A GOP lawmaker in Tennessee has stepped down over sexual harassment allegations just weeks after voting to expel two Black Democrats for protesting gun violence on the House floor.
According to NBC News, Tennessee Rep. Scotty Campbell, who serves as the vice chair of the House Republican Caucus, resigned in the wake of the Ethics Subcommittee concluding that the GOP leader violated the Legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy.
The Ethics Subcommittee issued its findings in a document addressed to Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton last month, but reports of the decision surfaced on Thursday (April 20).
Campbell resigned from his post just hours after the local TV station WTVF-TV confronted him Thursday about sexual harassment allegations involving legislative interns.
Declining to give details of what happened, Campbell told the outlet: “I had consensual, adult conversations with two adults off property.”
“If I choose to talk to any intern in the future, it will be recorded,” he added.
Despite the last month’s ethics finding, Campbell was still in office on April 6 when he voted to expel Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both of whom have since been reinstated to the House. The GOP lawmaker also voted to expel Rep. Gloria Johnson, a third Democratic involved in the gun violence protest but who was spared from expulsion by one vote.
Johnson slammed Campbell’s ethics violation as “horrendous.”
“Yet if you talk without permission, you get expulsion resolutions,” she tweeted on Thursday.
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