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The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
A panel of three federal judges has dismissed a lawsuit that alleged racial gerrymandering in a challenge of the 2022 redistricting of the state’s congressional maps.
The lawsuit was filed last year, with plaintiffs including the Tennessee State Conference of the NAACP, the African American Clergy Collective of Tennessee, the Equity Alliance, the League of Women Voters of Tennessee, and a number of state voters, including former Democrat State Senator Brenda Gilmore.
Plaintiffs alleged that the redistricting was done to intentionally discriminate against Black voters by diminishing the impact of votes from those communities in both Memphis and the Nashville area. Their complaint stated that “candidates of choice” for those voters all lost due to the redistricting.
The judges stated that the suit must “more than plausibly allege that Tennessee’s legislators knew that their Republican-friendly map would harm voters who preferred Democratic candidates – including the higher percentage of minority voters who preferred those candidates.”
While the judicial panel did note that there were facts in the case that pointed to racial gerrymandering, those same facts would also be evidence of “political gerrymandering.”
The court also stated that some of the “facts” provided in the lawsuit, such as the expulsion of Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, had “little to do with redistricting.”
In the ruling, the judges stated that the plaintiffs “must rule out the possibility that politics drove the districting process.”
House Speaker Cameron Sexton’s office released a statement noting that they were “happy to have resolution on this matter so that we can focus on what’s ahead for Tennessee,” although the panel’s ruling does allow the lawsuit to be refiled if it is amended to “plausibly disentangle race from politics.”
