Image: Democrat Sens. London Lamar and Ramesh Akbari of Memphis and Sen. Charlane Oliver of Nashville outside Senate chambers on May 5, 2026. “This is a line in the sand,” Akbari told GOP senators of a hurried redistricting. Image Credit: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only. Per The Tennessee Lookout’s Republishing Guidelines, this article has been edited for writing style & length.***
By: Sam Stockard, Cassandra Stephenson and Adam Friedman [Tennessee Lookout-CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] –
Tennessee lawmakers adopted a set of rules on Tuesday for their special legislative session that would limit public comment and shorten the time frame for the public to view any new U.S. House map.
The rules are likely to allow the state’s Republican supermajority to pass a new map by their anticipated timeline of Thursday, as the GOP hopes to tilt a Democrat-held U.S. House seat in Memphis in its favor.
The rules passed Tuesday morning came as hundreds of protesters descended on the State Capitol in Nashville to push back against the redistricting effort.
“I think about my forefathers, and everything that they gave — sacrificed — for me to have a right to vote,” said Tim Hines, who traveled from Columbia to the Capitol for the protest. “I’ve been watching things slowly erode that sacrifice, and I came out here today to let them know that I will not be erased.”
Just before the session was scheduled to gavel in, multiple lawmakers and prominent political activists spoke to a crowd gathering outside the State Capitol. Several speakers likened the protest to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
“This feels like my teenage years, when we didn’t even have the Voting Rights (Act) passed,” NAACP Tennessee State Conference President Gloria Sweet-Love said.
Gov. Bill Lee called state lawmakers back to the Capitol less than two weeks after they wrapped their normal legislative session to draw a new congressional map in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the federal Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court ruled that states are no longer required to create legislative maps with majority-minority districts for Black voters.
This restriction has not been court-mandated in Tennessee’s case, but the state legislature has adopted it in practice when drawing its U.S. House map. State lawmakers created a U.S. House seat that includes all of Memphis, effectively helping Democrats hold on to it as the state leadership has shifted further away from the party.
Rep. Andrew Farmer, a Sevierville Republican, said the legislature wouldn’t have returned if not for the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, adding the legislature would evaluate the opinion and see where the state’s plan falls.
“The governor called us back,” said Farmer, who will chair a House redistricting committee. “We didn’t call ourselves back. So we’re here trying to follow the law.”
President Donald Trump and Tennessee U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is also running for governor this year, have been pressuring state lawmakers to draw a new map that they hoped would take effect by the 2026 midterms in November.
Trump won 64% of the vote in Tennessee in 2024, a state that had a Democrat governor as recently as 2010. This increase in Republican support over the years created a supermajority that allowed the party to draw a new map in 2022 that split Nashville across three congressional seats, flipping a district the Democrats had held for nearly 150 years.
Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said he attended the protest because the city didn’t have a member of Congress who could attend.
Three Republican U.S. Congress members represent parts of Nashville, but none of them have an actual office in the city.
“We are signaling that we stand with Memphis in this moment,” O’Connell said.
Tennessee’s Congressional delegation after 2022 shifted from 7-2 favoring Republicans to 8-1. The GOP hopes the new map would give it a 9-0 advantage.
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a former state senator and Memphis Democrat who has held District 9 or two decades, said the special session was a “terrible day” for Memphis and Tennessee.
“To think the legislature I served in for 24 years as a senator is doing this to the second largest city in the state and one of the most iconic cities in the country and doing it with impunity because they have no regard except to worship the most corrupt president we’ve ever known, it’s unbelievable,” Cohen said.
House Republicans turned back efforts by House Minority Leader Karen Camper, a Memphis Democrat, to bring “transparency” to the redistricting plan and adopted their own rules that include barring anyone who disrupts meetings for the entire special session.
The Republican-controlled rules committee voted down Camper’s proposals to make a redistricting map available to the public for at least 72 hours before a vote. Camper’s effort to hold public hearings in the Memphis congressional district also fell short, along with a request that the legislature provide a legal basis for changing district lines mid-cycle, and explain how the new map would comply with the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act.
“The world is watching.” Camper said. “The world knows that in this country, in this state, we really don’t value democracy.”
The first thing legislators will have to do is pass a law allowing them to draw a new map. Tennessee’s statute requires that a new U.S. House map be drawn following the census, and bars a redrawing until the next one. Following the 2020 census, lawmakers drew a U.S. House map that went into effect for the 2022 midterm election.
Camper also requested that the financial impact of each bill be included in any measure the legislature considers. Her proposal would also have prevented the legislature from considering the same bill in committees and on the House floor on the same day.
Another part of her plan would have required House members who participate in drawing the district map to disclose any entity involved in the process, as well as the use of data, which would become part of the official legislative record.
Republican lawmakers are on a tight timeline to pass a new election map. Tennessee will hold its primary election on Aug. 6, and qualifying deadlines for candidates in those races passed in March.
During the special session, lawmakers will have to write new rules for candidates to run and survive any potential legal challenges.
“This racist redistricting is an attempt to have a new three-fifths compromise (to) count the bodies for representational participation in Congress but deny the agency and humanity,” said state Rep. Justin Pearson, a Memphis Democrat who began campaigning against Cohen for the now-targeted congressional seat months ago.
