The Tennessee Waltz

Tennessee, the adopted state of imperialist President James K. Polk and racist President Andrew Johnson, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, and the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, expelled two black state legislators named Justin - Justin Jones and Justin Pearson - for peacefully protesting for gun control in the well of the state House of Representatives in Nashville in the aftermath of a school shooting in the city over a week earlier.  A third representative, a white female Democrat named Gloria Johnson, who also protested against guns, was also up for expulsion but kept her seat.  And not because she wasn't a man named Justin.

American state legislatures have done a lot of dumb things, such as criminalizing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, restricting the teaching of black history, banning gender-affirming care for transsexual children, and banning the playing of Randy Newman's "Short People" on the radio  (the last one is a law in Maryland - really), but this is the topper.  The Republican supermajority, beholden to the gun lobby and refusing to do anything about it, has just punished two black men in the Tennessee legislature for calling them on it by throwing them out.  They've sent a message to anyone opposed to them that there is a price to pay for expressing opposition to their agenda.  The Tennessee House Republicans may have let Gloria Johnson off the hook now, but the expulsion of Jones and Pearson has made it clear to her that she'll be next if she pulls this stunt next time.

This has happened even as an untold number of demonstrators - many if not most of them young people - descended on the Tennessee legislature demanding action on assault weapons because it made more sense than writing their legistors a bunch of e-mails.  Not only are Tennessee Republicans refusing to listen to them, they're likely to have them arrested  and cleared out just like the young people of the now-forgotten Occupy Wall Street movement who were cleared out of Lower Manhattan.  Once they're out of the way, life will go on and no one will care.

Lawrence O'Donnell says that, while it may not look like it, the forces of good are winning.   Not likely, not in this lifetime; every time America looks like it's making progress, a long, dark period of backsliding is inevitable.