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Hey, it's Kelly McEvers, and we are back with episode 2 of Supermajority. And just to note, Before we start, there's some coarse language in this episode. Okay, here's Maribha Night. It was April third of last year, exactly a week after the shooting at the Covenant School. You may remember this from the beginning of the last episode. Protests demanding more gun control had been raging, and the house was in chaos after three Democrats took to the floor with a bullhorn in solidarity. Now, Republican lawmakers had introduced resolutions to expel them.

All those in favor, vote I. All those opposed, vote no. My vote, my vote.

Angry spectators look down on lawmakers from the House Gallery, screaming fascists as the resolutions passed.

Now I see the whole country watching us, and they would have never paid any attention before. Mr. Trooper, unfortunately, the members cannot hear. I ask you to clear out the balcony, please.

But next door in the Senate, things were quite different. All was quiet, not a peep from the gallery. It was business as usual.

Clerk, take the role. 32 members are present. The Senate has a quorum and is now in session. Mr. Speaker, if I could approach the well, please, sir. You may.

Right after the pledge of allegiance, longtime Senator Rusty Crow had the floor for a moment of recognition.

Senator Crow, you're recognized in the well. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

He wanted to welcome a visitor from abroad.

We're very proud to have Istivan with us.

I've introduced you to the development- Istivan Kis, the executive director of a place called the Danube Institute, as in the Danube River. It's a conservative think tank based in Budapest.

With that, Mr. Speaker, if we could allow Istivan Kis to say a few words to us, and I would appreciate that, sir. Mr. Kitz, you're recognized, sir. Thank you very much, Senator Crow, for this kind introduction.

Senator Crowe already mentioned that the Danube Institute was established with the aim to be a a Beltway- The Danube Institute is funded by the Hungarian government, and it has close ties to the country's far-right leader, Viktor Orbán. It's a way to take his politics on the road. And those politics are worth explaining for a moment. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten electoral rules. He's taken over public institutions, weakened independent courts, and gutded independent media. In a 2022 report, the European Parliament declared that Hungary is no longer a functioning democracy, instead, calling it an electoral autocracy. Senator Crowe had started thinking about Hungary's politics and its leader about a year earlier, after a constituent, who's also a friend, had called him.

He said, Rusty, did you hear the speech that Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, just gave at CPAC? I said, No.

Cpac is the conservative Political Action Conference, this annual meeting where a lot of major Republicans gather. It had hosted Orbán as a speaker.

It was an amazing speech that dealt with our traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Croce of the Senate wrote this proclamation, praising Orban's speech, and the constituent took it over to Hungary to deliver it directly. Hungary was now returning the gesture via Istivan Kiss.

Dear Honorable senators, it's a rare privilege and honor to be here with you in the great volunteer state.

I never would have imagined years ago when I would ever visit Tennessee, to be honest. But here Kiss was, offering his condolences for the shooting and explaining that he was in town for the week. I would be very honored and happy to meet as many of you as possible during my time here. Thank you very much again for the opportunity, and God bless you and your work.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr.

A resolution introduced by Crow to honor the Danube Institute passed unanimously in the Senate. Even Democrats voted yes. Then it went to the House, where it also passed, and then off to be signed by the governor. Kiss's visit didn't seem to raise any alarms inside the capital, but outside, to journalists and academics, it was striking. They'd been watching Tennessee, and some of them told me that The Mall D. Democracy here, the norms within our political system that most of us take for granted, have been shifting for years. The political scientist Jake Grumback at UC Berkeley has created what he calls a state democracy index, which he says measures how democratic a state government is. It includes 61 different indicators that he measured for every state. And in Tennessee, things didn't look good, especially in critical matters like gerrymandering.

Setting near records in partisan gerrymandering.

Access to voting, election integrity. They blocked up any modernization reform of the voting system that most other states started doing. And lastly, how responsive lawmakers are to their constituents wishes.

And on really all of those, you can observe Tennessee traveling towards the bottom and becoming the bottom performer as of 2018.

