Volume 139, Issue 6 Wednesday, September 30, 2020
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‘Lamar is a Liar’ protestors gather outside Sen. Alexander’s office following Supreme Court vote DANIEL DASSOW Staff Writer
Just five days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a crowd of grassroots organizers and concerned locals gathered outside of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander’s downtown office Wednesday night to protest his support for filling the late justice’s seat before the election in November. In a statement released on Sept. 20, Alexander, who is not seeking re-election in November, said that moving to fill Ginsburg’s seat on the court before the election is “only doing what Democrat leaders have said they would do if the shoe was on the other foot,” and that voters who elected Republican Senators “expect them to do it.” But his statement of support for a preelection confirmation, along with others made by his Republican colleagues, was met with sharp criticism in light of the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to confirm then President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court in 2016.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote to confirm Merrick Garland to the court in 2016, arguing that the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat should not be filled in an election year. The seat was left empty for over a year, until the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch in April 2017. Now, McConnell and his fellow Republican Senators want to fill Ginsburg’s seat in only seven weeks, and the protestors outside Sen. Alexander’s office Wednesday night showed up to speak out against his support for the vote. Leading the “Lamar is a Liar” protest was Kim Spoon, an organizer for Indivisible East Tennessee, a chapter of a nationwide progressive activism group dedicated to
fighting President Trump’s legislative agenda through local politics. Clad in a shirt that read “Register & Phonebank & Canvass & Vote & Win” and holding a megaphone, Spoon expressed the resentment that the small crowd felt. “Mitch McConnell held a Supreme Court open for over a year. Is this what kills you, the hypocrisy of it all? He held that seat for over a year to prevent Barack Obama from filling it,” Spoon said. “The voters who elected [Alexander] expect [a vote], but when we elected Obama we didn’t expect it? For a whole last year of his term? The hypocrisy is astounding.” In her speech before the crowd, Spoon made it clear that more is on the line than a simple seat on the court. According to her and her fellow activists, Ginsburg’s legacy of being a champion for women and minorities is in jeopardy. “We cannot let Donald Trump destroy [Ginsburg’s] legacy by replacing her with a justice from his short list of extremists,” Spoon said. “Anybody he picks to replace RBG would no doubt undo all the progressive change she fought for her whole life. We’re not even getting time to grieve over her before we all have to jump into action.” Spoon was a progressive one-line generator Wednesday night, throwing out such quips as, “I’m tired of being represented by morons,” and, “Therapy works great, but screaming is faster and quicker.”
Is this what kills you, the hypocrisy of it all? KIM SPOON ORGANIZER FOR INDIVISIBLE EAST TN
But undergirding her message was a solemn call to action from the twenty or so people standing before her. She and her fellow Indivisible organizers throughout the country are gathering outside of Republican senator’s offices to protest the pre-election confirmation vote, she says. She also ran through a long list of Democratic candidates, from Renee Hoyos for Tennessee congressional District 2 to Virginia Couch for state house District 18,
Two protestors stand outside of Lamar Alexander’s downtown o�ce holding a sign calling for delay on SCOTUS vote on Sept. 23, 2020. Daniel Dassow / The Daily Beacon and the incumbent Republicans they are up against, encouraging the crowd to volunteer and vote to flip the legislatures. “We have to block everything Republicans try to do to get this nomination confirmed. We have to fight like hell to take the Senate back, and the White House of course. We have got to get everybody we know to tweet, to call, to email, to Resistbot,” Spoon said, referencing the digital service that allows constituents to rapidly send letters to elected officials. Nathan Higdon, another organizer with Indivisible East Tennessee, says that voters who don’t do their research about candidates could be helping to undo 50 years of progressive legislation. “If we don’t have a Senator in place from Tennessee who believes in the humanity of Tennesseeans, then we’ll have someone who will just rubber stamp someone who is there to take away rights that we say we believe in,” Higdon said. “If voters aren’t asking...where those people stand on women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights, then we’re also making this incredibly easy to just get rid of these things.” Higdon emphasized the importance of examining officials’ voting records, rather than simply looking at their local constituent services. He believes that UT students in
particular ought to be invested in research of voting records, since votes cast in the state legislature may directly affect the university. “As a publicly-funded institution, being engaged in the legislature helps to ensure that you’re getting high-quality education, because it is a state university,” Higdon said. Both Spoon and Higdon were adamant that the crowd register to vote and encourage everyone they know to do the same. Spoon referenced Tennessee’s record of low voter turnout, which is the third lowest in the nation. “People call Tennessee a red state. It’s not a red state. It’s a non-voting state,” Spoon said. The message of the protest was ultimately about much more than a vacancy on the Supreme Court. It was about the potential threat to the progressive legislative agenda posed since the election of President Trump by officials like Lamar Alexander, who activists believe could dismantle years of social progress with one of his last votes as a senator. “Our lives are depending on this now,” Spoon said. “It was all fun and racist games in the beginning, wasn’t it? Now it’s your life. It’s your life.”