Plaintiffs won’t revive federal lawsuit over Tennessee’s redistricting maps

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A group of Tennessee voting and civil rights advocates says it won’t refile a federal lawsuit alleging the state’s U.S. House map and boundaries for the state Senate amount to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

In a news release Friday, the plaintiffs whose lawsuit was dismissed last month said their efforts in court were facing “new, substantial and unjust standards to prove racial gerrymandering” under a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that involved South Carolina’s political maps.

When a three-judge panel dismissed the Tennessee lawsuit last month, the judges also gave the plaintiffs time to refile the complaint if they could amend it to “plausibly disentangle race from politics.”

The plaintiffs said they are urging people to vote in the Nov. 5 election, noting the state’s low rankings in turnout. The registration deadline is Oct. 7 and early voting begins Oct. 16.

“We made a difficult decision to forgo further litigation, but this is not a retreat by any means,” Gloria Sweet-Love, president of the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, said in the release. “We know we will soon drive 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 court challenge over Tennessee’s congressional redistricting map, which Republican state lawmakers used to carve up Democratic-leaning Nashville to help the GOP flip a seat in the 2022 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.

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.

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 — 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 Tennessee voters.

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s state legislative maps still face another lawsuit on state constitutional grounds. That case is headed to oral arguments in front of the Tennessee Supreme Court next week.