For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a fortress, to ensure that the Black voters who make up the majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the ruling Republican party took a week to wipe the district off the map.
Tennessee yesterday passed a law that splits Memphis between three different districts, reducing the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an extra seat in the House. The move was the first, and certainly not the final, legal response by the GOP to the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that struck down the Voting Rights Act. In the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 decision in Louisiana vs. Callaisthey believe they no longer have to cater to non-white voters, many of whom vote Democratic.
Voting rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the decision to tighten the national race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been surprising. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers normally reserved for natural disasters to halt the primary election that was already underway to give lawmakers time to regain control. Alabama Republicans got the vote time to watch for a hurricane when the storm flooded the state capitol to allow a new primary election if a federal court clears the way for state redistricting. South Carolina state legislators also took the first step toward drawing the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.
Together, these moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its congressional majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court threw out a statewide referendum engineered by Democrats to give them an additional four-seat majority.
The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, however Callis The decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by five other conservative members of the Supreme Court, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like an echo of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This diminishes Black political power.” When the Court handed down its decision last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an Equal Justice Initiative event in Montgomery. He went back to his car and cried.
In Louisiana, more than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots in the state’s May 16 primary when Landry suspended the U.S. House race. The move created chaos and confusion, election officials told us. Years of attacks on election integrity have already created distrust among voters in the system, making the difficult task of election management even more difficult. Among election workers, “it’s demoralizing,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told us. He compared Landry’s move to ripping off a tablecloth on a table that has already been set.
To complicate matters further, Landry only postponed the House primaries. He did not rule out a highly contested state Senate race, leading to concerns that turnout in the race would drop. In Lafayette Parish in southern Louisiana, Registrar of Voters Charlene Meaux-Menard told us that many of the parish’s 160,000 voters are confused about why three polling places are open for voting, because they thought the entire election was canceled. A Republican visited the sites and wrote on Facebook that the election was still ongoing: “Voters are frustrated—far from us—to have to go through this new process,” he said. “They think elections are not held at all.”
In Tangipahoa Parish, one hour east of Baton Rouge, Andi Matheu, voter registrar, told us that his biggest challenge is getting the message to 80,000 voters that the election is underway. He said many people seem to only read the headlines but not the news in the story. “The headline says ‘Election Suspended,’ and that’s not true,” he said angrily. “Then it’s like a bad game of Telephone—one person tells another person, who tells another person. And when it comes down to the fifth person, we’re not going to have another election in Louisiana.”
Wduring the election officials in Louisiana are at loggerheads, Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature are now deciding whether to redistrict one or both of the House districts in New Orleans and Baton Rouge that Black Democrats currently represent. Either way, their choice will contribute to the decline of Black representation in Congress.
By the time Callis decision was made last week, Florida Republicans were already voting on a new map that the Court thought would weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Tennessee Republicans were ready too. On Wednesday, they introduced a map that separates the only remaining Democratic stronghold in Memphis from its suburbs. The proposal cleared both houses of parliament yesterday, and faced massive protests that included violent confrontations between a Democratic congressman and government troops. (The MP’s brother was arrested). “They destroyed the votes of one community for their own political gain,” Democratic State Sen. London Lamar told us. “They knew they were going to take away the Negro vote, and it’s disgusting and disgusting.”
Kermit Moore, president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, described his reaction as “anger and disgust.” “This mid-decade Republican power grab is illegal, unethical, and takes power away from a community that had a chance to vote and choose their representative,” he told us. (For nearly 20 years, Memphis has voted to send a white activist, Steve Cohen, to Congress. “That doesn’t matter,” Moore said when we brought this up. “Blacks had a choice in who represented them, and Steve Cohen has been that choice.”)
Although the Supreme Court has already blessed Louisiana’s move to immediately redraw its congressional districts, the legality of the GOP’s push to build a gerrymander elsewhere is unclear. Alito’s decision directly invalidated the Louisiana map only. “These other states use” the Callis decision “as an excuse to do what they wanted to do,” Omar Noureldin, a former Justice Department official who now heads the litigation team at the watchdog group Common Cause, told us. Democrats and voting rights advocates hold out little hope of challenging Tennessee’s map, but the burden of proving intentional racial discrimination under the state’s new standards. Callis it will be very difficult to meet. “I have no hope,” Noureldin said. In Florida, voters in 2010 approved a constitutional amendment expressly outlawing partisan gerrymandering, but Democrats remain skeptical that the state’s overwhelmingly Republican-appointed Supreme Court will throw out its new map.
The legal approach is different in Alabama, which even then Callis remains under a federal court order not to redraw its congressional districts until the 2030 Census. The state is trying to lift that order, but that order, along with the looming May 19 primary, previously caused Gov. Kay Ivey to hesitate to call the legislature back into special session. He soon changed his mind, and GOP lawmakers approved bills that would set up a new congressional race if the Supreme Court rules in his favor.
Whether South Carolina redraws its map may depend on internal GOP politics as much as the judiciary. Republican leaders hesitated to act until recently, in part because targeting Clyburn’s seat would put GOP-held districts at risk in a Democratic wave election. But following Callis with that decision, President Trump has increased his pressure on red states to govern as aggressively as possible—even if it means canceling the primary elections that have already been held. “If they have to vote twice, so be it,” Trump said he wrote on Social Reality.
The president’s outcry grew two days later, when many of the candidates he supported in Indiana’s state Senate primary defeated incumbent Republicans who defied Trump by voting for an aggressive proposal in December. “There was no intention to redraw congressional district lines in South Carolina. Then the pressure came from the top to do it, and all of a sudden, we went to the races,” Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the South Carolina state House of Representatives, told us. Still, Cobb-Hunter said she wasn’t sure Republicans would ultimately vote on redistricting, or that they would win a seat if they did. “I’m not sure that what they think will happen will happen,” he said.
Whether or not Republicans have succeeded in imposing restrictions in the state of South Carolina, in the past week they have retaken a decisive lead in the national war on violence. The Democrats had briefly tied the results in Virginia, but the reversal of their electoral victory as well as the post-Callis The GOP’s moves in the South will make their efforts to take back the Legislature even more difficult. If they are disappointed by the aggressiveness of the Republican response to the Supreme Court decision, they do not claim to be surprised. Neither did Hardy, the Alabama linebacker. “This is not American. This is very American,” he told us. “This is a textbook example of how power works in this country.”
