Montana transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr has been silenced from the Statehouse floor for the rest of the session after she told colleagues they would have “blood on your hands” if they voted to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans children.
The punishment marks the first time in nearly 50 years that Montana lawmakers have sought such disciplinary action against a colleague. Yet it is the second time in recent weeks that legislators have seen fit to gag a legislator who voices opposition to an ongoing debate in the House, right in the venue whose function it is to hear all views before decisions are made that affect our lives.
Under the terms of the punishment, Zephyr will still be able to vote remotely but will be unable to participate in debates on the floor for the remainder of the 90-day legislative session. The Democratic representative had been forbidden from speaking for the past week over her comments, which Republicans said violated decorum.
Zephyr’s remarks, and the Republican response, set off a chain of events that led to a rally outside the capitol at noon Monday. Protesters later packed into the gallery at the statehouse and brought House proceedings to a halt while chanting “Let her speak.” The scene spurred her supporters on, resulting in the arrest of seven people.
Silencing Zephyr comes on the heels of a similar action taken by Republican legislators on the floor of the Tennessee House of Representatives on Thursday April 13, when three representatives were expelled for demanding gun control legislation.
Just days after six people — three of them only nine years old — were murdered at the Covenant elementary school, three Democratic lawmakers, Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson and Justin Jones, joined a group of protesters demanding their legislature act to put an end to the epidemic of mass shootings that is roiling the country. Rather than listen and engage, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives voted according to party lines to expel two of their colleagues from the chamber—notably, both Black, while Gloria Johnson, a white woman, survived the vote. The decision to remove the Representatives from their seats was widely condemned as an “unprecedented” abuse of power, with the state GOP wielding a punishment that’s been reserved for legislators guilty of criminal offences like taking bribes and serially sexually harassing people, not for breaking decorum.
A member of the Democratic Party, Zephyr was elected in the 2022 election, making her the first openly transgender person to be elected to the state legislature in Montana. In a defiant speech on Wednesday before lawmakers voted, Zephyr said she was taking a stand for the LGBTQ+ community, her constituents in Missoula and “democracy itself”.
She accused the Republican house speaker, Matt Regier, of taking away the voices of her 11,000 constituents and attempting to drive “a nail in the coffin of democracy” by silencing her.
“If you use decorum to silence people who hold you accountable, then all you’re doing is using decorum as a tool of oppression,” she said.
In a statement after the vote, she called the decision a “disturbing affront to democracy” that stripped her of the ability to represent her constituents.
Abuses like these two, in Tennessee and in Montana–little more than super-partisan stunts–have a way of biting back. Not only were Pearson and Jones reinstated in Tennessee, but the GOP stunt made them national heroes for all but entrenched conservatives. Not only did President Biden thank them for standing up for democracy, but the outrage that it generated invigorated democracy more than any debate on the floor of the House could have. It also garnered the attention of the global community: readers of the Nashville Tennessean wrote in letters to the editor from locales as far-flung as New Zealand and Italy.
Zephyr, a rookie representative virtually unknown outside of her district, like the Tennessee Three, has been turned into a national symbol of resistance to the abuse of power and to the extremism that is slowly and steadily eroding the moral principles of the Republican Party. Justin Pearson, one of the Tennessee lawmakers connected the two incidents and saw their commonality: “Voices across the country continue to rise for justice and expose the anti-democratic behavior of people in Republican-led states,” he said on Twitter. “We will not let our democracy die without fighting for every voice.”
