Plaintiffs won’t revive federal lawsuit over Tennessee’s redistricting maps
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — That’s according to a group of voter and civil rights activists from Tennessee will not refile a federal lawsuit claiming that the map of the U.S. House of Representatives and the boundaries of the Senate amount to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
In a news release Friday, the plaintiffs whose lawsuit was dismissed last month said their efforts in court faced “new, substantive and unjust standards to prove racist gerrymandering” under a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that changed South Carolina’s political maps were involved.
When a three-judge panel dismissed the Tennessee lawsuit last month, the justices also gave plaintiffs time to refile the complaint if they could amend it to “plausibly decouple race from politics.”
Prosecutors say they are urging people to vote in the Nov. 5 election, citing low voter turnout in the state. The registration deadline is October 7 and early voting begins on October 16.
“We have made a difficult decision to refrain from further litigation, but this is in no way a retreat,” Gloria Sweet-Love, president of the NAACP’s Tennessee State Conference, said in the news release. “We know that we will soon stamp out the discrimination and racist practices that silence the voices of too many of us in Tennessee at the ballot box.”
The lawsuit was the first over Tennessee’s congressional redistricting map, which Republican state lawmakers were accustomed to dividing Democratic-leaning Nashville to help the Republican Party gain seats in the 2022 electionsa move that critics charged was made 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 Senate District 31 in majority-Black Shelby County, including part of Memphis, using similar arguments and saying the white voting-age population rose under the new maps. A Republican now holds that seat.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disputes over partisan gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts were not within its purview, limiting those claims to state courts under their own constitutions and laws. Most recently, the Supreme Court upheld South Carolina’s congressional map in a 6-3 decision that found the state’s General Assembly did not use race to draw districts based on the 2020 census.
After Nashville was split into three former congressional districts Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper of Nashville declined to seek re-electionclaiming that he could not win under the new layout. In the end, Rep. won. John Rose won re-election by about 33 percentage points, Rep. Mark Green won another term with 22 points, and Representative Andy Ogles won his first term with 13 points in the district abandoned by Cooper.
Tennessee now has eight Republicans in the U.S. House, with just one Democrat remaining: Rep. Steve Cohen of Memphis.
The plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit include the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, the African American Clergy Collective of Tennessee, the Equity Alliance, the Memphis A. Philip Randolph Institute, the League of Women Voters of Tennessee and individual voters in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, Tennessee’s legislative maps continue to face another lawsuit on state constitutional grounds. That case will be heard orally before the Tennessee Supreme Court next week.