The state hit on every indicator Grumbach found. And his state democracy index, it spit out a notable finding. By 2018, Tennessee was dead last. He's not the only one to take notice of the state. Anne Applebaum, who we mentioned in episode one, wrote that, Today, Tennessee is a model of one-party rule. And after the expulsion of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy, wrote that what happened in Tennessee fit a startling development of partisan majorities trying to silence dissent. In Tennessee, numerous protected rights are at issue, they wrote. But the Covenant moms don't know about any of this, about the index, about Kiss's visit. At that point, It had just been days since the shooting. Then there was their summer advocating for stricter gun laws, and the August special session.

I did think, naively, into special session that our time here would be done.

That's Mary Joyce.

I thought, We'll go in. We'll pass some gun safety laws, and surely they'll listen to us because we're going to pour our hearts out, and we're going to tell our stories, and we're going to tell about the trauma that has happened to us. And we are your neighbors in Nashville, in Tennessee, and we are moms, and we are Christians, and nothing happened. And so now we're coming back, and I would say we're much more prepared for what we're actually up against.

The women are coming back to yet another legislative session, with more activism under their belts, a renewed sense of purpose, and a fresh well of anger, since a special session last summer left them empty-handed. When they When they come back to the Capitol, this time for months, not days, they come face to face with the brute force of this politically lopsided legislature, making decisions about way more than gun violence. This time it's abortion, education, LGBTQ rights. And not only that, these women also come face to face with themselves. When they do, they start looking inward. Where the hell have I been? They ask. And where the Republican Party that I once knew? From NPR's Embedded and WPLL in Nashville, I'm Maribha Knight, and you're listening to Supermajority. Every weekday, NPR's best political reporters come to you on the NPR politics podcast to explain the big news coming out Washington, The Campaign Trail, and beyond. We don't just want to tell you what happened. We tell you why it matters. Join the NPR politics podcast every single afternoon to understand the world through political eyes.

Truth, independent, Excellence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence.

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Hey, it's Ayesha Rosco from NPR's Up First podcast. I'm one of thousands of NPR Network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country.

We bring all Americans closer together through free and independent journalism, music, politics, culture, and so much more. The NPR Network, what you hear changes everything. Learn more at npr.

Org/network. Can mommy make some coffee? Okay, let's make some coffee before we go. Got to have all the caffeine to make it through these days.

It's January ninth, the first day of the 2024 legislative session, and Sarah Shup-Newman is just trying to get out the door.

Judah, Mama and Uncle Adam are going to go meet with some people today, and Daddy's going to be home to play with you, okay? No, I'm not going to stay here. Daddy's going to stay home today?

Sarah had been preparing for the session, getting new signs printed, doing admin for the nonprofit she was starting with other moms. It was called Covenant Families for Brighter Tomorrows.

So we have Covenant Mom, Covenant Dad, and We Stand with Covenant Families ones for anybody else in the audience.

I've been in touch with the women pretty often since the special session ended in August, and the past four months have been crazy busy for them. They've been appearing in the local press, a national cable news shows. They even traveled to Washington, DC to push for gun control on the national level.

Should we have a fun day with Daddy? I want mommy's new site.

Daddy's going to- Sarah's advocacy hasn't been easy on her family. She's home a lot less and her husband, Seth, has been picking up the slack.

Okay. Daddy, go see if you can find this secret ship.

Today, that means working from home with a toddler on the loose.

Love you, Seth. I love you, too.

I love you, too. Happy to be with you. While Sarah is at the Statehouse.

You good? Yeah. Good. I feel golden. By mid-morning, all the women, Sarah Shup-Numan, Mary Joyce, and Melissa Alexander, arrive at the Capitol, making their way up the three sets of limestone steps through the layers of security and into the lobby of the house chamber, where they immediately start making a plan for the day. You made that list of people to meet with? Yes. So So I think that might be a good place to go.

When the buzzer rings announcing the house session is about to begin, they head up another steep flight of stairs into the house gallery, where they sit in the front row.

They're coming in. I hear about the Claire, the House Representatives of the 113th Journal Assembly of the State of Tennessee, now in session.

The three women peering over the railing right in the line of sight of the speaker. They want to put pressure on lawmakers. They want to show up and signal that that they're watching closely, that they won't let up on gun control.

