Tennessee State Senator Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) said “not a single person” he’s talked to in Memphis has pushed back on his intent to file a Senate Joint Resolution immediately following the November election requiring the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy.
Taylor, who sent a notice of intent to Lt. Governor Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) on Monday announcing his intent to file a Senate Joint Resolution requiring the removal of Mulroy, said the district attorney’s recently-dropped idea to not prosecute felons charged with unlawful possession of a weapon was the decision that “broke the camel’s back.”
“Last week, District Attorney Mulroy announced that he was no longer going to prosecute convicted felons caught in possession of a firearm. As long as that underlying felony was nonviolent, he was not going to prosecute him. He’s going to put them on diversion. If they stayed out of trouble, they wouldn’t have to suffer any consequences of having a firearm, even though they were a convicted felon,” Taylor said on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“For the district attorney to say he’s not going to prosecute them is really unfortunate. So that was really the thing that broke the camel’s back for me. I began talking with members of the business community because I wanted to find out from them if they thought he was too controversial and was disruptive to the business community. I talked to the business community, I talked to judges, I’ve talked to law enforcement and I expected somebody to push back, but not a single person pushed back. Everyone said that this is a conversation this community needs to have. So I announced that I’m going to file an ouster resolution when we reconvene in January,” Taylor added.
Taylor said there are two ways Mulroy could be removed from office – one is that the Tennessee House of Representatives could vote to impeach and the Tennessee Senate convict the district attorney, while the other option is that a two-thirds majority of both chambers vote to remove Mulroy under a specific cause.
While he is currently working with legal services to specify the cause under which Mulroy could be removed, Taylor said the overarching issue he sees with Mulroy is that the district attorney is “circumventing the will of the people and the General Assembly by prosecuting laws based on how he wishes they were written, not on actually how they’re written.”
“That’ll be the basis for his removal. He is derelict in his duties and isn’t faithfully following the laws as laid out by the General Assembly,” Taylor said.
Taylor said that while Senate leadership has expressed support for his effort to remove Mulroy from office, he doesn’t believe a single Democrat will agree with removing the district attorney, as “Democrats in the Senate are out of step with the voting public” in Memphis.
“I don’t expect any Democrats to support this. Look, the Democrats in the Senate they’re out of step. They’re out of step with the voting public down here. They are using national talking points about overturning the will of the people and so forth. They don’t seem to be too concerned over the fact that 400 people were killed in Memphis last year and 90 percent of them were black and 6 percent were Hispanic and 4 percent were white,” Taylor said.
“I’m getting called a racist and a white supremacist for what I’m attempting to do. But again, in the community down here, whites are fearful that they’re going to be murdered, but blacks are actually being murdered. So I’m not sure how that equates into being a white supremacist, but if that’s what I am by trying to save black lives then so be it,” Taylor added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Brent Taylor” by Brent Taylor.
