KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Hey. It's Kelly McEvers, and we are back with Episode 2 of Supermajority. And just a note before we start - there's some coarse language in this episode. OK, here's Meribah Knight.
MERIBAH KNIGHT, BYLINE: It was April 3 of last year, exactly a week after the shooting at the Covenant School. You may remember this from the beginning of the last episode. Protests demanding more gun control had been raging, and the House was in chaos after three Democrats took to the floor with a bullhorn in solidarity. Now, Republican lawmakers had introduced resolutions to expel them.
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CAMERON SEXTON: All those in favor, vote aye. All those opposed, vote no.
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KNIGHT: Angry spectators looked down on lawmakers from the House gallery, screaming fascists as the resolutions passed.
SARAH SHOOP NEUMANN: Now I see the whole country watching us. And they would've never paid any attention before.
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SEXTON: Mr. Trooper, unfortunately, the members cannot hear. I ask you to clear out the balcony, please.
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KNIGHT: But next door, in the Senate, things were quite different. All was quiet. Not a peep from the gallery. It was business as usual.
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RANDY MCNALLY: Clerk, take the roll.
UNIDENTIFIED CLERK: Thirty-two members are present.
MCNALLY: The Senate has a quorum and is now in session.
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RUSTY CROWE: Mr. Speaker, if I could approach the well, please, sir.
MCNALLY: You may.
KNIGHT: Right after the Pledge of Allegiance, longtime Senator Rusty Crowe had the floor for a moment of recognition.
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MCNALLY: Senator Crowe, you're recognized in the well.
RUSTY CROWE: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
KNIGHT: He wanted to welcome a visitor from abroad.
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RUSTY CROWE: And so we're very proud to have Istvan with us.
KNIGHT: Istvan Kiss, the executive director of a place called the Danube Institute, as in the Danube River. It's a conservative think tank based in Budapest.
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RUSTY CROWE: With that, Mr. Speaker, if we could allow Istvan Kiss to say a few words to us, and I would appreciate that, sir.
MCNALLY: Mr. Kiss, you're recognized, sir.
ISTVAN KISS: Thank you very much, Senator Crowe, for this kind introduction. Senator Crowe already mentioned that Danube Institute was established with the aim to be a kind of a beltway.
KNIGHT: The Danube Institute is funded by the Hungarian government, and it has close ties to the country's far-right leader, Viktor Orban. It's a way to take his politics on the road. And those politics are worth explaining for a moment. Since 2010, Orban has rewritten electoral rules. He's taken over public institutions, weakened independent courts and gutted independent media. In a 2022 report, the European Parliament declared that Hungary is no longer a functioning democracy, instead calling it an electoral autocracy.
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KNIGHT: Senator Crowe had started thinking about Hungary's politics and its leader about a year earlier after a constituent, who's also a friend, had called him.
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RUSTY CROWE: And he said, Rusty, did you hear the speech that the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, just gave at CPAC? And I said, no.
KNIGHT: CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, this annual meeting where a lot of major Republicans gather. It had hosted Orban as a speaker.
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RUSTY CROWE: It was an amazing speech that dealt with our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
KNIGHT: Crowe said the Senate wrote this proclamation praising Orban's speech, and the constituent took it over to Hungary to deliver it directly. Hungary was now returning the gesture via Istvan Kiss.
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KISS: Dear honorable senators, it's a rare privilege and honor to be here with you in the great Volunteer State. I never would have imagined years ago that I would ever visit Tennessee, to be honest.
KNIGHT: But here Kiss was, offering his condolences for the shooting and explaining that he was in town for the week.
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KISS: So I will be very honored and happy to meet as many of you as possible during my time here. Thank you very much, again, for the opportunity. And God bless you and your work. Thank you.
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RUSTY CROWE: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
KNIGHT: A resolution introduced by Crowe to honor the Danube Institute passed unanimously in the Senate. Even Democrats voted yes. Then it went to the House, where it also passed, and then off to be signed by the governor. Kiss' visit didn't seem to raise any alarms inside the Capitol, but outside, to journalists and academics, it was striking. They'd been watching Tennessee, and some of them told me that small-D democracy here, the norms within our political system that most of us take for granted, had been shifting for years.
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KNIGHT: The political scientist Jake Grumbach at UC Berkeley has created what he calls a state democracy index, which he says measures how democratic a state government is. It includes 61 different indicators that he measured for every state. And in Tennessee, things didn't look good, especially in critical matters like gerrymandering...
JAKE GRUMBACH: Setting near-records in partisan gerrymandering.
KNIGHT: ...Access to voting, election integrity...
GRUMBACH: They blocked any sort of modernization reform of the voting system that most other states started doing.