I just think I feel a responsibility to show them you're accountable. You might not need the Democratic Party to pass bills or do a decision or anything, but people are watching, and people that voted for you are watching.

They're not the only ones. Filling the gallery seats day after day are dozens of other women, many of them mothers, some holding toddlers in their arms, others have their teen children in tow. They're Republicans and Democrats, in tailored blazers and pearls or jeans and T-shirts. Many are here for the same reason as Sarah and Melissa and Mary. They want safer gun laws, but they're here for other reasons, too. Abortion, public education funding, rights for their queer or trans child.

Representative White will lead us in the pledge of allegiance.

Whatever it is, they, too, are peering over the railing.

I pledge to lead this to the flag of the United States of America.

Right alongside the Covenant Mom's.

We stand, one nation, on God, invisible, with liberty and justice for all.

After the first day, the women start to see the full scope of legislation being considered this session. Bills, bills, and more bills.

House bills 1,535, 1,554, 1,574 through 1,580, and 1,583 through 1,708 be introduced and passed on first consideration. Without objection. So order. Next order, Mr. Clark.

It really does go that fast. A quick primer, though. For a bill to become a state law in Tennessee. First, it's got to be introduced in both chambers, the House and the Senate, respectively. Then it must navigate a gauntlet of committees, head to each floor for a full vote, and then onto the governor's desk for his signature. It can be dizzying keeping track of all the bills filed. There are more than 2,800 ping-ponging around, gathering amendments, adding new language, looking for co-sponsors, and picking up votes. Only a fraction of them will actually become law by the end of the session.

Tomorrow, the Senate floor session starts at 8:30, House starts at 9:00.

Of all the women, Sarah Shoup-Newman gets especially sucked into the machinations of the legislature. Sure.

They could certainly add stuff onto the agendas. I just keep checking it.

She goes to the Capitol almost daily, watching bills cycle through committees. To make things easier on herself.

I've got a whole spreadsheet track.

Sarah starts tracking bills in a Google spreadsheet, over 150 of them, and not just about guns, but other issues that affect parents and families.

I had told some of the other Covenant parents, Hey, I'll make a spreadsheet and help track these so we can see where where things are at. I would just click every number to read what these bills were.

She tracks when they're filed, their sponsors, what committees they're headed to. She writes detailed notes about the viability of the bill, and there's color coding based on whether she supports it, opposes it, or is unsure.

There were grocery tax breaks, there were free lunches for kids. There were just a lot of different things that I felt like were really important. It just became very clear that there were many other things that I cared about.

The bills that are being introduced tend to fall into a handful of different buckets. There are bills that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

This is a Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance Bill.

This first two sections- There are the practical bills, Funding Highways.

Perhaps the largest transportation funding bill that this state has seen.

The In the Weeds bills, Property Appraisals and annual audits.

Mr. Clark, please take the vote.

Your token Commemorative bills.

Please help me preserve history by making Hotslaw and official food of Tennessee.

Then there's the stuff that gets criticized as being more political theater than lawmaking.

House joint Resolution 849, Resolution to urge the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. Teach local education and public charter school to recognize November the seventh of each year as victims of Communism Day.

By the filing deadline around the end of January, there are bills that start to scare Sarah, bills that she believes cut to the heart of Civil Liberties, or at least to her fundamental understanding of how our democracy works.

I started seeing all these things that were glaringly unconstitutional. You sit in the committee hearings and there's a lawyer on each committee, and often they're asked, Will will this bring a constitutional challenge? On multiple bills, they say, Yes, this goes against the Constitution. This will likely result in a lawsuit for our state.

She tracked those two. One such bill would prevent expelled lawmakers from returning to their seats.

Now, there's been a lot of talk about this being an unconstitutional piece of legislation because the committee- It's directly aimed at preventing what Justin Jones and Justin Pearson did last spring after they were expelled and eventually reelected by their constituents.

A pose, Sarah wrote next to it and read on her spreadsheet. There's one bill in particular that Sarah Latches onto, that she starts to follow closely, a bill that spoke to the pain of a different mother, also pleading with lawmakers for a safer Tennessee.

