Joe Biden's Meeting With Tennessee Troublemakers Didn't Create Jobs (Because We Have Full Employment)
Biden also excoriated the Republicans who tried to expel Democrats for speaking at the dais without being recognized, which would normally merit censure at most. "Look, what that Republican legislature did was shocking, it was undemocratic, and it was without any precedent. But you turned it around very quickly."
Biden also pointed out, as the three already knew from their show trial, "Nothing is guaranteed about our democracy — every generation has to fight for it. And you all are doing just that."
During the meeting, Rep. Johnson delivered to Biden a letter emailed to her, Jones, and Pearson by Sarah Shoop Neumann of Nashville, whose five-year-old son Noah is a preschooler at the Covenant School. The contents of the letter haven't been released, but Neumann spoke at an April 17 gun control rally outside the state Capitol about how the shooting had affected the community:
“My own son, Noah, was okay, he was getting a haircut with his dad, but the rest of our community was inside that building,” Neumann said through tears. “My friends, our children; so many people we love in that building, our safe space.”
Neumann spoke of contacting her friends to warn them of the danger and gathering at the reunification site in a nearby church.
“I won’t ever be able to describe what it was like sitting in that church. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body, holding our friends, praying, waiting to hear if their kids were alive,” Neumann said. “Piecing together things that people saw and heard."
Neumann recalled how, in the weeks since, parents have heard their children talk about witnessing the killings, or being in a nearby room and sheltering as their teachers tried to shield them with their bodies. "The trauma is not going to dissipate, it’s not going to leave us or our children, it will just find a home within us, and we’ll learn to live with it." (And wow, doesn't that sound like something Joe Biden would say, too?)
“The most painful question I have had to answer from my 5-year-old, who keeps proudly telling me how brave his teachers were and how they knew exactly how to keep them safe from the bad guy, but he asked, ‘Mommy, how did they know to practice? Has this happened before?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘A lot, mommy?’ I said, ‘yes.’ He said, ‘The shooter's dead, but more can come.”
So you have a sense of what she probably wrote to Biden.
Following Monday's meeting, CNN reports, the three Tennessee Democrats told reporters they, Biden, and Harris had discussed potential ways to reduce gun violence, like an assault weapons ban, red flag laws, safe storage laws, and the like. Rep. Jones said that they'd also talked with Biden about their desire to “build out multiracial democracy and challenge these extreme voices.”
Also too, on Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends complained that Biden had met with the three legislators instead of with the families of the shooting victims, repeating the very same "eats shoots and leaves" headline — "Biden ripped for meeting protesting TN Dems, not shooting victims' families" — that appeared on an April 19 Fox News Digital piece. We're not sure whether the ambiguous headline was repeated as a chyron because nobody noticed the double meaning, or because some smartass in the Fox News editing booth thought it was hilariously terrible and wanted it to get more exposure.
In that writeup of a Fox News segment, former GW Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen briefly accused Biden of playing politics with a shooting tragedy, then spent most of the appearance ranting about how Biden was guilty of employing "situational ethics" because he was fine with protesters "storming" the Tennessee Capitol, but not with the precisely equivalent January 6 "protests" at the US Capitol, and there's a man who knows all about situational ethics, tell you what.
[AP/ White House / ABC News / CNN / Fox News]
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