It isn’t the first time the right has denied elected representatives their seat. When they have the power they have no compunction about doing it. And it looks like we’re going to see more of it. Jeff Greenfield writes: In the fevered nationalism of World War I, Congress refused to seat Socialist Victor Berger after he won a seat in 1918. He ran again in 1919 and won again, and Congress again refused to seat him. At the same time, the New York State Assembly expelled all five Socialists on general grounds of “disloyalty.” The mood of the time was captured by the Assembly speaker, who thundered: “We are building by our action today a granite bulwark against all traitors within the boundaries of our republic. Our flag of the republic is whipping the breeze in defiance of enemies from without.” A few decades later, a similar attempt to ban an elected legislator was rebuffed. Julian Bond, a key civil rights leader, had been elected to the Georgia House; but in 1966, the legislature voted by an overwhelming margin not to seat him on the grounds that he had opposed the war in Vietnam and expressed sympathy for draft resisters. But later that year, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Bond’s First Amendment rights had been violated and ordered him seated. He served for more than 20 years in the Georgia House and then the state Senate. The case of the two Tennessee Democrats involves neither criminal nor immoral…