Speaking publicly for the first time since joining a lawsuit against Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s deployment of the National Guard to Memphis, State Sen. Jeff Yarbro didn’t mince words.
“You can’t restore law and order if you’re ignoring the ‘law’ part,” Yarbro said. “The Tennessee Constitution could not be clearer. The governor does not have the unilateral authority to deploy troops to police civilians, and every Republican attorney general for the past four years has agreed.”
With that, Yarbro — a lawyer and one of seven elected officials suing Gov. Bill Lee — distilled a complicated constitutional battle into one sentence. The fight over the National Guard in Memphis, he said, isn’t just a political clash. It’s a question of whether state leaders are willing to follow the state’s own laws…