It's become known as the Tyree Nichols Bill to a lot of us.

It It's emblematic of a larger trend within the Republican Party, and now that Sarah is witnessing it, she's unsettled. It's a way that the state can override local policies that conflict with its conservative agenda. The story behind the bill started more than a year earlier. In January of last year in Memphis, a largely Black and Democratic city, the police stopped a 29-year-old Black man named Tyree Nichols for what they claimed it was reckless driving, though a later investigation would show no evidence of that. Memphis police, like a lot of cities across the US, use these stops often. They're called pretextural traffic stops, pulling drivers over for seemingly small things like a broken tail light, and then searching for evidence of more serious crimes. After Nichols was pulled over, videos showed police beating him for three minutes straight, officers punching, kicking, using a baton, beating him mercilessely. All the while, he called out for his mother. Nichols died three days later.

We were just some old people ready to retire.

This is Rovonne Wells, Thierry's mother.

And then all of this happened, and we were thrusted into this new world.

Rovonne had never been politically active, never imagined that she'd end up an activist. Yet here she was. Soon after her son's death, Rovonne and her husband Rodney began working to get pretextural traffic stops banned in Memphis. Within months, they did it. The Memphis City Council voted unanimously to ban the practice. Now, though, less than a year later, two Republican representatives, Brent Taylor and John Gillespie, both from part of the county that includes Memphis, file a bill to reverse all of this.

We need to take the handcuffs off our police so that the police can put the handcuffs on the criminals where they belong.

These two Republicans are part of the majority at the State House, which has a three to one advantage over Democrats. Their bill would overturn the wishes of the Memphis City government to write its own rules, a predominantly Black city and one with mostly Democratic lawmakers, no less. Sarah starts paying attention to the Tyree Nichols bill, in part because she didn't realize the state government could override a city's authority like that or would even want to. Republican Lawmakers all around her talk about the overreach of the federal government. They rail against it. And now she thinks, here they are, overreaching.

I think they think they have unrestricted control all over everything, which honestly is quite hypocritical. This is a Republican state.

Unlike Sarah, Rovon Wells, Thierry's mom, was not surprised. It is run by Republicans, and if they don't like something, they're going to change it. When cities pass laws at odds with the state, the state can step in and undo their work. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have been doing this thing a lot in recent years. And nationwide, this preemptive legislation is happening more than ever before. According to a reporting from NPR last May, more than 600 of these kinds of bills, preemptive ones, were proposed in legislatures across the country on things like public safety, education, LGBTQ rights, mostly in Republican-dominated dates. The evening the Tyree Nichols bill goes to the house floor for a vote, Sarah stays to watch, missing family dinner and her kids' bedtimes. She sits in the gallery directly across from Rovon and Rodney, who wears a striped suit and a lapel pin that reads Tyree in large white letters. It's getting late.

I just watched the gallery emptied out, which I understand, but they were just ended up sitting there almost by themselves. And it just feels like, I don't know them, but I have an obligation to stay.

Did you talk to the Wells family?

I did.

What was it like meeting them?

It was just sad. And I talked to them after, and I just wanted them to know I care about violence across the state, not just at my son's school.

The bill didn't pass the house that night, but it did later that week, '68 to '24, nearly along party lines. The governor signed it into law by the end of the month. Rovonne was devastated. After the governor signed the bill, she met with him.

When we spoke to him, we just basically told him that we felt like it was slap in the face, not just to us, but for the other citizens of Memphis.

So basically, you just slap the whole city of Memphis in their faces. Rovon says she told the governor that he hadn't seen the last of her, that she'd be back to fight against the law again. And later, she says she heard from a friend that the governor spoke highly of their meeting, called Rovon the nicest mad person he'd ever met. I reached out to Governor Lee, but he didn't respond. As Sarah starts to spend more time at the Statehouse, she says she's met a lot of other activists around many issues besides guns, and they welcomed her and the other women.

I know as Covenant Parents, we were granted opportunities and ability to speak with people that many others were not.

