As sure as the sun rises in the east, Tennessee lawmakers bowed toward Washington, D.C.

Despite blaring protests and impassioned pleas at the Capitol, the Republican-controlled legislature used a special session this week to change state laws and redraw Tennessee’s congressional district maps, diluting a block of Black Memphis voters, in an effort to give President Donald Trump one more vote in this fall’s midterm election. The result is a potential 9-0 Republican advantage in the state’s congressional delegation (Shelby County Sen. Brent Taylor used the new map to launch a campaign for the new 9th U.S. Congressional District seat), without a court order or new census information and done in the middle of an apportionment cycle, which was illegal until Thursday.

“I’m sure daddy Trump will be proud of you,” Democratic Sen. Charlane Oliver said on the Senate floor. Moments later she stood on her desk singing and holding a banner that said, “No Jim Crow 2.0 Stop the TN steal,” failing to vote because Senate Speaker Randy McNally determined that members had to be sitting at their desks. 

Senate Chief Clerk Russell Humphrey jerked the banner from her hands.

The Senate’s other five Democrats rushed back to their seats to vote, bringing it to a 25-5 outcome.

For about the 20th time this week, state troopers had to clear the room because people were raising hell inside and outside the chamber.

Afterward, McNally, who is leaving the legislature this year, showed no compassion for Oliver, calling her conduct “disgraceful.”

“She disrespected her colleagues, her constituents and this state. There is simply no excuse for what she did. The Senate floor is for deliberative debate not calculated performative disruption. It was conduct unbecoming of a Senator — pure and simple,” McNally said in a statement.

It was a fitting end to what folks are calling one of the worst days in Tennessee history.

Republicans, who are risking their own districts by turning them bluer, claimed all week that the effort was nothing but political, a move to keep Trump’s policies in place.

Rep. Jason Zachary told the House the map “gives us a historic opportunity” to send a full Republican delegation to Washington, D.C.

Democrats scoffed.

“This is being done because of race. This is being done to divide a city,” Democratic Rep. Jason Powell of Nashville said.

“Let Memphis secede from the state of Tennessee. … Let my people go,” Democratic Rep. Antonio Parkinson said.

Feeling heat from Trump last week, Republican Gov. Bill Lee called the legislature into his umpteenth special session on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted a key provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act designed to give Black voters more power. 

Republicans claimed they were simply called back to comply with the court’s decision, even though the decision stemming from a Louisiana case had nothing to do with the 9th Congressional District in Memphis, a naturally occurring Black voting block.

Along party lines, Tennessee lawmakers rejected efforts to preserve the Memphis district, in spite of a letter from Martin Luther King III urging them to remember the efforts of his father and other civil rights leaders to end discrimination against Black voters.

“Memphis is a reminder about the urgent need, and tremendous sacrifices made, to ensure that all communities have a voice in our democracy. I stand with the NAACP in opposing this egregious attempt to dismantle the only Congressional district that provides Black voters in Tennessee a voice in the process,” King’s letter said.

Readers might recall that his father, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 when he went there to support striking sanitation workers. One of King’s most important political successes was to persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to push passage of the Voting Rights Act.

A year earlier, after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told an aide in an off-hand comment that he might have turned the South over to the Republican Party for a generation.

Turns out he was a soothsayer.

Setting the stage for litigation

Lawsuits are expected on multiple fronts in state and federal court stemming from Thursday’s votes. The NAACP filed a challenge in Davidson County Chancery Court later in the day.

Throughout this week’s proceedings, Republican lawmakers denied that their efforts were discriminatory or even had anything to do with race. They were cagey in answering Democrats’ questions, with Republican Sen. John Stevens of Huntingdon, who allegedly helped draw the map, saying he didn’t know where Memphis city lines started and ended. The map was based only on population and politics, he said, claiming he had no idea Memphis was a majority-minority city.

