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Tennessee lawmakers plan to divide the growing city of Nashville into several congressional districts, a redistribution plan that would almost certainly doom the incumbent Democratic representative and send a Republican to Washington in his stead.
“There were people who proposed dividing Davidson County, and there were those who proposed not to divide Davidson County,” House Speaker Cameron told NBC News. Sexton, a Republican. “It’s possible.”
Sexton said the maps had yet to be drawn and that a draft would not be made public until early January. But Democrats, especially one whose US House seat may be in jeopardy, have already started sounding the alarm bells.
“It is highly likely that they will rule Tennessee and destroy the identity and political clout of Nashville,” said Representative Jim Cooper, Democratic Congressman who has represented Tennessee’s 5th District since 2003, in an interview. “It’s kind of like political looting. If you know the store is open and no one is looking, you’re going to steal as much as you can.”
He recently appeared at a State House hearing on the redistribution to publicly advocate with lawmakers to keep Nashville intact. He also said he was pressuring Republicans who directly control the process in hopes of avoiding a redistribution maneuver that could cost him his job and, he says, harm the city’s future.
The US Constitution requires a census every 10 years. The data is used to redraw congressional districts to represent population changes, so that each congressional district has approximately the same number of people. The process has become deeply political, with the two sides vying to use their state house advantage to draw cards that will help them control the American house.
Since the last round of redistribution, Middle Tennessee and Nashville, one of the few blue spots in reliable red state, have exploded. The current 5th Congressional District, which includes all of Davidson County, as well as the more rural Dickson County and parts of Cheatham County, is too large and needs to be changed. Davidson County is now about the right size for its own congressional district, but slicing experts have said the city could also be divided between surrounding conservative areas in what is known as a gerrymander “slice of pizza.” “. The end result would almost certainly eliminate the city’s ability to elect Democrats, these experts said, since its blue voters would be spread across several very conservative districts.
Debby Gould, president of the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, said Nashville residents are widely opposed to dividing the city into different districts. The group sought public input and called on lawmakers to be transparent about their plans and to listen to people’s opinions on how maps should be drawn.
“When you think of all the ways money goes to the state, including the federal government, including health issues, including education issues, we have a school district of 86,000 children,” she said in an interview, noting that the city and Davidson consolidated into one government in 1963. “There are a lot of reasons you want someone to be your lawyer in Congress with a voice. unified, and not feel like we are just a subsection, we in Nashville are not a subsection of another group.
Sexton argued that not all counties can be held together and suggested that it wasn’t always a bad thing to have a city like Nashville split into chunks that are represented by multiple members of Congress.
“If more than one person represents a county, then you have more votes in Washington,” he said.
State Representative Kevin Vaughan, a Republican who will oversee maps of Middle Tennessee for the House Redistribution Committee, said the county split will fundamentally depend on demographics.
“The numbers will speak for themselves,” he said.
Vaughan said lawmakers wanted to draw fair districts – the ones that wouldn’t get sued and drag them into a lengthy, taxpayer-funded lawsuit – but said he wasn’t “predisposed” to how to draw the maps. in Nashville.
Cooper said most of his promised challengers in 2022 are Republicans and that he believes they would be tempted to run with maps that divide Nashville into multiple districts, making more Democratic urban areas “very digestible.”
One of his challengers is Robby Starbuck, a Republican supported by Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Starbuck lives outside the existing neighborhood; Under Tennessee law, lawmakers are not required to live within the district they represent.
“I know the only thing people are going to say about me is, ‘His house is not here,'” Starbuck told the Nashville Tennessean. “It is very possible that my farm ends up in the district and his house cannot end up in the district.”
But not all Republicans are keen on dividing Nashville.
“My belief is that it would be a bad idea,” said U.S. Representative Mark Green, a Republican who represents the state’s 7th district immediately west of Nashville, at a recent event with a chamber of commerce. local, according to The Nashville Post: “If you look at Atlanta and Philadelphia – two cities that have tried to do this – in three to four cycles, those cities have flipped.”
Green said Republicans now hold a “very comfortable” majority in the US delegation in Tennessee, with seven seats to the Democrats’ two. “We can stay really comfortable at seven-and-two for 10 years, or we can take risks, and we can probably get an eight-and-one for four to six years,” he said, according to the outlet.
Nashville would not be the first city in the South to be spliced by Republican redistribution plans.
Ten years ago, a map drawn by Republicans divided the liberal city of Asheville, North Carolina into two districts, sending most of the city to a nearby conservative neighborhood as district lines meandered through. residential communities for no apparent rhyme or reason. The result? Two secure Republican seats.
The new district lines made it impossible for then-US Representative Heath Shuler, a moderate Democrat and former NFL quarterback, to get re-elected. He retired to spend more time with his family and was replaced by some of the more conservative Republicans in Congress: Mark Meadows, who retired to serve in President Donald Trump’s White House, and later Cawthorn , the lawmaker who endorsed one of Cooper’s challengers. .
At the time, Republicans in North Carolina openly recognized that the district maps they drew for the United States House districts were a political gerrymander. And those maps – which were contested and redesigned several times throughout the decade – ultimately helped pave the way for more partisan gerrymandering across the country. In 2019, the United States Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering that had occurred in North Carolina and Maryland was legal under federal law.
Racial gerrymandering remains illegal under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which will likely prevent Republicans from considering a gerrymander in Tennessee’s other Blue Pocket, the 9th district of majority Black Democratic Representative Steve Cohen . Like Asheville, Nashville is a predominantly white city.
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