The Senate Rules Committee chairman declined to take up a resolution Monday that called for the resignation of Rep. Karl Oliver, who wrote in a Facebook post last month that those removing Confederate monuments “should be lynched.”
The resolution, which was first filed in the Senate by Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, called for the resignation of Oliver.
In the House, Rep. Sonya Williams-Barnes, D-Gulfport, filed a resolution Monday for Oliver’s expulsion from the Legislature.
The resolution by the chairperson of the Black Legislative Caucus was expected to be addressed when the House returned later in the afternoon to take up Senate appropriation bills.
The resolution calls for a two-thirds “vote to permanently expel Representative Karl Oliver from the Mississippi House of Representatives due to the incendiary and racially offensive public statements he made regarding “lynching” of “leadership” responsible for removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans.”
The resolution cites a section of the Mississippi constitution that states the House and Senate can punish members for “disorderly behavior,” and expel a member with a two-thirds vote.
Resolutions typically flow through the regular committee process. Simmons’ resolution was sent to the Senate Rules committee Monday morning.
Sen. Terry Burton, R-Newton, the Rules chairman, said his committee would not consider the resolution, effectively killing the item.
Burton also is the Senate President Pro Tempore, the highest ranking senator as voted by his colleagues. He has served in the Legislature since 1992.
It was not immediately clear why Burton declined to have his committee consider the resolution.
“(Rep. Oliver’s words) were certainly unacceptable,” Simmons said. “They put national attention on the state of Mississippi — attention, as you all know, that we do not need.”
“I’ve been here six years, and I’ve never had anyone, as a member of this esteemed institution, to use the words that were used by Karl Oliver,” Simmons said.
In a Facebook post in May, Oliver wrote: “The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific. If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, “leadership” of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State.”
The comment was immediately met with bipartisan condemnation. Oliver issued an apology two days after writing the post, saying “I deeply regret that I chose this word.”
House Speaker Philip Gunn revoked Oliver’s vice chairmanship of the House Forestry committee.
“They do not reflect the views of the Republican party, the leadership of the House of Representatives or the House as a whole,” Gunn said in a statement hours after the post garnered national attention. “Using the word ‘lynched’ is inappropriate and offensive.”
Oliver said Monday that he had no comment in response to Simmons’ resolution.
Democratic leaders issued a stern statement after the post, but until Monday, no leader in either party had called for Oliver’s resignation.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.