A new court ruling approving Tennessee’s congressional map that dilutes Black voting power is the latest example of how the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority is helping Republicans win elections.
The ruling came from a lower-court panel that rejected a challenge to the map from Black voters on Thursday, blessing a map that could deliver state Republicans all nine U.S. congressional seats. They currently hold an 8-1 advantage under a map that had let Black voters elect a representative of their choice in the Memphis-based seat of Rep. Steve Cohen, who said he won’t run for re-election under the new map that splits the state’s only majority-Black district into three separate districts.
Tennessee Republicans passed the map after the Supreme Court’s April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which made it harder to bring voting rights claims, over dissent from the court’s three Democratic appointees, who called Callais the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
In this Tennessee case, the state said it was motivated by partisan advantage in crafting the new map. That might sound like an admission of impropriety but, under Supreme Court precedent, it’s not only legally acceptable but is now treated by courts as sacrosanct.
That made it an uphill battle for Black Memphians who sued to halt the new map. They argued that race was a significant motivating factor and that they were discriminated against by being split up and having their power diluted. They also claimed unlawful retaliation for having exercised their First Amendment rights.
Both the dilution and retaliation claims were rejected by the three-judge panel comprising two Trump appointees and an Obama appointee.
On the vote dilution claim, the panel said the plaintiffs had to show the state was motivated by race when it drew the new map and that it caused them discriminatory harm. But the court said the plaintiffs failed to show a discriminatory purpose and so they can’t block the map.
“Here, the map’s effects — breaking Black Memphians into three separate congressional districts — are readily explainable by political motivations,” the panel said, adding that it’s “no secret” that Memphis voters “prefer Democratic candidates and that rural voters prefer Republican candidates. So it makes sense that Tennessee’s legislature would split Memphis into thirds when attempting to create a map that favors Republican candidates.”
The panel said it’s “virtually impossible to consider the new map’s racial effects without isolating those effects — that is, drawing an alternative map that doesn’t produce racial effects, yet accomplishes Tennessee’s political objectives.” That burden of presenting such an alternative fell to the plaintiffs, the panel said, even though a 2024 Supreme Court precedent didn’t mention alternative maps being needed for vote-dilution claims. The panel cited Callais’ requirement for an alternative map in the Voting Rights Act context, which the panel said should also be a requirement for a constitutional claim like the one the Memphis plaintiffs pressed.
“So Plaintiffs are wrong that they don’t need to provide an alternative map here — at least in the face of the credible state political objectives that Defendants assert,” the panel said in its per curiam opinion, meaning one for which no single judge claims authorship. The three judges went on to say the plaintiffs haven’t produced such a map “because they can’t,” given the degree to which Memphis voters support Democratic candidates. “As a result, the road to a reliably 9-0 map runs through Memphis. Thus, political motivations readily explain the map’s dilutive effects,” the panel said.
It further cited the Supreme Court’s recent backing of Alabama’s use of a map that another three-judge panel (with two Trump appointees on it) had found not only satisfied Callais’ new test but also was illegal because it intentionally discriminated against Black Alabamians. The Tennessee panel cited the Alabama case for the proposition that while federal courts are discouraged from intervening in elections, states are allowed to make their own changes. The panel cited that notion, known as the Purcell principle, as further reason to side with Tennessee, which said that its ballots “have already been sent overseas, and that several other unworkable problems would result from an injunction” against the map.
The panel cited yet another Roberts Court election precedent in rejecting the plaintiffs’ First Amendment retaliation claim. That precedent is 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, a 5-4 ruling that said federal courts can’t even consider partisan gerrymandering claims because they present a “political question.” The panel said that “if the alleged targeting is political — punishing voters for organizing and voting for candidates the legislative majority disfavors — Rucho places the claim beyond judicial reach.”
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