This year brings an interesting development in the evolution of the Tennessee Democrat party’s leadership into a party that is continuing on its path to become more and more as anti Second Amendment as the national Democrat party leaders clearly are. Indeed, Tennessee’s Democrat leadership increasingly looks more and more like the laughing stock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than the rural conservatives of just 1 to 2 decades ago. Tennessee’s Democrat party is being controlled by urban progressives. Consider the circumstances of Rep. John Mark Windle, who was until just recently a rural yet conservative Tennessee Democrat from Livingston, Tennessee.
Born in Cookeville, he has been a life-long Tennessean. Rep. Windle is a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He is licensed as an attorney in Tennessee. He is a Colonel in the Army National Guard. Reports indicate that he has been deployed several times including Kosovo and two combat tours to Iraq and that he was injured during one of those tours in a mortar attack. Just over 60, he has also been a life long rural, conservative Democrat.
Rep. John Mark Windle was first elected to the Tennessee Legislature on November 6, 1990 – he was not even 30 at the time. He ran at the time as a Democrat. He ran at a time when much of Tennessee was controlled by Democrats but at a time when a large number of non-office holding Democrats in Tennessee were (and are today) rural Democrats who are far more Bible fearing, pro-life, patriotic, conservative and 2nd Amendment supporting than the modern Pelosi-Biden-AOC slant of the party.
In March 2022, the Tennessee Star reported that information it obtained indicated that the leadership of the Tennessee Democrat party was planning to remove Rep. Windle from the Democrat party due in part to his support of Second Amendment and other conservative issues. The plan discussed in the Tennessee Star was that the leadership of the Democrat party was going to let Rep. Windle qualify by April 7, 2022, to run as a Democrat again and then after that deadline had expired to remove him from the party thereby removing him from the 2022 ballot.
That strategy is not new for Tennessee’s Democrat party leadership. They did it in 2020 to long time Democrat John DeBerry as also reported by the Tennessee Star. Rep. DeBerry has been a Democrat since at least the 1970s and had served in the Tennessee Legislature since at least 1995. He was re-elected year after year. But in 2020, just after the qualifying deadline had expired, Rep. DeBerry was kicked out of his own party by a 41-18 vote by members of the Tennessee Democrat Executive Committee. One of the reasons given is that Rep. DeBerry, a preacher, was one of a handful of rural Democrats representatives who had voted in support of a controversial bill banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat could be detected.
Apparently, the rumors were credible enough that Rep. Windle made a choice. He has left the Democrat party and registered for re-election as an Independent.
Knowing the fact that Rep. Windle has in fact been a steadfast supporter not just of the Second Amendment in Tennessee but on many conservative issues, it was expected that he would have easily been re-elected in his district in November. His decision to leave the AOC driven leadership of the Democrat party to represent his constituents and stand on his principles suggests he may well be serving in 2023 as an independent in the Tennessee Legislature.
Indeed, given what some Republican legislators have done the last 12 years to kill good gun bills, like Senate Judiciary’s vote recently to kill REAL Constitutional Carry by sending the bill to “summer study” on the votes of REPUBLICANS Sen. Mike Bell, Sen. Todd Gardenhire, Sen. Jon Lundberg, Sen. Paul Rose, and Sen. John Stevens, we need pro 2nd Amendment legislators who put the constitution and principles above party or even leadership loyalty.
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