Tennessee Republicans Are Racist, Corrupt Dicks Both Publicly And Privately, How Shocking

What is going on with Republicans in the state of Tennessee? (State motto: That State That Looks A Bit Like One Of Those Shapes You Learned About In Math Class.) The GOP caucus in the state House has found so many ways to step on their own dicks lately that we can safely assume they will all pee sitting down for the rest of their lives.

If we’re picking the most prolific dick-stepper, we’re going with Tennessee Speaker Cameron Sexton, the Republican representative from Crossville. Or is he? Popular Information’s intrepid Judd Legum (full disclosure: yes, we’re very distant cousins, we think, but we have never met; believe it or not, Legums are innumerate in a couple of very specific sections of the mid-Atlantic) has been investigating whether Sexton actually lives in his district, or if he bought an expensive house in Nashville, moved his family there, but has nonetheless been dinging Tennessee’s taxpayers to the tune of thousands of dollars of per diem expenses.

Who wants to guess which way this is going?

Thanks to Legum’s reporting, Sexton admitted last week that he did indeed move his family to Nashville, even though the state legislature is only in session four months out of the year. Furthermore:

Sexton went to considerable lengths to obscure his purchase of his home in Nashville. He established an anonymous trust, the Beccani Trust, to buy the property. Cameron Sexton’s name does not appear anywhere on the documents memorializing the sale and the mortgage. A financial advisor based in Utah, Bret Bryce, was appointed trustee and signed most of the documents.

But Sexton’s wife, Lacey Sexton, signed the warranty deed for the property as the “affiant.”

This is 100 percent how you do real estate purchases when everything is on the up and up and you do have nothing to hide, such as whether you may now be ineligible under Article II, Section 5a of the Tennessee Constitution to represent the place you used to live that is two hours away from the state capital.

Sexton did at some point buy a condo in Crossville as a way-less-than-adequate residency fig leaf. Then he neglected to pay the property taxes on it until Popular Info brought it to the public’s attention.

Also, there is this:

But members who live more than 50 miles outside of Nashville are entitled to a much larger per diem, $313 in 2022, to cover the cost of lodging in Nashville. Sexton has taken the larger per diem, which is pegged to the cost of a hotel room in Nashville. On the forms, Sexton claims a roundtrip commute of 236 miles.

These per diems are also available when the legislature is out of session if a member has to travel to Nashville to conduct official business. Sexton makes extensive use of that privilege, consistently charging taxpayers the larger amount.

Since 2021, Sexton has charged Tennessee taxpayers $92,071 in per diem expenses.

Ninety-two thousand dollars in under two years! A fella could easily pay off two years of property taxes on a condo with that windfall, assuming he’s not spending it all on hair gel.

And to think, if Sexton and his caucus had merely censured those three Democrats for disrupting a legislative session instead of removing them from office, it would have been at best a thirty-second story on CNN and they would not have brought the attention of national reporters down on their own heads. Congrats, you idiots.

Meanwhile, someone secretly recorded Sexton’s caucus clawing at each other’s throats like highly aroused lemurs in a closed-door meeting. Then that someone leaked the audio to Justin Kanew of the Tennessee Holler:

If you listen to the recording, you will first hear one Rep. Jason Zachary very upset that Democrats have been trashing him as a racist simply because he and his mostly white fellow Republicans ponderously lectured two young Black legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, before expelling them from the House for the crime of leading a protest against a gun control bill while Black: