The United States is a complicated place. On one hand you have the blessed freedom of opportunity, of religion, of the pursuit of happiness…and on the other hand…well, as Calvin Boardus Jr., aka, Snoop Dogg, so melodiously put it:

It’s like this and like that and like this and uh
It’s like that and like this and like that and uh
It’s like this…

America is a grand experiment of ideals threaded through a constitution both bold and noble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Of course, this declaration has famously bent under the weight of ideas laden with notions of superiority and inferiority, yes, even in inception, and it’s badly misshapen now, but it is not broken–not yet, though if the state of Tennessee has it’s way, it will be.

That’s because the Tennessee legislature, most of it Republican, worships in the cult of Donald Trump. These Republican legislators proved their devotion and fealty to Trump yesterday by glomming onto a ridiculous lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is clamoring for a presidential pardon for impropriety and fraud. The lawsuit once again challenges the validity of Biden’s presidential win via the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. It is remarkably similar to the lawsuit that the Supreme Court refused to hear brought by Pennsylvania Representative Mike Kelly earlier this week.

And so, to the disgust of most of us who reside in Tennessee’s largest metropolitan areas–the economic engine that powers the state–and to some of us who don’t, the volunteer state again sides with the devil and sixteen other states in infamy, just as it did over one hundred and fifty years ago, when it took up arms with some of the same collaborating states against our countrymen for the sake of slavery.

Embarrassing. Shameful. Cowardly. Grotesque.

When will the Tennessee learn?

Tennessee’s roll of shame:

  • Herbert Slatery (R) – Attorney General
  • Chuck Fleischmann (R) – Representative
  • Mark Green (R) – Representative
  • David Kustoff (R) – Representative
  • John Rose (R) – Representative