KNIGHT: ...And lastly, how responsive lawmakers are to their constituents' wishes.
GRUMBACH: And on really all of those, you can observe Tennessee traveling towards the bottom and becoming the bottom performer as of 2018.
KNIGHT: The state hit on every indicator Grumbach found. And his state democracy index - it spit out a notable finding. By 2018, Tennessee was dead last. He's not the only one to take notice of the state. Anne Applebaum, who we mentioned in Episode 1, wrote that, quote, "today, Tennessee is a model of one party rule."
And after the expulsion of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy, wrote that what happened in Tennessee fit a startling development of partisan majorities trying to silence dissent. In Tennessee, numerous protected rights are at issue, they wrote.
But the Covenant moms don't know about any of this, about the index, about Kiss' visit. At that point, it had just been days since the shooting. Then there was their summer advocating for stricter gun laws and the August special session.
MARY JOYCE: I did think going into - naively - into special session that our time here would be done.
KNIGHT: That's Mary Joyce.
JOYCE: I thought, we'll go in. We'll pass some gun safety laws. And surely they'll listen to us because we're going to pour our hearts out, and we're going to tell our stories, and we're going to tell about the trauma that has happened to us. And we are your neighbors in Nashville, in Tennessee. And we are moms, and we're Christians. And nothing happened.
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JOYCE: And so now we're coming back. And I would say we're much more prepared for what we're actually up against.
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KNIGHT: The women are coming back to yet another legislative session with more activism under their belts, a renewed sense of purpose and a fresh well of anger since the special session last summer left them empty-handed. When they come back to the Capitol, this time for months, not days, they come face-to-face with the brute force of this politically lopsided legislature, making decisions about way more than gun violence. This time, it's abortion, education, LGBTQ rights. And not only that. These women also come face-to-face with themselves. When they do, they start looking inward. Where the hell have I been? - they ask. And where is the Republican Party that I once knew?
From NPR's EMBEDDED and WPLN in Nashville, I'm Meribah Knight, and you're listening to Supermajority.
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SHOOP NEUMANN: Can Mommy make some coffee? OK, let's make some coffee before we go. Got to have all the caffeine to make it through these days.
KNIGHT: It's January 9, the first day of the 2024 legislative session. And Sarah Shoop Neumann is just trying to get out the door.
SHOOP NEUMANN: Judah, Mama and Uncle Adam are going to go meet with some people today, and Daddy's going to be home to play with you, OK?
JUDAH: No, I want Mommy to stay here.
SHOOP NEUMANN: Daddy's going to stay home today.
KNIGHT: Sarah had been preparing for the session, getting new signs printed, doing admin for the nonprofit she was starting with other moms. It was called Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrows.
SHOOP NEUMANN: So we have Covenant Mom, Covenant Dad and We Stand With Covenant Families ones for anybody else in the audience.
KNIGHT: I've been in touch with the women pretty often since the special session ended in August, and the past four months have been crazy busy for them. They've been appearing in the local press, on national cable news shows. They even traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for gun control on the national level.
SHOOP NEUMANN: So you going to have a fun day with Daddy?
JUDAH: I want Mommy to stay here.
KNIGHT: Sarah's advocacy hasn't been easy on her family. She's home a lot less, and her husband, Seth, has been picking up the slack.
SHOOP NEUMANN: OK. Daddy, go see if you can find the secret ship.
KNIGHT: Today, that means working from home with a toddler on the loose.
SHOOP NEUMANN: Love you, Seth.
SETH: Love you too. Have a good day.
KNIGHT: While Sarah is at the Statehouse.
JOYCE: You good?
SHOOP NEUMANN: Yeah.
JOYCE: Good.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I feel golden.
JOYCE: Good.
KNIGHT: By midmorning, all the women - Sarah Shoop Neumann, Mary Joyce and Melissa Alexander - arrive at the Capitol, making their way up the three sets of limestone steps, through the layers of security and into the lobby of the House chamber, where they immediately start making a plan for the day.
MELISSA ALEXANDER: You made that list...
JOYCE: Yeah. Yes.
ALEXANDER: ...Of people to meet with?
JOYCE: Yeah.
ALEXANDER: So I think that might be a good list.
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KNIGHT: When the buzzer rings, announcing the House session is about to begin, they head up another steep flight of stairs into the House gallery, where they sit in the front row.
SHOOP NEUMANN: They're coming in.
SEXTON: I hereby declare the House of Representatives of the 113th General Assembly of State of Tennessee now in session.
