Settlement: Tennessee AG concedes sanctuary city voting law is ‘unconstitutional’

A Tennessee law that tried to criminalize public officials for voting in favor of sanctuary city policies will not take effect.

Passed last year amid a flurry of immigration measures, the law policed how local officials vote. It permitted the attorney general to initiate the process to remove local officials from their post. It also allowed him to charge the officials with a felony if they were to cast votes in favor of a sanctuary city policy — even though such policies have been banned in Tennessee since 2019.

This prompted seven of Nashville’s Metro Councilmembers and the ACLU to sue.

“It is antithetical to a free society for legislators to be charged with a crime for representing their constituents,” Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, ACLU-TN interim legal director, wrote in a statement. “This law criminalized key aspects of a working democracy. It made dissent a felony.”

Now, in a proposed settlement, Tennessee’s Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti concedes that he cannot support the law’s constitutionality. The proposal says the law “infringes[s] on principles of legislative immunity and independence.”

“Every legislator, whether at the federal, state, or local level, has a constitutional guarantee against prosecution for how they vote,” Skrmetti was quoted in a statement to WPLN News. “Sanctuary policies remain illegal in Tennessee, but city and county officials cannot be imprisoned for voting for such policies. As a result, we agreed that dismissal of this case was the appropriate outcome.”

Councilmember Clay Capp, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is a “victory for free-speech.”

“Never before in the history of America has any state tried to make it a rule that it’s a crime for a local official to disagree with them or to vote in some way that they don’t approve,” Capp said. “The MAGA movement generally is trying to clamp down on the free speech of people who disagree with them or people that they don’t like. This is a really, really big victory for the basic American value of free speech and self-government.”

Meanwhile, state legislators — some of whom backed the penalty idea last year — have been working to remove the policy from state law. That bill, which deletes the code making such votes a felony, is currently moving through the legislature.