Judges dismiss suit alleging Tennessee's political maps discriminate against communities of color

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A federal judicial panel has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Tennessee's U.S. House maps and those for the state Senate amount to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

“In sum, the complaint alleges facts that are consistent with a racial gerrymander," stated the ruling, which was issued Wednesday. "But the facts are also consistent with a political gerrymander.”

The complaint was the first court challenge over a 2022 congressional redistricting map that carved up Democratic-leaning Nashville to help Republicans flip a seat in last year’s elections, a move that critics claimed was done to dilute the power of Black voters and other communities of color in one of the state's few Democratic strongholds.

The lawsuit also challenged state Senate District 31 in majority-Black Shelby County, including part of Memphis, using similar arguments and saying that the white voting age population went up under the new maps. A Republican now holds that seat.

However, the three federal judges who wrote the ruling argued there was another clear motivation behind Tennessee’s Republican state legislative supermajority by pointing to “naked partisanship" as the likely “straightforward explanation.”

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disputes over partisan gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts are none of its business, limiting those claims to state courts under their own constitutions and laws. Most recently, the high court upheld South Carolina’s congressional map in a 6-3 decision that said the state General Assembly did not use race to draw districts based on the 2020 Census.

In Tennessee's case, the plaintiffs included the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, the African American Clergy Collective of Tennessee, the Equity Alliance, the League of Women Voters of Tennessee and several Tennessee voters, including former Democratic state Sen. Brenda Gilmore.

After Nashville was splintered into three congressional districts, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper of Nashville declined to seek reelection, claiming he couldn't win under the new layout. Ultimately, Rep. John Rose won reelection by about 33 percentage points, Rep. Mark Green won another term by 22 points, and Rep. Andy Ogles won his first term by 13 points in the district vacated by Cooper.

Tennessee now has eight Republicans in the U.S. House, with just one Democrat left in Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen.

In the original complaint, the plaintiffs argued that all three of the “candidates of choice” for minority voters lost their congressional bids in the Nashville area in 2022.

The judges countered that the lawsuit had to “more than plausibly allege that Tennessee’s legislators knew that their Republican-friendly map would harm voters who preferred Democratic candidates—including the higher percentage of minority voters who preferred those candidates.”

The judges did reject Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's argument that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file their challenge and also declared that the plaintiffs did not have to come up with their own map in their legal challenge. In their dismissal, the judges said the complaint could be refiled over the next 30 days as long as it was amended to "plausibly disentangle race from politics.”

Republicans celebrated the ruling, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton's office issuing a statement saying they were “happy to have resolution on this matter so that we can focus on what’s ahead for Tennessee.”

Notably, the ruling briefly weighed in on ongoing controversies that have surrounded the Republican-dominant Statehouse, where Democrats have alleged racial discrimination in both the legislative policies enacted and actions that their GOP colleagues have taken recently.

Ranging from the brief expulsion of two young Black Democratic lawmakers to passing legislation aimed at slashing the left-leaning Nashville's city council, the plaintiffs' complaint provided several examples that they claimed as evidence of a “discriminatory motive.”

The court countered that the examples had “little to do with redistricting” but did note that they suggest the “possibility of misconduct.”

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s state legislative maps still face another lawsuit on state constitutional grounds.