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KNIGHT: The three women peering over the railing, right in the line of sight of the speaker. They want to put pressure on lawmakers. They want to show up and signal that they're watching closely, that they won't let up on gun control.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I just think I feel a responsibility to show them, you're accountable. You might not need the Democratic Party to pass bills or do a decision or anything, but people are watching, and people that voted for you are watching.
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KNIGHT: They're not the only ones. Filling the gallery seats day after day are dozens of other women, many of them mothers, some holding toddlers in their arms. Others have their teen children in tow. They're Republicans and Democrats, in tailored blazers and pearls or jeans and T-shirts. Many are here for the same reason as Sarah and Melissa and Mary. They want safer gun laws. But they're here for other reasons too - abortion, public education funding, rights for their queer or trans child...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Representative White will lead us in the Pledge Of Allegiance.
KNIGHT: ...Whatever it is, they, too, are peering over the railing...
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...
KNIGHT: ...Right alongside the Covenant moms.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: ...One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
KNIGHT: After the first day, the women start to see the full scope of legislation being considered this session - bills, bills and more bills.
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UNIDENTIFIED CLERK: The House Bills 1535, 1554, 1574 through 1580 and 1583 through 1708, be introduced and passed on first consideration.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Without objection. So ordered.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2.: Next order of business, Mr. Clerk.
KNIGHT: It really does go that fast. A quick primer, though - for a bill to become a state law in Tennessee, first, it's got to be introduced in both chambers, the House and the Senate, respectively. Then it must navigate a gauntlet of committees, head to each floor for a full vote and then on to the governor's desk for his signature.
It can be dizzying keeping track of all the bills filed. There are more than 2,800 ping-ponging around, gathering amendments, adding new language, looking for co-sponsors and picking up votes. Only a fraction of them will actually become law by the end of the session.
SHOOP NEUMANN: Tomorrow, the Senate floor session starts at 8:30. House starts at 9.
KNIGHT: Of all the women, Sarah Shoop Neumann gets especially sucked into the machinations of the legislature.
SHOOP NEUMANN: They could certainly add stuff onto the agendas. I just keep checking it.
KNIGHT: She goes to the Capitol almost daily, watching bills cycle through committees. And to make things easier on herself...
SHOOP NEUMANN: I've got a whole spreadsheet tracked...
KNIGHT: Sarah starts tracking bills in a Google spreadsheet, over 150 of them and not just about guns but other issues that affect parents and families.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I had told some of the other covenant parents, hey, I'll make a spreadsheet and help track these so we can see where things are at. So I would just click every number to read what these bills were.
KNIGHT: She tracks when they're filed, their sponsors, what committees they're headed to. She writes detailed notes about the viability of the bill. And there's color coding based on whether she supports it, opposes it, or is unsure.
SHOOP NEUMANN: There were grocery tax breaks. There were free lunches for kids. There were just a lot of different things that I felt like were really important, and it just became very clear that there were many other things that I cared about.
KNIGHT: The bills that are being introduced tend to fall into a handful of different buckets. There are bills that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: This is a Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance bill. This first two sections...
KNIGHT: There are the practical bills, funding highways.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Perhaps the largest transportation funding bill that this state has seen.
KNIGHT: The in-the-weeds bills, property appraisals and annual audits.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2.: Mr. Clerk, please take the vote.
KNIGHT: Your token commemorative bills.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Please help me preserve history by making hot slaw an official food of Tennessee.
KNIGHT: And then there's the stuff that gets criticized as being more political theater than lawmaking.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: House Joint Resolution 849 - resolution to urge the United States to withdraw from the United Nations.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Each local education and public charter school to recognize November the 7 of each year as Victims of Communism Day.
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KNIGHT: By the filing deadline around the end of January, there are bills that start to scare Sarah, bills that she believes cut to the heart of civil liberties or at least to her fundamental understanding of how our democracy works.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I started seeing all these things that were glaringly unconstitutional. You sit in the committee hearings, and there's a lawyer on each committee. And often they're asked, will this bring a constitutional challenge? And on multiple bills, they say, yes, This goes against the Constitution. This will likely result in a lawsuit for our state.
KNIGHT: So she tracked those, too. One such bill would prevent expelled lawmakers from returning to their seats.
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JOHNNY GARRETT: Now, there's been a lot of talk about this being an unconstitutional piece of legislation because the committee...
KNIGHT: It's directly aimed at preventing what Justin Jones and Justin Pearson did last spring after they were expelled, then eventually reelected by their constituents. Oppose, Sarah wrote next to it in red on her spreadsheet.
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KNIGHT: There's one bill in particular that Sarah latches onto that she starts to follow closely, a bill that spoke to the pain of a different mother, also pleading with lawmakers for a safer Tennessee.
