiots in the Republican supermajority are even considering a measure, he writes, that would “arm teachers in Tennessee, the state with some of the laxest gun safety laws in the country.”

The Nashville massacre, Pearson states, “came just weeks after 20 people were killed in shootings in Memphis over a 10-day period in February.” He even mentions that he himself knows someone whose life has been touched by preventable gun violence. He then indicates that a high school classmate of his was murdered just a few months ago. “He strongly concludes, “More guns simply cannot be the answer.”

Pearson champions a new Tennessee that is “being born in its emerging miraculous diversity.”

In conclusion, Pearson writes in the vein of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “My constituents sent me to the Tennessee State House to continue this work in their name. We will never be silenced. We will not sit down. We will not move to the back of the bus or the back of the house. We will march forward. We will continue to challenge the Old South and bring about a Renewed South, one that is fair and just and democratic for Black, brown, White, indigenous, transgender, poor, immigrant – for all people. And we will win. Because we are on the right side of history.”

A very admirable young man, I must say, and the very reason why those old guard white jerks in the State House are running scared of this man and his fellow colleague, Justin Jones.

Maybe there is justice in the world finally, as a new ABC News/ipsos poll shows Dumpf’s already low favorability ratings have plummeted even further, to 25 percent! And that same poll also shows that most Americans are well aware that Dumpf is a criminal, with 53 percent [shit! it should be 90 percent, in my humble opinion] saying that Dumpf “intentionally” did something wrong. Ugh! How about fomenting an insurrection against his own government, for one, or inadvertently causing the death of 300,000 Americans during the early months of the pandemic. The details of this new poll of the declining fortunes of the former president appear in an online article for Salon entitled “Blinded by hate: Republicans too busy to notice plummeting poll numbers for Trump and GOP,” by Amanda Marcotte.

This sentence in the article should be chiseled in the forehead of every foe of Trump, which definitely includes me and millions of others who have more common sense than the traditional Trump voter. “It seems that for many GOP voters, it really is that they would rather lose the 2024 presidential race than admit liberals were right about Trump.” Marcotte also writes that for many others, “it’s just that they are in deep denial.” She debunks the most recent canard that more indictments will make the buffoon even stronger; she calls this “wishful thinking.” She admits then that “wishful thinking has infected the MAGA base in that they live in a bubble, where they don’t consume non-MAGA media or interact with normal non-MAGA Americans much, if at all.” She writes “it can be easy to convince themselves that the orange-hued fascist is as popular nationwide as he is in their Facebook mentions.” He isn’t!

The one word that captures Dumpf’s plummeting popularity and the entire Republican Party is delusional. Dumpf’s narcissism is spreading throughout the party, “causing people who really should know better to believe that they have a wellspring of support that simply doesn’t exist.” The party continues to push unpopular policies like waging war on abortion and rejecting commonsense measures to combat gun reform, which is favored by a majority of Americans, both Democrat and Republican. She tells the truth about the extreme MAGA faction here, read: Republicans when she writes, “They are hella racist, hate democracy, and don’t care how many people die by gun violence, so long as they keep getting their NRA funding.” The way repugnicans are now acting with regard to Dumpf and to these divisive issues has convinced the rest of America of how bad these people really are.

Marcotte concludes hopefully that as the progressive backlash continues to grow against these authoritarian moves on the part of the extremists in the repugnican party, “voters may actually have a chance to throw Republicans out before the GOP fires the kill shot on American democracy.” We can only hope this will happen!

Stay safe and be well.