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. The ruling stated that while the complaint alleged facts consistent with a racial gerrymander, they were also consistent with a political gerrymander. The lawsuit was the first court challenge over a 2022 congressional redistricting map that critics claimed was done to dilute the power of Black voters and other communities of color in Nashville, a Democratic stronghold. The lawsuit also challenged a state Senate district in majority-Black Shelby County, claiming that the white voting age population increased under the new maps to favor Republicans.
The three federal judges who wrote the ruling argued that there was another clear motivation behind Tennessee’s Republican state legislative supermajority, pointing to “naked partisanship” as the likely explanation. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disputes over partisan gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts are not within its jurisdiction, leaving such claims to be addressed by state courts under their own laws. The plaintiffs in the Tennessee case included organizations like the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and several Tennessee voters, including former Democratic state Sen. Brenda Gilmore.
After Nashville was divided into three congressional districts, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper declined to seek reelection, citing the difficulty of winning under the new layout. Republicans ultimately won all three seats in Nashville by significant margins in the 2022 elections, flipping them from Democratic control. The judges in the ruling rejected the argument by the Attorney General that the challenge was filed too late and specified that the plaintiffs did not need to come up with their own map in their legal challenge. They allowed the complaint to be refiled in the next 30 days if amended to disentangle race from politics.
Republicans celebrated the ruling, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton’s office expressing relief that the matter was resolved and they could focus on the future for Tennessee. The ruling briefly touched on ongoing controversies within the Republican-dominant Statehouse, including allegations of racial discrimination in legislative policies and actions taken by GOP colleagues. While the examples provided by the plaintiffs were deemed to have little to do with redistricting, the court acknowledged the possibility of misconduct. Tennessee’s state legislative maps still face another lawsuit on state constitutional grounds, indicating that the legal challenges are ongoing.