SHOOP NEUMANN: It's become known as the Tyre Nichols bill to a lot of us.
KNIGHT: It's emblematic of a larger trend within the Republican Party, and now that Sarah is witnessing it, she's unsettled. It's a way that the state can override local policies that conflict with its conservative agenda. The story behind the bill started more than a year earlier. In January of last year in Memphis, a largely Black and Democratic city, the police stopped a 29-year-old Black man named Tyre Nichols for what they claimed was reckless driving, though a later investigation would show no evidence of that. Memphis Police, like a lot of cities across the U.S., use these stops often. They're called pretextual traffic stops, pulling drivers over for seemingly small things like a broken tail light and then searching for evidence of more serious crimes. After Nichols was pulled over, videos showed the police beating him for three minutes straight - officers punching, kicking, using a baton, beating him mercilessly. All the while, he called out for his mother. Nichols died three days later.
ROWVAUGHN WELLS: We were just some old people ready to retire.
KNIGHT: This is RowVaughn Wells, Tyre's mother.
WELLS: And then all of this happened, and we were thrusted into this new world.
KNIGHT: RowVaughn had never been politically active, never imagined that she'd end up an activist. Yet here she was. Soon after her son's death, RowVaughn and her husband, Rodney, began working to get pretextual traffic stops banned in Memphis. Within months, they did it. The Memphis City Council voted unanimously to ban the practice. Now, though, less than a year later, two Republican representatives, Brent Taylor, and John Gillespie, both from part of the county that includes Memphis, file a bill to reverse all of this.
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BRENT TAYLOR: We need to take the handcuffs off our police so that the police can put the handcuffs on the criminals where they belong.
KNIGHT: These two Republicans are part of the majority at the state House, which has a 3-to-1 advantage over Democrats. Their bill would overturn the wishes of the Memphis City government to write its own rules, a predominantly Black city, and one with mostly Democratic lawmakers no less. Sarah starts paying attention to the Tyre Nichols bill, in part because she didn't realize the state government could override a city's authority like that or would even want to. Republican lawmakers all around her talk about the overreach of the federal government. They rail against it. And now she thinks, here they are overreaching.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I think they think they have unrestricted control over everything, which honestly is quite hypocritical.
WELLS: This is a Republican state.
KNIGHT: Unlike Sarah, RowVaughn Wells, Tyre's mom, was not surprised.
WELLS: It is run by Republicans. And if they don't like something, they're going to change it.
KNIGHT: When cities pass laws at odds with the state, the state can step in and undo their work. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have been doing this kind of thing a lot in recent years. And nationwide, this kind of preemptive legislation is happening more than ever before. According to reporting from NPR last May, more than 600 of these kinds of bills, preemptive ones, were proposed in legislatures across the country on things like public safety, education, LGBTQ rights, mostly in Republican-dominated states. The evening the Tyre Nichols bill goes to the House floor for a vote, Sarah stays to watch - missing family dinner and her kids' bedtimes. She sits in the gallery, directly across from RowVaughn and Rodney, who wears a striped suit and a lapel pin that reads Tyre in large white letters. It's getting late.
SHOOP NEUMANN: And I just watched as the gallery emptied out, which I understand. But they were just ended up sitting there almost by themselves. And it just feels like I don't know them, but I have an obligation to stay.
KNIGHT: Did you talk to the Wells family, to...?
SHOOP NEUMANN: I did.
KNIGHT: What was it like meeting them?
SHOOP NEUMANN: It was just sad. And I talked to them after, and I just wanted them to know, like, I care about violence across the state, not just at my son's school.
KNIGHT: The bill didn't pass the House that night, but it did later that week, 68 to 24, nearly along party lines. And the governor signed it into law by the end of the month. RowVaughn was devastated. After the governor signed the bill, she met with him.
WELLS: When we spoke to him, we just basically told him that we felt like it was a slap in the face. Not just to us but for the other citizens of Memphis. So basically, you just slapped the whole city of Memphis in their faces.
KNIGHT: RowVaughn says she told the governor that he hadn't seen the last of her, that she'd be back to fight against the law again. And later, she says she heard from a friend that the governor spoke highly of their meeting, called RowVaughn the nicest mad person he'd ever met. I reached out to Governor Lee, but he didn't respond. As Sarah starts to spend more time at the statehouse, she says she's met a lot of other activists around many issues besides guns, and they welcomed her and the other women.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I know as Covenant parents, we were granted opportunities and ability to speak with people that many others were not.
KNIGHT: But some activists have expressed criticism. They watched the Covenant moms in the legislature day after day or in the news, and they have mixed feelings about how shocked the moms are that they aren't being listened to, about how unfamiliar the women are with this world. And they question why it took until now for the women to push back against other Republicans.