But Some activists have expressed criticism. They've watched the Covenant Moms in the legislature day after day or in the news, and they have mixed feelings about how shocked the moms are that they aren't being listened to, about how unfamiliar the women are with this world. They question why it took until now for the women to push back against other Republicans.

As long as they were jumping on Black folks and gays, you didn't say anything.

One of those people is Saku Franklin, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He co-wrote a book about race and politics in Tennessee called Losing Power. He's a thinker, a man about activist circles. He's been hearing some of this criticism of the Covenant Moms from other activists.

The lawmakers have gained an enormous amount of power over a decade or so by being able to tap into the sentiments and energies of the same communities that the Covenant women come from. But people have their political evolutions in different timelines, so you want to respect the Covenant moms and the women down there. But it's just very frustrating because as long as it involved other people, then it was one thing.

Sarah is acutely aware of these criticisms. She's been thinking about them a lot.

I really was just completely naive to how much happens at our state level. I've been voting for 20 years now, and I was unaware that this is what our state reps were doing. It makes you feel a little sick.

The people she was meeting and the bills she was tracking, restricting abortion, censuring books, overriding city policies. Sarah says she's suddenly seeing an entirely new, darker side of Tennessee. One she feels She may have had a hand in making.

I feel complicit in a lot of things, to be honest. I feel like I failed Noah and every other kid at the Covenant at school. And that's hard. And I don't want other people to feel like this.

For Sarah, Mary, and Melissa, being Being a Republican went hand in hand with being a good conservative, a good Christian, a hard worker.

I look out for my neighbor. I welcome everybody. I think everybody should be fed and have a roof on their head and be taken care of and loved and given a chance in life. To me, those are conservative Christian values, and I assumed that that is also what it meant to be Republican.

But Sarah says she was questioning whether her assumptions about what the party stood for had prevented her from seeing the ways it was shifting. Can you describe, so much of our discussions are around Is it possible to change your mind? What does it feel like and is it hard to have your views challenged and to bend?

It's really hard. It's really hard, especially when I've associated in my mind that my faith values are linked to voting a certain way. And I understand it myself, but I feel this need to explain it to all of my friends or all of the people. They're all going to think that I've given up my values, that I don't care about these things. And that's hard. I mean, I have a largely conservative family, and I know how many of them view these things.

Sarah begins to approach her work at the State House a little bit differently than the other Covenant women, drawing a bit closer to the other more liberal activists. As the session stretches on and Sarah gets pulled deeper and deeper in, she texts and writes letters to lawmakers. She pops by their offices without notice. Hi. Hi. How are you? Asking about legislation that has nothing to do with guns.

Are they really going to hear that or is that getting bumped to some new calendar?

Pleading with them to vote down bills on her spreadsheet, she bills are harmful, like bills to put more guns in schools and to punish political opponents. Please, I'm begging you, please lose our time.

Have real conversations.

While Sarah is trying to steer the Republican Party from the outside by advocating for and against legislation. The other Covenant moms, Mary Joyce and Melissa Alexander, are on their own journey. They, too, are evolving, and they begin contemplating a different approach, a high-stakes pivot in their strategy for change. That's after the break. These days, it can feel I think the news is fighting for your attention wherever you turn, but staying informed shouldn't be a battle. Everything you need to navigate the stories that matter to you is at your fingertips. The NPR app cuts through the noise, bringing you local, national, and global coverage. No paywalls, no profits, no nonsense. Download the NPR app in your app store today, or you can go to npr. Org/app. In early January, a couple of days before the 2024 legislative session is set to begin, before Sarah started printing out her signs and building her spreadsheet, Mary and Melissa are invited to attend the Reagan Day Gala. They've been getting closer the last few months, hanging out not just at the Statehouse, but as friends. Now they're heading to a big deal fundraising night for the GOP in Melissa's Home County.

The dress code is Western Formal.

Before the dinner, because we've never been to one of these, this is Melissa. We were texting each other going, Are you going to wear boots? Are you going to wear a hat? Do you wear a dress?

That's Mary.

Do you wear pants? What do you wear? What is that? What does that mean? And I even googled it, and a slew of options came up. I went with a nice Blazer dress with tassels in the back.

