What happened
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) on Thursday signed into law a new congressional map that slices up Memphis to disperse its Black voters into Republican-leaning districts, seeking to eliminate the state’s last Democratic-held and majority-Black district. The General Assembly’s Republican supermajority approved the gerrymander earlier in the day amid raucous protests.
Who said what
Tennessee is the first state to draw a new map since the Supreme Court last week neutered the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling “opened a new front, particularly in the South, in a bitter, coast-to-coast redistricting battle” launched by President Donald Trump to protect the GOP’s slim House majority, The New York Times said.
Tennessee Republicans “defended the new map,” saying their “partisan” goal was sending “an all-Republican delegation” to Congress, NPR said. “You cannot take a majority Black city, fracture its voting power and then tell us race has nothing to do with it,” said state Sen. London Lamar (D). The new map is “Jim Crow on steroids,” political scientist Norm Ornstein said on social media. The new map likely “would never have withstood scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act under the last several decades,” said David Becker at the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Now, the Supreme Court almost seems to invite” these gerrymanders.
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What next?
The NAACP on Thursday evening challenged Tennessee’s map in state court. Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina are taking steps to eliminate majority-Black districts in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.
