State Rep. Zooey Zephyr had already run afoul of the House leadership by accusing fellow legislators of having “blood on your hands,” but after a raucous protest at the Montana Capitol, the Republican majority declared enough.
The state’s House voted Wednesday to bar the Democrat from the floor for the rest of the session, the latest example this year of lawmakers going to extraordinary lengths to preserve legislative decorum by penalizing those who breach it.
Montana is far from alone. As defiant lawmakers disrupt proceedings with overheated language, outrageous accusations and raucous protests, state legislative leaders are cracking down faster than you can say “Robert’s Rules of Order.”
“Freedom in this body involves obedience to all the rules of this body, including the rules of decorum,” Majority Leader Sue Vinton, who sponsored the censure resolution, said on the House floor.
The importance of those rules failed to impress Ms. Zephyr, the first transgender legislator in state history. When House Speaker Matt Regier “asks me to apologize on behalf of decorum, what he is really asking me to do is be silent,” she said.
“If you use decorum to silence people who hold you accountable, then all you are doing is using decorum as a tool of oppression,” the representative from Missoula said in floor remarks before the censure vote.
The first-term Democrat may still cast votes but may not participate in floor debates for the rest of the session, which ends next week. She was permitted to keep her seat.
Others didn’t get off that easily.
In Tennessee, the Republican-led House voted this month to expel two Democratic legislators who commandeered the podium, used a bullhorn to call for gun control legislation and led chants for noisy protesters in the gallery.
State Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were removed, and the vote to expel a third Democrat, Rep. Gloria Johnson, failed by one vote.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were quickly reinstated by their local councils on an interim basis ahead of the Aug. 3 special election and June 5 primaries.
In both states, the penalties resulted from clashes over legislative norms between Republican majorities and mostly younger Democratic lawmakers convinced that the righteousness of their causes justified the breaking of rules.
The Tennessee protest was a reaction to the refusal to pass more gun controls in the wake of the deadly shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville by a transgender former student. Ms. Zephyr’s “blood on your hands” blast referred to Republican support for legislation banning minor children from undergoing gender transition procedures.
The transgender rights issue was also front and center in Oklahoma last month during a vote to censure Democratic state Rep. Mauree Turner.
The Republican-led House removed the lawmaker from all committee assignments for impeding an investigation into a transgender rights activist accused of assaulting an officer and a lawmaker by throwing water at them during a protest.
“This member knowingly, and willfully, impeded a law enforcement investigation, harboring a fugitive and repeatedly lying to officers, and used their official office and position to thwart attempts by law enforcement to make contact with a suspect of the investigation,” the House leadership said in a March 7 statement.
The lawmaker, who is nonbinary, was offered the chance to keep the committee seats by issuing a formal apology but said, “I think an apology for loving the people of Oklahoma is something that I cannot do.”
In all those cases, Democratic legislators were disciplined by Republican-controlled chambers. In Arizona, Republicans took down one of their own.
The Arizona House voted April 12 to expel Republican Liz Harris after an ethics committee investigation concluded that she violated the chamber’s rules by “eroding the public trust in the legislative process” with her “disorderly behavior.”
The report found that she invited a witness to a February hearing who accused her colleagues and other officials of criminal activity, including taking bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel, that she sought to hide the testimony from House leaders beforehand, and that she misled the committee investigators.
“What should have been a joint hearing to examine commonsense election reforms devolved into disgraceful fringe theater,” House Speaker Ben Toma said in a statement. “I’m not alone in believing that it was irresponsible and bad judgment for Ms. Harris to invite a person to present unsubstantiated and defamatory allegations in a legislative forum.”
Ms. Harris called the report “a lie” as she carried a box of personal belongings to her car. She told reporters that the expulsion vote was “an example of how … if you don’t toe the line, this is what happens.”
Whether the high-profile disciplinary votes help or hurt is another question.
After the Tennessee expulsions, the three lawmakers known as the Tennessee Three became celebrities as Democrats and gun control groups hailed them.
The legislators were invited to the White House to meet with President Biden. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, Georgia Democrat, compared them to civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The two expelled lawmakers are expected to win back their seats in the special election, and the Tennessee Constitution forbids expelling a lawmaker twice for the same offense.
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell asked Mr. Jones in an April 12 interview: “Do the Republicans understand what a huge mistake it was to follow the speaker of that House down this road?”
Mr. Jones, who has called for House Speaker Cameron Sexton to resign, replied, “Speaker Cameron Sexton tried to flex this extremist authoritarian abuse of power, and it’s backfired.”
Ms. Zephyr may be on the cusp of the same treatment.
USA Today columnist Rex Huppke declared in a Thursday op-ed that: “Montana Republicans tried to erase a transgender lawmaker. Instead, they created a hero.”
On the other side was Montana Republican Party Chairman Don Kaltschmidt, who said that “this radical legislator instigated a riot that ended in multiple arrests and endangered legislators and staff.”
“Revoking House floor privileges from Rep. Zephyr shows that representative’s behavior is unacceptable and not tolerated in the Montana State Capitol,” he said.
Seven people were arrested in the Monday protest. About 100 noisy activists spilled into the House gallery as Ms. Zephyr held up a microphone on the chamber floor in solidarity with the protesters.
Republican state Rep. David Bedey called the protest an “assault on our representative democracy.”
“The free expression of ideas cannot flourish in an atmosphere of turmoil and incivility,” he said.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