SEKOU FRANKLIN: Like, you know, as long as they were jumping on Black folks and gays, you know, you didn't say anything.
KNIGHT: One of those people is Sekou Franklin, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He co-wrote a book about race and politics in Tennessee called "Losing Power." He's a thinker - a man about activist circles. He's been hearing some of this criticism of the Covenant moms from other activists.
FRANKLIN: The lawmakers have gained an enormous amount of power over a decade or so by being able to tap into the sentiments and energies of the same communities that the Covenant women come from. But people have their political evolutions in different timelines, so you want to respect the Covenant moms and the women down there. But it's just very frustrating because, as long as it involves other people, then it was one thing.
KNIGHT: Sarah is acutely aware of these criticisms. She's been thinking about them a lot.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I really was just completely naive to how much happens at our state level. And I've been voting for 20 years now, and I was unaware that this is what our state reps were doing. And it makes you feel a little sick.
KNIGHT: The people she was meeting and the bills she was tracking - restricting abortion, censoring books, overriding city policies - Sarah says she's suddenly seeing an entirely new, darker side of Tennessee - one she feels she may have had a hand in making.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I feel complicit in a lot of things, to be honest. I feel like I failed Noah and every other kid at the Covenant School. And that's hard, and I don't want other people to feel like this.
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KNIGHT: For Sarah, Mary and Melissa, being a Republican went hand in hand with being a good conservative, a good Christian, a hard worker.
SHOOP NEUMANN: I look out for my neighbor. I welcome everybody. I think everybody should be fed and have a roof on their head and be taken care of and loved and given a chance in life. To me, those are conservative Christian values, and I assumed that that is also what it meant to be Republican.
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KNIGHT: But now, Sarah says she was questioning whether her assumptions about what the party stood for had prevented her from seeing the ways it was shifting.
Can you describe - like, so much of our discussions are around kind of - is it possible to change your mind? What does it feel like, and is it hard to have your views challenged and to bend?
SHOOP NEUMANN: It's really hard. It's really hard, especially when, you know, I've associated in my mind that my faith values are linked to voting a certain way. And I understand it myself, but I feel this need to, like, explain it to all of my friends or all of the people. Like, they're all going to think that I've given up my values, that I don't care about these things. And that's hard. I mean, I have a largely conservative family, and I know how many of them view these things.
KNIGHT: Sarah begins to approach her work at the Statehouse a little bit differently than the other Covenant women - drawing a bit closer to the other more liberal activists.
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KNIGHT: As the session stretches on and Sarah gets pulled deeper and deeper in, she texts and writes letters to lawmakers. She pops by their offices without notice...
SHOOP NEUMANN: Hi.
GLORIA JOHNSON: Hi.
SHOOP NEUMANN: How are you?
KNIGHT: ...Asking about legislation that has nothing to do with guns...
SHOOP NEUMANN: Are they really going to hear that, or is that getting bumped to some new calendar?
KNIGHT: ...Pleading with them to vote down bills on her spreadsheet she feels are harmful, like bills to put more guns in schools and to punish political opponents.
SHOOP NEUMANN: Please, I'm begging you, please. Just use our time wisely. Have room for conversations.
KNIGHT: While Sarah is trying to steer the Republican Party from the outside by advocating for and against legislation, the other Covenant moms - Mary Joyce and Melissa Alexander - are on their own journey. They, too, are evolving, and they begin contemplating a different approach - a high-stakes pivot in their strategy for change. That's after the break.
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KNIGHT: In early January, a couple days before the 2024 legislative session is set to begin, before Sarah started printing out her signs and building her spreadsheet, Mary and Melissa are invited to attend the Reagan Day Gala. They've been getting closer the last few months - hanging out not just at the Statehouse, but as friends. And now they're heading to a big-deal fundraising night for the GOP in Melissa's home county, and the dress code is Western formal.
ALEXANDER: Before the dinner, 'cause we'd never been to one of these...
KNIGHT: This is Melissa.
ALEXANDER: ...We were texting each other going, are you going to wear boots? Are you going to wear a hat? Like, what...
JOYCE: Do you wear a dress?
KNIGHT: That's Mary.
JOYCE: Do you wear pants? Like, what do you wear? What is that? What does that mean? And I even Googled it, and a slew of options came up. I went with a nice blazer dress with tassels in the back.
KNIGHT: Melissa, though, opts for full-on Western.
ALEXANDER: I have a legit cowboy hat custom fitted. So I said, what the heck? I'll wear a cowboy hat.
KNIGHT: Around 6 o'clock, the women grabbed their husbands and headed to the ballroom of a nearby Marriott.