Melissa, though, opts for full-on Western.

I have a legit cowboy hat, custom-fitted. So I said, What the heck? I'll wear a cowboy hat.

Around 6:00, the women grabbed their husbands and head to the ballroom of a nearby marriott.

Immediately, I knew I chose the right thing to wear because I saw a sea of hats. It looked like You had taken everybody right off of this set of Yellowstone or something and put them in a room together.

This isn't just dressing for fun. The women have a mission to look the part, to blend in, but But then to disrupt the usual conversations.

We really didn't small talk. We would walk immediately up to a group of people or a legislator and say, So how do you feel about guns?

It was bold, I got to say, because the guest list was a who's who of pro-gun Republicans.

Ted Cruz was there, Marsha Blackburn, Andy Ogles.

Ogles is a US congressman whose Christmas card featured his entire family holding AR-15 style rifles. You may have seen it. It went viral. Tommy Lahren is there, too, the conservative political commentator who's internet famous for her fast-talking rebukes of liberals, and lots of state lawmakers, the Senate Majority Leader, House members.

Gino Bolso was not there.

Gino Bolso, Melissa's representative in the State House.

But he did have a video.

The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave.

At the front of the room, a large screen plays short videos. Just before their Petite Filet comes out, a video from Gino Bolso appears.

We're going to remove pride flags, transgender flags, BLM flags, and any other subversive political flags from classrooms across the state.

This is Bolso's first term in the Statehouse.

We're going to pass a bill that at long last requires release of the Covenant Killers Manifesto.

And you can depend on- Bulso has been on the Covenant Mom's radar since the special session because he wants the shooter's writings to be released to the public, a move they said they strongly oppose, in part because they think it could inspire copycats.

I look forward to fighting for you in 2024 and beyond to protect those freedoms that we all treasure and hold so dear. Thank you and God bless you. And may God bless.

Melissa and Mary had stepped away to the bathroom right before this video came on. So when they walk in-It was ending, and it just was just gross. The women have been following Bolso for a while, not only because he's Melissa's representative, but because he's becoming infamous among the protesters at the State House for the controversial legislation he's proposing. Bolsa was elected in 2022. He ran on a platform form of a true conservative, a constitutionalist, a problem solver. And he won 65% of the vote, which is a lot. Though Melissa didn't vote for him, at least not in the primary. But he sure has her attention now. After the Covenant School shooting and Bolso's insistence on making the shooter's writings public, Melissa went to meet with him, hoping to have some dialog about potential legislation. When she When he arrived at his office, she discovered a room converted into a small chapel.

A couple of rows of kneelers and a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall.

Bolso is a devout Catholic, and he invited Melissa to pray with him. She was thrown.

I'm like, Oh.

But also...

I'm a Christian, and I pray, and I'm like, If this is an opportunity to pray with somebody and at least find common ground in our faith, okay, I want to pray with him, and I hope that maybe this will bring us closer. And then fast forward to today, and I'm like, All these bills- The bills Bolsa was introducing, fighting for in the legislature, are to strike the term gender identity from school curricula, to make it easier to remove books from schools and to sue schools for having those books.

As a parent, that caught Melissa's attention.

Just seemed like a different person filed them than the one that kneel there and prayed with me and hugged me.

All of this really disappointed Melissa. Frankly, it enraged her.

Don't do that shit to my Williamson County. Don't do it.

Melissa felt like Bolsa wasn't listening to her. She wasn't seeing him consider any change in his stance on gun control or the Covenant shooter's writings. Yeah, she says she'd felt dismissed by other lawmakers, too, but she was Bolso's constituent. To try to get to know Bolso better, I went to interview him at his office to talk one-on-one outside the tumult of the State House. We sat in a small conference room lined with leatherbound law books. Like all Tennessee state lawmakers, being an elected representative isn't Bolso's full-time job. For more than three decades, he's been a lawyer, mostly civil cases.

There's a big difference between being a lawyer and being a legislature. I'm still learning how to transition from one to the other.

This legislative session, Bolso has been busy filing bills.