Instead, Stevens sought to blame New York, California and Virginia for redrawing their district lines to pick up more Democratic seats. He failed to mention that Texas and Florida instigated redistricting efforts to protect Trump.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed after last week’s ruling that the nation made enough racial progress over the last half century that it didn’t need to preserve minority voting blocks anymore.

The irony is not lost on opponents because it paved the way for immediate action that will enable voters in white, affluent Williamson County to wash away the votes of Black residents in Memphis. 

The new redistricting map wipes out the 9th U.S. Congressional District represented by Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Memphis, slicing Shelby County into three districts, two of which run all the way to Williamson, home of Lee, Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson and U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a gubernatorial candidate.

That means rich folks in Middle Tennessee will control the future of Memphis’ Black residents, many of them living on the margins.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who was advised by one protester Thursday to visit his hometown of Crossville at some point (Sexton lives most of the time in Nashville), argued during committee meetings that stretching districts across the state is nothing new. He pointed out that the 4th district, designed for former Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper during the 1990s, ran from the Kentucky state line on the Cumberland Plateau to Hardin County at the Alabama line. Of course, that ended up not working out too well as Republicans won that seat in 1994.

NAACP Tennessee files lawsuit challenging redrawn US House district map

No doubt, Democrats (who don’t control anything in state and federal politics after a century at the helm) drew themselves into a corner. 

In 2002, Democrats also created a district to keep Democratic U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis in a seat and crammed former Rep. Blackburn and other Republicans into the old 7th district. Clearly, she survived, in part because people got fed up with Democrats’ shenanigans and ultimately removed them.

Incidentally, Sexton apparently forgot that those lines were drawn following the 1990 census, not in the midst of a 10-year apportionment cycle.

Democrats warned their counterparts that a day of reckoning is coming.  

A Tennessee Lookout analysis of 2020 and 2024 county voting results shows new Districts 5, 8 and 9 will give Republicans only 5 to 10 percentage point advantage. Simultaneously, those three districts contain most of Memphis’ Black voters, a point certain to be brought up in legal arguments. 

Yet Republicans forged ahead, despite looming litigation, spending millions of taxpayer dollars to gather for three unholy days – to prop up the president.

Just a little late

Tennessee Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins sent a memo to county election commissions this week warning them of changes needed to respond to new congressional district maps.

The qualifying deadline for this year’s election fell on March 10. But lawmakers voted to extend that to May 15, a decision that led MTSU political science professor Sekou Franklin to testify that such changes would cause “chaos” and “confusion” among voters.

It’s only been four years since the legislature cut Davidson County into three districts to end its days as a Democratic stronghold. The result was 10,000 to 15,000 voters casting ballots in the wrong district.

GoinsMemo

In his memo, Goins told county election officials they would have to reprogram election management systems, cope with new county or precinct splits, update voter registration systems, retrain poll officials and take other steps such as running new public notices in newspapers and sending letters to every voter affected by polling changes.

Fittingly, Goins wasn’t available to testify before House and Senate committees, but they were made aware of the letter.

It also must be noted that the bills connected to this confab didn’t contain the costs for county election commissions. In fact, the fiscal impact estimates said the expenses would be insignificant. 

Oh well, it’s only money.

Was the fix in?

House Minority Leader Karen Camper of Memphis told the Lookout on Tuesday that redistricting was “a done deal.”

Queried about that prospect, one Republican lawmaker asked this reporter, “Have you ever seen a done deal in this House?”

The response: “Um, the current map?”

It’s the same district map the state attorney general argued for in 2022 against a constitutional challenge but now will be preparing to debunk on several fronts.

Lawmakers admitted this week the White House “opined” and gave “guidance” on the map, in addition to providing boundary and population figures. Yet they claimed they drew it, even as some Republicans conceded that Trump would have the final word.

So much for the “Tennessee way.”

“But the band’s on the bus and they’re ready to go / Gotta drive all night and do a show in Chicago or Detroit.” *

*”Loadout,” Jackson Browne