ALEXANDER: And immediately, I knew I'd chose the right thing to wear because I saw a sea of hats. It looked like you had taken everybody right off of the set of "Yellowstone" or something and put them in a room together.
KNIGHT: And this isn't just dressing for fun. The women have a mission - to look the part, to blend in but then to disrupt the usual conversations.
ALEXANDER: And we really didn't small talk. We would walk immediately up to a group of people or a legislator and say, so, how do you feel about guns?
KNIGHT: It was bold, I got to say, because the guest list was a who's who of pro-gun Republicans.
ALEXANDER: Ted Cruz was there, Marsha Blackburn, Andy Ogles.
KNIGHT: Ogles is a U.S. Congressman whose Christmas card featured his entire family holding AR-15-style rifles. You may have seen it. It went viral. Tomi Lahren is there, too, the conservative political commentator who's kind of internet famous for her fast-talking rebukes of liberals - and lots of state lawmakers, the Senate majority leader, House members.
ALEXANDER: Gino Bulso was not there.
KNIGHT: Gino Bulso, Melissa's representative in the Statehouse.
ALEXANDER: But he did have a video.
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GINO BULSO: The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave.
KNIGHT: At the front of the room, a large screen plays short videos. And just before their petite filet comes out, a video from Gino Bulso appears.
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BULSO: We are going to remove Pride flags, transgender flags, BLM flags and any other subversive political flags from classrooms across the state.
KNIGHT: This is Bulso's first term in the Statehouse.
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BULSO: We're going to pass a bill that, at long last, requires the release of the Covenant killer's manifesto. And you can depend on...
KNIGHT: Bulso has been on the Covenant moms' radar since the special session because he wants the shooter's writings to be released to the public, a move they said they strongly oppose, in part because they think it could inspire copycats.
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BULSO: I look forward to fighting for you in 2024 and beyond to protect those freedoms that we all treasure and hold so dear. Thank you, and God bless you. And may God bless...
KNIGHT: Melissa and Mary had stepped away to the bathroom right before this video came on. So when they walk in...
JOYCE: It was ending, and it just was just gross.
KNIGHT: The women have been following Bulso for a while, not only because he's Melissa's representative but because he's becoming kind of infamous among the protesters at the Statehouse for the controversial legislation he's proposing. Bulso was elected in 2022. He ran on a platform of a true conservative, a constitutionalist, a problem solver. And he won 65% of the vote, which is a lot. Though Melissa didn't vote for him, at least not in the primary. But he sure has her attention now. After The Covenant School shooting and Bulso's insistence on making the shooter's writings public, Melissa went to meet with him, hoping to have some kind of dialogue about potential legislation. When she arrived at his office, she discovered a room converted into a kind of small chapel.
ALEXANDER: A couple of rows of kneelers and a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall and...
KNIGHT: Bulso is a devout Catholic, and he invited Melissa to pray with him. She was thrown.
ALEXANDER: I'm like, oh.
KNIGHT: But also...
ALEXANDER: I'm a Christian, and I pray, and I'm like, if this is an opportunity to pray with somebody and, you know, at least find common ground in our faith, OK, I want to pray with him, and I hope that maybe this will bring us closer. And then fast-forward to today, and I'm like, all these bills...
KNIGHT: The bills Bulso was introducing, fighting for in the legislature, are to strike the term gender identity from school curricula, to make it easier to remove books from schools and to sue schools for having those books. And as a parent, that caught Melissa's attention.
ALEXANDER: Just seemed like a different person filed them than the one that kneeled there and prayed with me and hugged me.
KNIGHT: All of this really disappointed Melissa. Frankly, it kind of enraged her.
ALEXANDER: Like, don't do that s*** to my Williamson County. Like, don't do it.
KNIGHT: Melissa felt like Bulso wasn't listening to her. She wasn't seeing him consider any change in his stance on gun control or the Covenant shooter's writings. And yeah, she says she'd felt dismissed by other lawmakers, too. But she was Bulso's constituent. So to try to get to know Bulso better, I went to interview him at his office to talk one-on-one outside the tumult of the statehouse. We sat in a small conference room lined with leather-bound law books. Like all Tennessee state lawmakers, being an elected representative isn't Bulso's full-time job. For more than three decades, he's been a lawyer, mostly civil cases.
BULSO: And there's a big difference between being a lawyer and being a legislator. I'm still learning how to transition from one to the other.
KNIGHT: This legislative session, Bulso's been busy filing bills.
BULSO: I'd say the views that you see me express in committee meetings and on the House floor do definitely represent the views of the vast majority of our constituents.