I'd say the views that you see me express in committee meetings and on the House floor do definitely represent the views of the vast majority of our constituents.

One he says he's proud of is a pilot program to put therapy dogs in a few schools.

To help kids that are suffering with anxiety or other types of emotional issues.

But also, he has bills that hit nearly every hot button issue, one that would allow private schools with pre-k kids to develop a handgun policy. Mr.

Clark, please take the vote.

It passed. I, 74, 23 names. And anti-abortion legislation requiring schools to include a video on fetal development.

And That passed and was signed into law.

I-67, 23 names.

And a bill to make it harder to challenge the legislature's rules in court. That passed the House and failed in the Senate. But the bill he filed that people really up in arms is one he talked about in the video at the Reagan Day Gala, a bill to ban any flag in classrooms except an American flag and a Tennessee flag, which would mean no pride flags and Black Lives Matter flags, among others.

I mean, there's no reason to have a pride flag or a transgender flag or any other political flag in a classroom. Kids go there to be educated.

After bouncing around committees for about a month, the bill passes in the House and heads to the Senate for a floor vote. While I've been reporting this story, Bolso's critics, including Melissa, have called him extreme because of bills like these. But Bolso sees it a different way.

Certainly over the last 10 to 12 years, the General Assembly has become more and more and more conservative. I think that's reflective of the fact that over the last 10 to 12 years, Tennessee on the whole, have become more and more and more conservative.

The second part is not totally true. Tennessee's voters have elected conservative lawmakers time and time again. But within the Republican Party, there seems to be a disconnect between lawmakers and constituents. A recent poll from Vanderbilt University showed that, for example, a majority of Republicans in Tennessee support exceptions around abortion, and they also support some gun control, but the legislature declines to take up this legislation. When I've asked political scientists what they make of this discrepancy, they believe that Republican politicians bucking their electorate will generate backlash among their own constituents.

I think my political views or my views on certain things are not this MAGA type.

Republicans like Melissa.

It almost feels a little bit... That feeling of that pit in my stomach that, wow, this is a little bit dangerous, this ideology, and it's scary. It scares me a little.

Melissa is aware that Gino Bolso is up for re-election this year. Now that she's paying attention to what's going on at the State House, she begins to wonder, what might it take to unseat him? More after the break. Npr brings you the updates you need on the day's biggest headlines. The Senate narrowly passed the debt ceiling bill that will prevent the country from defaulting on its loans. Stories from across the world.

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Less than six months before the primaries, Gino Bolso holds a town hall meeting in his district. It's the week of spring break. Melissa can't make it, but she'd sent a friend in her place, and I'm there, too.

Thank you all for coming this afternoon.

The town hall is held at a local public library, and by the time I arrive, it's standing room only. You'd think Taylor Swift was here, one supporter tells Bolso.

What a great crowd we've got tonight.

It really shows the- Bolso stands in in front of the crowd with a small portable speaker and a mic that's turned up to maximum volume. He goes through a progress report on the bills he's introduced this year.

The whole intent behind H. B. 1605- He's talking about the pride flag ban here.is to make sure that the school is used as a place to educate students, not to indoctrinate them into a particular point of view, especially a political.

Bulso supporters fill up the first couple rows of seats, clapping vigorously. But the rest of the room appears to be quite upset.

I could tell many of you have heard about that, and maybe we'll have a chance for some questions. We also have got- By the time the Q&A rolls there's a line that stretches the length of the room.

Some feel ignored. I am a voter in your district. And disrespected. You don't return my email, so I'm glad to meet you. Targeted even.

As a lesbian constituent, I really wish you would not use words like indoctrinate.

We're your constituents, and we're here, too.

This county and the state has turned out on the issue of school safety and guns and mental health, and I know that they have hit brick wall. I want to hear your response.

The crowd appears to be mostly Democrats, but there are some Republicans there, too. Near the end of the town hall, one woman steps up to the mic to ask Bolso about his staunchly anti-abortion stance.

My question to you is very simple. How many constituents do you need to hear from in order to act on our behalf? If it's an issue, even as Republicans, and we may not see eye to eye on?

