[8][9] The previous month, Sexton was nominated by House Republicans as speaker after multiple rounds of voting, defeating Ryan Williams, Jay Reedy, Curtis Johnson, Mike Carter, and Matthew Hill in the internal party election.

[20] In 2022, Sexton, along with Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally, cosponsored truth in sentencing legislation, which was enacted with the support of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.

The legislation requires offenders to serve the full prison sentence (i.e., no parole) for certain crimes (such as attempted murder and burglary).

The bust, installed at the state Capitol in 1978, had faced calls for its removal, because Forrest was a Confederate general who founded the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War.

[24] During the COVID-19 pandemic in Tennessee, Sexton was a key architect of a special session of the legislature to pass bills banning municipalities within Tennessee from establishing face mask or COVID-19 vaccine requirements; the legislation specifically targeted Metro Nashville government's authority.

[35] As a result of the passage of the legislation, beginning in 2022, more than half of Tennessee's counties selected candidates to run in school board elections in partisan primaries.

[38][39] No state has ever rejected its share of the federal education budget, although the idea gained currency among Republicans in the 2020s.

[37] In January 2022, Sexton interjected as Representative John Ray Clemmons tried to honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day inside the House chamber.

[40] Clemmons began his honoring of the day by referring to the Auschwitz concentration camp, which the Red Army liberated from the Nazis, to the McMinn County School Board's ban on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus.

[41][40][44][45] In 2017, Sexton sponsored a bill to place a 15-month moratorium on industrial wind energy projects in Tennessee.

[46] Tennessee's abortion ban, one of the strictest in the U.S., passed as a trigger law in 2019 and took effect in August 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v.

The split broke up the Nashville-based 5th district held by longtime Democratic congressman Jim Cooper, resulting in his decision not to run for reelection.

Sexton denied accusations of gerrymandering, stating that he believed the new maps would give Nashville more representation in Washington.

The members had violated the chamber's decorum rules by leading gun control protests on the House floor during a legislative session.

[58][59] Sexton led the effort to expel the three members,[60] and had earlier revoked their identification-card access to the Capitol and stripped them of committee assignments.

[63] Johnson, Jones, Pearson, the Tennessee Black Caucus, and other Democrats alleged that the two members were expelled because of racism.

[64][65] Jones and Pearson returned to office after the Nashville Metro Council and Shelby County Commission both unanimously voted to reinstate them.

[67] Sexton owns a condo in Crossville in his district, as well as a home in West Nashville, which he purchased through an anonymous trust in September 2021.