President Biden invited the three Tennessee Democrats who faced expulsion votes to the White House Friday, a day after two of them were ousted from the state legislature for protesting against gun violence.
Biden’s invite and conference call with the trio came on the same day Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Nashville to meet with the lawmakers dubbed the “Tennessee Three.”
The White House has not announced if Biden has invited the family members of the six victims of last week’s deadly shooting at the Covenant School – which precipitated the protest at the Tennessee statehouse – to Washington, DC.
It also does not appear that Harris met with the family of victims Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Hallie Scruggs, 9, William Kinney, 9, Cynthia Peak, 61, Mike Hill, 61, and Katherine Koonce, 60, during her visit to the Volunteer State.
The “Tennessee Three” – state Rep. Gloria Johnson, 60, and former state Reps. Justin Jones, 27, and Justin Pearson, 29, – all faced expulsion votes from their Republican colleagues on Thursday over a peaceful protest in the Tennessee General Assembly last week that violated decorum rules.
Lawmakers voted to expel Jones and Pearson, who are both black, while Johnson, who is white, survived the vote.
“Earlier today, I spoke to Reps. Jones, Pearson, and Johnson to thank them for their leadership and courage in the face of a blatant disregard of our nation’s democratic values,” Biden wrote in an Instagram post Friday, in which he shared an image of himself on a video call with the three.
“Our country needs to take action on gun violence — and to do that we need more voices like theirs speaking out.”
A White House pool report notes that the Tennessee officials thanked Biden for his “leadership on gun safety” and for spotlighting the “undemocratic and unprecedented attacks” on them this week in the Tennessee statehouse.
Their White House visit will take place “in the near future,” according to the pool report.
The vice president on Friday called the GOP response to the Tennessee statehouse protest “undemocratic and dangerous.”
“Six people, including three children, were killed last week in a school shooting in Nashville. How did Republican lawmakers in Tennessee respond? By expelling their colleagues who stood with Tennesseans and said enough is enough. This is undemocratic and dangerous,” Harris wrote in a tweet.
More than half of Nashville’s Metro Council said Friday they will reappoint Jones for his seat, putting him right back in the House.
Pearson, who won his seat after a special election in March, will be replaced by an interim representative chosen by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, which contains a nine-member Democratic supermajority.
Chairman Mickell Lowery said Thursday before the expulsion vote that he was seeking legal guidance on whether Pearson could be reappointed immediately until a special election could be held.