Parcel viewer nashville4/24/2023 That district is represented by Mark Green, a Republican from Clarksville (52 miles from Nashville). A large portion of North Nashville, which is more than 70 percent Black, will now be part of the seventh district, which is currently nearly 80 percent white. It’s very clear which party wants reform and which does not.Īs for who will now represent the bleeding stumps of this dismembered city, the journalist Steve Cavendish identified some likely suspects in a demoralizing article for The Nashville Scene last week. An updated version of the bill passed the House again last year but failed once more in the Senate when Republicans filibustered. In 2019, the For the People Act - which would expand voting rights and end partisan gerrymandering, among other reforms - passed in the House but stalled in the Republican-held Senate when Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to the floor for a vote. To be clear, both parties engage in statehouse gerrymandering when they are in power, but at the federal level, it’s Democrats who are trying to stop it. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, “The current redistricting cycle will be the first since the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling that gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court, which has set the stage for perhaps the most ominous round of map drawing in the country’s history.” Gerrymandering allows elected officials to choose their own voters, instead of the other way around.Ī corollary effect of this practice is to reinforce the political polarization that now makes it so difficult for elected officials from opposing parties to work together. Each one begins in Nashville and extends far into the overwhelmingly white surrounding counties.Ĭlearly this is a matter of crucial importance to Nashville voters, but it’s also a stark example of the unfairness inherent in gerrymandering itself, which is so widespread and so undemocratic as to be nothing less than a national tragedy. Under the new redistricting plan, Republicans in the legislature kept intact the counties in virtually all other House districts, but they carved Metropolitan Davidson County into three districts. What makes it an outrageous map from a civil rights standpoint is that it exists solely to silence the voters in this city, one of the most racially and culturally diverse in Tennessee. It would be a ludicrous map by any definition. Hohenwald, the Lewis County seat, is 83 miles and an entire world away from Nashville. The new district will meander east through parts of rural Wilson County and south through parts of wealthy Williamson County, then further south through Marshall and Maury Counties, before turning west to enfold Lewis County. Under gerrymandering, it will resemble spilled coffee on a crumpled map that someone tried to pour off before the stain set. Cooper’s Fifth Congressional District currently consists of three tidy counties - all of Dickson and Davidson Counties, along with most of Cheatham - lined up in a row. In truth, given what has happened to Nashville under the congressional redistricting plan approved by the Tennessee General Assembly last week, it’s restrained. That kind of language may sound dramatic, possibly a bit hysterical. “Gerrymandering is an extinction event for the political life of Nashville.” And that’s a tragedy not for me but for Nashvillians because soon you’ll have to look for your congressman in Nashville, not in Nashville but in Clarksville or Cookeville or Columbia.” He was even more direct with WPLN News: “The Republicans could not beat me at the polls, so they have chosen to wreck the Nashville district. No one tried harder to keep our city whole.” NASHVILLE - When Representative Jim Cooper announced last week that he would be retiring after 32 years in Congress, the 67-year-old did not mince words about his reasons for stepping down: “I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville.
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