Tennessee State Senator Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) is defending his intent to file a Senate Joint Resolution requiring the removal of Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy during next year’s legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly despite critics calling the move “an attempt to overturn an election.”
Last month, Taylor announced that he intends to file a Senate Joint Resolution immediately following the November election requiring the removal of Mulroy.
Taylor (pictured above, right) sent a notice of intent to Lt. Governor Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) announcing his effort to remove Mulroy via ouster resolution.
The state senator also notified the Senate Judiciary Committee Legal Counsel of his request to research and draft an ouster resolution for Mulroy.
Last week, Taylor’s office set up a hotline for crime victims and current or former staff members of the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office to gather complaints against Mulroy (pictured above, left), to which the state senator said has seen approximately two dozen tips be submitted so far.
“I wanted to solicit the experiences of crime victims and other members of the public. I wanted them to share their experiences of what it’s like to live in Molroy’s Memphis. So I’ve asked them to call and we have vetted probably two dozen calls and emails and text messages from people sharing their experience with the DA’s office following a crime that they had been a victim of…Anyone that’s been a crime victim that lives in Middle Tennessee or anyone that’s been down to Mulroy’s Memphis and has been a victim of crime, we want to hear their story,” Taylor said on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Taylor said he’s currently working with the General Assembly’s legal services to draft the resolution against Mulroy and plans to travel the state within the coming months to ask his colleagues in the Tennessee Senate to support or even cosponsor his resolution.
“What I plan to do this summer is to actually travel around the state to various senators, sit down with them, and go through the challenges we’re having down here in Mulroy’s Memphis. I’ll go through the charges one by one with the documentation we have for those charges and ask them to, at a minimum, support the resolution and at most if they would join me in cosponsoring the resolution,” Taylor said.
Taylor went on to explain the process that would lead to the removal of Mulroy.
“Now, the resolution will be a resolution that will set in motion what is necessary for an ouster. So the resolution itself won’t be the ouster resolution, it will be a request of the two speakers to appoint a select committee that will then perhaps hire a special prosecutor that would help them go through the charges that I’ll have laid out in this resolution and they will make a report to the General Assembly with a recommendation hopefully of removal. If they do that and we vote to remove, it’ll take two thirds vote in the House and the Senate, which is 22 votes in the Senate and 66 in the House. We remove him,” Taylor explained.
“The process to replace him is that the governor would appoint a replacement until the next statewide election, which will be in 2026. That person that the governor would appoint would essentially be in office for about 18 months. They would be the new incumbent going into the election and whoever wins in 2026 would finish out Mulroy’s term,” Taylor added.
Taylor also addressed the critics of his work to remove Mulroy, saying such work is a “use of the Constitution.”
“I will say that the critics of this plan say that I’m attempting to overturn an election, that DA Mulroy was elected in an election fair and square, and although that may be true, people’s right to vote and participate in an election is enshrined in the Tennessee Constitution right alongside the process to remove DAs and judges who are no longer properly performing their job. So I contend this is not an abuse of the Constitution, but it is actually a use of the Constitution,” Taylor said.
“The last thing I’ll say, I find it interesting that my detractors, who mainly are Democrats, are faulting me for wanting to overturn an election with this ouster resolution but suddenly this morning, after that disastrous response for performance by Joe Biden at the debate, suddenly they’re looking to overturn the will of the Democrat voters and the Democrat primaries by looking for another candidate to replace him…It rings hollow when the Democrats want to accuse me of overturning an election,” 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 Senator Brent Taylor. Photo “Steven Mulroy” by Shelby County District Attorney. Background Photo “Tennessee State Capitol” by Antony-22 CC BY-SA 4.0.
