The spirit of the gag rule lives on

The neoconfederate mind in action:

Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) removed Democratic lawmakers from House committees Tuesday after they protested the GOP’s newly enacted congressional gerrymander that eliminated the state’s lone majority-Black district.

In a letter to House Minority Leader Karen Camper (D), Sexton said Democratic lawmakers would receive individual letters removing them from committees because of their conduct during last week’s special session, where Republicans repealed a decades-old state ban on mid-decade redistricting and rammed through a new congressional map expected to give the GOP a 9-0 delegation.

“Members of the Democratic Caucus will receive individual letters removing them from all standing committees and subcommittees of the House,” Sexton wrote.

The move appears to punish the entire Democratic caucus for its resistance to the gerrymander — and, according to state Rep. Justin Pearson (D), removes every Black elected official in the Tennessee legislature from the committees they served on.

“Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on,” Pearson wrote on social media. “This move strips nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve in TN state leg.”

This is the kind of reflexive authoritarianism that dominates the Republican Party now. It’s not enough to win, and it’s not enough for the “win” being to disenfranchise your opponents. They have to pretend to like it, or you will punish them further. The uniting theme her is there increasingly extremist contempt for any kind of democratic contestation.