Red state's next move may be to purge Democrats entirely

When the Republican-led Tennessee legislature in May carved up the state’s one remaining congressional district represented by a Democrat it was acting openly on a morally gruesome principle.

In a state where more than a third of voters are reliably Democrats (per the last two presidential elections) Republicans find it unacceptable that the percentage of congressional House seats held by Democrats treads water at 11% — one of Tennessee’s nine seats. This cannot stand, they mouthfoamingly cogitate, so we must draw new lines that drown the enemy and make it zero.

Slicing and dicing Memphis’s majority Black 9th District into three GOP-friendly majority white districts certainly felt like the kind of hasty and shameless racial gerrymander seen in several southern states following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision in April.

The Republicans who run Tennessee may not have much of a grasp of constitutional law, as they manage to remind us each year with bills that turn laws into lawsuits. But they did show us during the May redistricting special session that they can muster the remedial level of reading comprehension needed to decipher Supreme Court marching orders.

The Court’s take in Callais was clear: race-based gerrymandering is not cool but party-based gerrymandering is totally cool. And so followed the marching orders for conservative state houses: draw new districts however you like, even in maps that intentionally dismantle minority representation; just make sure you let the maps do the talking; say nothing out loud through your piehole that would feed your opponents a viable claim about map-drawing motives that are anything but purely partisan.

And so as the new congressional map was crammed through the legislature last month we were treated to the mind-numbing spectacle of endlessly parroted versions of map sponsor Sen. John Stevens’s mantra: “This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage.”

Funny thing is, as contrived as it was, I mostly believe it. Sure, racism (along with sexism and homophobia) abounds in the councils of state government here, and the heated fusillade of racial grievance that confronted the new congressional map was plenty justified. But even so I believe this really was about adding a red seat, not a white seat. I have no doubt that Tennessee Republicans would have sold out white Democrats just as readily as they politically dismembered Black Democrats if it would have served their true purpose: finding one more red seat in the U.S. House for their DC overlords.

As the GOP adopted the new map neutering Democrats in Memphis, just as they did in Nashville in 2022, I got to thinking: Why stop there? If they can crack blue cities into blue splinters floating in red congressional districts, can they not perhaps do the same with state legislative districts? But then I thought, well, no they won’t go there — there’s no gain.

The congressional redraw had concrete value, netting at most just the one seat but in a razor-thin-margin congress where every seat matters. Here In the Tennessee state capitol, on the other hand, the GOP already has veto-proof supermajorities in both houses, so what would be the point?

Or so I thought until word last week that that the Tennessee GOP plans to hurl its flaming hatchet of one-party belligerence at that very target: state Senate and House district maps. According to Republican Caucus press secretary Molly Crawford, we can expect legislation proposing new maps as early as next year. The point, I guess, is this: Why settle for margins of 27-6 in the Senate and 75-24 in the House when with some crafty line drawing it can be 33-0 and 99-0. Why, indeed, should there be a single Democrat in Tennessee state government?

With map-drawing software it’s a simple matter to ponder the possibilities for this sort of political mayhem. I spent a little quality time the other day with a platform well known to political mapping nerds called Dave’s Redistricting. It took me under an hour to carve Middle Tennessee into senate districts all with populations close to where a senate district should be and each having a Republican partisan edge (based on 2020 presidential voting data). As you can see in my map below I pulled this off by slicing Nashville into slivers of Davidson County that extend way out into the hinterlands (as our congressional districts already do).

An election with this map, if the partisan leans held, would cut Nashville’s Democratic representation in the state Senate from three to zero. Performing similar district surgery in Memphis could cut theirs from three to zero. Together that would completely eradicate the Democratic Party from the state Senate —the 33-0 nightmare. Purging the 99-member House of all Democrats would be a bit more challenging, requiring thinner slices and wackier looking districts in more parts of the state. But perhaps only a bit.

Returning to where I started, it all comes down to the underlying theory behind the exercise of power through redistricting. Now that the courts have given states permission to use district line drawing to any and every fathomable political aim, the party in power in a supermajority state like Tennessee, if it has a shred of decency or self-respect, must reckon seriously with the role of a minority party’s participation in consensual self-government. Do the one-third of Tennesseans who do not choose Republican government have a right to be represented in their elected legislature? In a functional democracy in a supposedly advanced liberal society, do the two-thirds who are calling the shots have a moral obligation to see to it the one-third are included rather than silenced?

These are not hard questions.