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. “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. 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. 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. 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.