Just one. We've got 70,000 Tennesseeans that I represent, and if any one of them comes to me, obviously, my door's always open.

I've talked to you about it. It didn't meet your criteria. That's why I'm wondering how many of the constituents it would take for you to act on our behalf.

Well, it just takes one.

But I wasn't good enough. My daughter is not good enough. I told you, my daughter is not safe in the state of Tennessee right now.

Melissa caught up on the town hall after her vacation. She sees herself and all of the people frustrated with Bolso, Democrats and Republicans.

It's empowering to hear other people push back on the legislature.

We watched the video of the town hall together on the floor of Mary's living room. Melissa purses her lips when Bolso speaks and nods her head when another constituent makes a point she agrees with, especially on gun control.

Because then you hear the clapping, people There's so many people aligned on this issue in this community, and he is not representing us at all.

I ran this theory by Bolso, that he's not in sync with his own electorate. He disagreed.

I think it's logically impossible for the House to be out of step with the electorate, because if that were the case, we're responsive to the voters. Every two years, the voters would just put in different representatives. That's part of the democratic process.

But it's worth mentioning here that It's virtually impossible to talk about representative government in Tennessee without talking about the issue of gerrymandering, slicing and dicing voting districts to fortify the power of the party in control, and how that can impact the democratic process. In Tennessee, the state GOP has admitted to using gerrymandering to get more seats. Now, to be clear, district 61, the district Bolsa now represents, has not been found to be gerrymandered. It's been read for at least three decades. An election there can feel like a foregone conclusion. Even with a Democratic challenger, a Republican will very likely win. And that leaves only one option for a real race, the Republican primary. Melissa knows this.

Over the past year, actually seeing things firsthand, I am now fully aware. It's like this fog has been lifted And so she starts thinking a little bigger.

She begins taking meetings with strategists and high-ranking members of the GOP because people have been urging her to run against Chino Abulso.

We could flip a seat from less extreme to more moderate. I thought that would send shockwaves through the state.

Melissa's friends begin calling to offer advice and support.

Should you choose to step into this specific one of running for office, it is not for the saint of heart. It will be hard.

I call her, too, to check in. I want to talk about just where your head is at right now.

Look, the Republican Party is never going to come out against an incumbent, incumbent meaning Gina Bolso.

Of the 18 bills Bolso brought this year, 10 of them were passed into law. While the flag bill didn't pass, it was defeated in the Senate, he plans to bring it It will live to see another day at the legislature, as long as, of course, Bolso gets reelected.

I'm a woman of faith, and I pray about this. I've asked for wisdom. I am not getting any answers.

I feel like the weight of Tennessee is on my shoulders right now. Next time on Supermajority. Melissa plots her course to the Statehouse. But the question remains, what can a moderate Republican really do in Tennessee? It doesn't bother me to go against the grain on people.

If some people don't like what I want, that's their problem.

Supermajority from Embedded is a collaboration with WPLN News in Nashville. This episode was produced and sound-designed by Ariana Lee with help from Dan Germa. Our senior producer is Adalina Lanceaniz. She and Alex Kotlowitz edited the series. Katie Simon is our supervising editor, and Irene Naguchi is the executive producer for the enterprise Storytelling Unit at NPR. Additional reporting and production help from David Goodherts and WPLN's Rose Gilbert. Robert Rodriguez mastered the program. Fact-checking by Katie Dogert and Rachel Brown. With WPLN News in Nashville, Mac Linebow is our Vice President of Audience Engagement. Tony Gonzales is our News Director. Rachel Yacavoni is our Director of Multi-Platform Publishing. Thanks to our managing editor of Standards and Practices, Tony Caven, and to Johannes Durgy and Micah Ratner for legal support. Special thanks to Kelly McEvers, Louise Treas, and Rylan Barton. And a big thanks to our Embedded Plus supporters. Embedded is where we do ambitious long-form journalism at NPR, and Embedded Plus helps us keep that work going. Supporters also get to listen to every Embedded series sponsor-free, and every episode early. Find out more at plus. Npr. Org/embedded, or find the Embedded channel in Apple. I'm Maribha Knight.

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