NASHVILLE -- Tennessee Democratic Party Chair Mary Mancini charged Tuesday that Republican state Rep. Rick Womick is out of control and called on GOP leaders to "do something anything" to "rein" him in.
Macini's charge comes after the Murfreesboro lawmaker first called on GOP legislative colleagues to give "serious consideration" to impeaching Republican Gov. Bill Haslam over accepting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.
Womick followed that up last week with a letter to the state's 95 county clerks in which he urged them to refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses to gay couples.
"Republican leadership's silence on this issue is deafening," Mancini said in a news release. "Once again Governor Haslam, Speaker [Beth] Harwell, and Lt. Gov. [Ron] Ramsey are too afraid of the extremists in their own party to show any kind of leadership.
"Or," Mancini said, "maybe they agree with Rep. Womick's irresponsible actions but just won't admit it. Either way, the Tennessee's Republican Party is clearly becoming home to extremists who expend their energy on grandstanding instead of focusing on the real problems facing the state."
Mary Mancini speaks following her election as chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2015. (AP Photo/Erik Schelzig) Womick dismissed the charges in a telephone interview, saying, "it's Democrats. I mean, they don't uphold the Constitution anyway. They try to change everything going through courts and it's unconstitutional."
He said U.S. Supreme Court "has no power to write the laws from the bench. And for them to sit there and say in their press release that basically the Supreme Court has ruled on that and it now becomes law is false. It's completely unconstitutional [for the Supreme Court] to make some sort of statement like that.
"Once again, Democrats at large but in particular the Democrat Party, if they can't get what they want through the legislative process, they try through the courts."
In his letter, which used his official stationery with the state's seal, Womick told clerks they can legally ignore the Supreme Court ruling.
"First it was impeach the governor and now it's pressuring other elected officials to ignore the law," Mancini said. "With a complete lack of leadership from Haslam, Harwell and Ramsey, I doubt this will be the last time we hear something this outrageous from Rep. Womick."
In his own news release today, Womick stated that "each of Tennessee's County Clerks are publicly elected servants of their county. They are held accountable only to the people that elected them and to their oath of office, not to the [U.S. Supreme Court], Governor Haslam, or Attorney General Herbert Slatery III."
If clerks ignore the nation's highest court's opinion, Womick asserted, they "will not be in violation of any federal law.
"As most Americans and Tennesseans understand and recognize," he said, "the SCOTUS 5-4 split decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, issued an opinion with no basis in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, American law, or 2000 years of Western history, purporting to overturn Natural Marriage."