Tennessee Legislature Fails To Condemn Neo-Nazis Again

NASHVILLE, TN -- For the second time in a month, the Tennessee General Assembly refused to condemn neo-Nazis and white nationalist groups.

This week, a resolution sponsored by House Republican Caucus Chairman Ryan Williams of Cookeville was taken off notice in a House committee, essentially killing it for the year.

The resolution said that the General Assembly would "strongly denounce and oppose the totalitarian impulses, violent terrorism, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that are promoted by white nationalists and neo-Nazis."

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The wording of the resolution was very similar to one filed by Nashville Democrat John Ray Clemmons which failed to advance out of a House committee in March when none of the panel's Republicans offered a second allowing for its introduction. A prime difference in Clemmons' resolution was language that urged, though did not require, law enforcement "to recognize these white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups as terrorist organizations and to pursue the criminal elements of these domestic terrorist organizations in the same manner and with the same fervor used to protect the United States from other manifestations of terrorism."

Clemmons filed the resolution in the days after the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a counter-protester was killed.

In an interview with The Tennessean after his abortive appearance before the subcommittee in March, Clemmons was flabbergasted, saying he was "in utter disbelief."

"I would love to try to pass a resolution denouncing white nationalists and neo-Nazis, but if I can't even get a second in a subcommittee, it evidences this Republican supermajority's refusal to denounce these hate organizations, for what reason I cannot begin to imagine," he told the paper.

Last year, the Tennessee House "accidentally" honored slave trader, early Ku Klax Klan leader and Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest after a Republican representative put language honoring him in an ostensibly non-controversial resolution about Tennessee history. The sponsor of that resolution was castigated on the House floor for subterfuge by members of the House Black Caucus, with top Republicans joining in the condemnation.

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