KNIGHT: One he says he's proud of is a pilot program to put therapy dogs in a few schools.
BULSO: To help kids that are suffering with anxiety or other types of emotional issues.
KNIGHT: But also, he has bills that hit nearly every hot-button issue, one that would allow private schools with pre-K kids to develop a handgun policy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEXTON: Mr. Clerk, please take the vote.
KNIGHT: It passed.
UNIDENTIFIED CLERK: Ayes 74, 23 nays.
KNIGHT: An anti-abortion legislation requiring schools to include a video on fetal development.
BULSO: And that passed and was signed into law.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CLERK: Ayes 67, 23 nays.
KNIGHT: And a bill to make it harder to challenge the legislature's rules in court. That passed the House and failed in the Senate. But the bill he filed that has people really up in arms is one he talked about in the video at the Reagan Day Gala, a bill to ban any flag in classrooms except an American flag and a Tennessee flag, which would mean no Pride flags and Black Lives Matter flags, among others.
BULSO: I mean, there's no reason to have a Pride flag or a transgender flag or any other political flag in a classroom. Kids go there to be educated.
KNIGHT: After bouncing around committees for about a month, the bill passes in the House and heads to the Senate for a floor vote. While I've been reporting this story, Bulso's critics, including Melissa, have called him extreme because of bills like these. But Bulso sees it a different way.
BULSO: Certainly, over the last 10 to 12 years, the general assembly has become more and more and more conservative. And I think that's reflective of the fact that over the last 10 to 12 years, Tennesseans, on the whole, have become more and more and more conservative.
KNIGHT: The second part is not totally true. Tennessee's voters have elected conservative lawmakers time and time again. But within the Republican Party, there seems to be a disconnect between lawmakers and constituents. A recent poll from Vanderbilt University showed that, for example, a majority of Republicans in Tennessee support exceptions around abortion, and they also support some kind of gun control, but the legislature declines to take up this kind of legislation. When I've asked political scientists what they make of this discrepancy, they believe that Republican politicians bucking their electorate will generate backlash among their own constituents.
ALEXANDER: I think my political views or my views on certain things are not this MAGA type.
KNIGHT: Republicans, like Melissa.
ALEXANDER: It almost feels a little bit like that feeling of, like, that pit in my stomach that, wow, like, this is a little bit dangerous, this ideology. And it's scary. It scares me a little.
KNIGHT: Melissa is aware that Gino Bulso is up for reelection this year. And now that she's paying attention to what's going on at the Statehouse, she begins to wonder, what might it take to unseat him? More after the break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KNIGHT: Less than six months before the primaries, Gino Bulso holds a town hall meeting in his district. It's the week of spring break. Melissa can't make it, but she'd sent a friend in her place, and I'm there, too.
BULSO: Thank you all for coming this afternoon.
KNIGHT: The town hall is held at a local public library, and by the time I arrive, it's standing room only. You'd think Taylor Swift was here, one supporter tells Bulso.
BULSO: What a great crowd we've got tonight. It really shows the...
KNIGHT: Bulso stands in the front of the crowd with a small portable speaker and a mic that's turned up to maximum volume. And he goes through a progress report on the bills he's introduced this year.
BULSO: The whole intent behind HB 1605...
KNIGHT: He's talking about the Pride flag ban here.
BULSO: ...Is to make sure that the school is used as a place to educate students, not to indoctrinate them into a particular point of view, especially a political one.
(BOOING, APPLAUSE)
KNIGHT: Bulso's supporters fill up the first couple rows of seats, clapping vigorously. But the rest of the room appears to be quite upset.
BULSO: I can tell many of you have heard about that, and maybe we'll have a chance for some questions. We also have got...
KNIGHT: By the time the Q&A rolls around, there's a line that stretches the length of the room. Some feel ignored.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #1: I am a voter in your district.
KNIGHT: And disrespected.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #1: You don't return my emails, so I'm glad to meet you.
KNIGHT: Targeted even.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #2: As a lesbian constituent, I really wish you would not use words like indoctrinate. We're your constituents, and we're here too.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #3: This county and this state has turned out on the issue of school safety and guns and mental health, and I know that they have hit a brick wall. I want to hear your response.
(APPLAUSE)
KNIGHT: The crowd appears to be mostly Democrats, but there are some Republicans there, too. Near the end of the town hall, one woman steps up to the mic to ask Bulso about his staunchly anti-abortion stance.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #4: My question to you is very simple. How many constituents do you need to hear from in order to act on our behalf if it's an issue, even as Republicans, that we may not see eye to eye on?
BULSO: Just one. We've got 70,000 Tennesseans that I represent. And if any one of them comes to me, obviously, my door is always open.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #4: I've talked to you about it.
