OPINION:
On Monday, President Biden will meet with the “Tennessee Three” — the Volunteer State lawmakers who were booted from the legislative chamber in Nashville after encouraging raucous protests in the statehouse and disrupting the legislative process.
The protesters were demanding new gun control laws after a transgender former student shot and killed six people last month at The Covenant School, a Christian school in Nashville. Two of the protesting lawmakers shouted through bullhorns, and protesters screamed “Fascists!” from the chamber’s balcony and blocked the statehouse’s entryways and exits. State troopers were summoned to assist members throughout the building.
According to the left, this was a peaceful protest. Of course, as we know from our history, if Republicans organized something similar, it would be denounced as an “insurrection” and a “threat to democracy.”
Two of the Democratic representatives, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — who are Black — were expelled from the chamber. The effort to expel the third offending lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, who is White, failed by one vote. Both Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were quickly restored to their posts on an interim basis by supporters in their home districts and are seeking reelection.
Enter the Biden White House, which quickly jumped on the expulsion to promote its narrative of pervasive racism and the need for more gun control.
“In order to make sure the voices were represented in a place where elected leaders are supposed to lead in a democracy, these leaders had to get a bullhorn. They had to get a bullhorn to be heard,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a partisan speech delivered at the Tennessee General Assembly on Good Friday, a day after their expulsion.
“Assault weapons — these are weapons of war,” she continued. “These are weapons that were designed to kill a lot of people quickly. They have no place on the streets of civil society.”
Let’s forget about the legitimate policy debate surrounding “assault weapons.”
Ms. Harris’ trip to Tennessee blocked out time for a private visit with the Tennessee Three but didn’t find time to comfort the aggrieved who had just lost their loved ones in the shooting. This is because the victims of the shooting did not fit with the Biden administration’s preferred narrative, as they were Christians targeted by a confused transgender person. Best to ignore them.
Showing support to the true victims, of course, would have undermined the narrative of the leftists, who organized a “die-in” at the Tennessee Capitol in support of transgender rights a few days before the vice president’s visit. These trans protesters demanded the killer be honored among the victims of the murder spree the shooter carried out. Because, really, it is transgenderism that is under attack.
The only issues the Biden White House seems to move fast on — and promote — are racism, gun control, transgender rights, abortion and climate change. If an event takes place that can be exploited to further that agenda, Mr. Biden and his team be there the next day. If the victims are White, middle-class and live in Republican-held areas? It’s like the tragedy never happened.
Why else would it take Labor Secretary Pete Buttigieg more than two weeks to visit with the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, after a train derailment unleashed a toxic chemical spill in the community? Mr. Buttigieg showed up only after former President Donald Trump visited the town, carrying with him pallets of bottled water and food.
A Black man plowed his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, leaving five dead and more than 60 injured in 2021. Neither the president nor his vice president could spare the time to visit the victims.
Ms. Harris, our “border czar,” avoids traveling to border states as much as possible. She has spent a few hours in El Paso, Texas, during her tenure, then only to speak with pro-migrant nonprofit groups. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists the border is “secure” despite surges in illegal immigration, drug seizures, homelessness and reports of child trafficking. He, too, has spent little time there and instead prefers to condemn his own workforce for whipping Black migrants while on horseback (never happened, but the Biden administration would like you to believe otherwise).
Mr. Biden spoke just the other day with the family of Ralph Yarl, the Black teenager who was shot by a White man after ringing the wrong doorbell at the wrong house while picking up his brothers in Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. Yarl was invited to visit the White House after he recovers.
“Until this attack against a young Black man is treated as abhorrent as [an] attack if it was a young White man, then we who believe in freedom cannot rest it until it comes,” Mr. Jones, one of the famed Tennessee Three, said on MSBNC last week of the incident, paraphrasing an old civil rights song.
In 2016, a 15-year-old White boy, Dylan Francisco, knocked on the wrong door in Massachusetts and was shot and killed. It never made the national news. Because — priorities.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at the Washington Times.
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