Just before the 2022 midterm elections, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper had held his Nashville congressional district seat for nearly two decades. But the long-time incumbent didn’t even bother to run in that election due to an all-too-common political practice, one supercharged in our modern era: partisan gerrymandering.
Following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that barred federal courts from stopping partisan gerrymandering — even if deemed “incompatible with democratic principles” — the Tennessee state legislature and GOP Gov. Bill Lee, after population changes from the 2020 census, approved a new state congressional map in early 2022 that split the once Democratic stronghold in Nashville into three reliably Republican districts.
After diluting Democratic power and fortifying their own — a classic case of politicians choosing voters instead of vice versa as intended — Republicans now control eight of nine congressional districts within Tennessee.
But after a Supreme Court hearing for Louisiana v. Callais earlier this month, the 6-3 conservative court seems poised to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, paving the way for legal, explicit racist gerrymandering — threatening Tennessee’s lone Democratic congressional district in Memphis.
At issue in the Louisiana case is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows federal courts to intervene if a state’s congressional map is disproportionate to its demographic makeup. Put another way, the provision within the decades-old legislation prevents states from discriminating against its Black residents in congressional representation. It’s why Tennessee, which is 29% non-white, still has a majority-minority district in Memphis.