BULSO: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #4: It didn't meet your criteria. And that's why I'm wondering how many of the constituents it would take for you to act on our behalf.
BULSO: Well, it just takes one. But again, it's got to be...
UNIDENTIFIED CONSTITUENT #4: But I wasn't good enough. My daughter is not good enough. I told you, my daughter is not safe in the state of Tennessee right now.
KNIGHT: Melissa caught up on the town hall after her vacation. She sees herself in all of the people frustrated with Bulso - Democrats and Republicans.
ALEXANDER: It's empowering to hear people push back on - other people push back on the legislature.
KNIGHT: We watch the video of the town hall together on the floor of Mary's living room. Melissa purses her lips when Bulso speaks, and nods her head when another constituent makes a point she agrees with, especially on gun control.
ALEXANDER: Because - and you hear the clapping, like, people - there's so many people aligned on this issue in this community, and he is not representing us at all.
KNIGHT: I ran this theory by Bulso, that he's not in sync with his own electorate. He disagreed.
BULSO: I think it's logically impossible for the House to be out of step with the electorate because if that were the case, we're responsive to the voters every two years. The voters would just put in different representatives. That's part of the Democratic process.
KNIGHT: But it's worth mentioning here that it's virtually impossible to talk about representative government in Tennessee without talking about the issue of gerrymandering, slicing and dicing voting districts to fortify the power of the party in control and how that can impact the democratic process. In Tennessee, the state GOP has admitted to using gerrymandering to get more seats.
Now, to be clear, District 61, the District Bulso now represents, has not been found to be gerrymandered. It's been red for at least three decades. So an election there can feel like a foregone conclusion. Even with a Democratic challenger, a Republican will very likely win. And that leaves only one option for a real race, the Republican primary. Melissa knows this.
ALEXANDER: Over the past year, actually seeing things firsthand, I am now fully aware. It's like, you know, it's like this fog has been lifted.
KNIGHT: And so she starts thinking a little bigger. She begins taking meetings with strategists and high-ranking members of the GOP because people have been urging her to run against Gino Bulso.
ALEXANDER: If we could flip a seat from less extreme to more moderate, I thought that would send, like, shockwaves through the state.
KNIGHT: Melissa's friends begin calling to offer advice and support.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: Should you choose to step into this specific one of running for office, it is not for the faint of heart. It will be hard.
KNIGHT: I call her, too, to check in.
So I want to talk about kind of just where your head is at right now.
ALEXANDER: Look. The Republican Party is never going to come out against an incumbent. Incumbent meaning Gino Bulso.
KNIGHT: Of the 18 bills Bulso brought this year, 10 of them were passed into law. While the flag bill didn't pass - it was defeated in the Senate - he plans to bring it back. It will live to see another day at the legislature as long as, of course, Bulso gets reelected.
ALEXANDER: I am just - I'm a woman of faith, and I've prayed about this. I've asked for wisdom. I am not getting any answers. I feel like the weight of Tennessee is on my shoulders right now.
KNIGHT: Next time on Supermajority, Melissa plots her course to the Statehouse. But the question remains. What can a moderate Republican really do in Tennessee?
RICHARD BRIGGS: It doesn't bother me to go against the grain on people. And if some people don't like what I want, that's their problem.
KNIGHT: Supermajority from EMBEDDED is a collaboration with WPLN News in Nashville. This episode was produced and sound-designed by Ariana Lee, with help from Dan Girma. Our senior producer is Adelina Lancianese. She and Alex Kotlowitz (ph) edited the series. Katie Simon is our supervising editor, and Irene Noguchi is the executive producer for the Enterprise Storytelling Unit at NPR. Additional reporting and production help from David Guthertz and WPLN's Rose Gilbert. Robert Rodriguez mastered the program. Fact-checking by Katie Daugert and Rachael Brown (ph). With WPLN News in Nashville, Mack Linebaugh is our vice president of audience engagement. Tony Gonzalez is our news director. Rachel Iacovone is our director of multiplatform publishing.
Thanks to our managing editor of standards and practices, Tony Cavin, and to Johannes Doerge and Micah Ratner for legal support. Special thanks to Kelly McEvers, Luis Trelles, and Ryland Barton. And a big thanks to our EMBEDDED+ supporters. EMBEDDED is where we do ambitious long-form journalism at NPR. And EMBEDDED+ helps us keep that work going. Supporters also get to listen to every EMBEDDED series sponsor-free and every episode early. Find out more at plus npr.org/embedded or find the EMBEDDED channel in Apple.
I'm Meribah Knight. This is EMBEDDED from NPR. Thanks for listening.
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