CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

On May 7, 2026, the Tennessee state legislature enacted, and Tennessee’s Governor signed Tennessee House Bill 7003. The statute gerrymandered[1] Tennessee’s Congressional District 9, that had consisted almost entirely of Shelby County, Tennessee, and its county seat Memphis, into three new districts encompassing numerous other Tennessee counties stretching as far away as the suburbs of Nashville. The sole purpose of the statute was to increase the number of Republican Tennessee Congressmen by one person, at the expense of Tennessee’s only Democratic Congressman. The targeted Democratic Congressman had been the consistent choice of the majority of voters in Shelby County, i.e., the old District 9, for several years. A majority of the voters in Shelby County were well known to be black people. Not very many black people, and not very many Democrats lived in the outlying counties that were incorporated into the three new Congressional Districts created by House Bill 7003. Those facts were also well known in Tennessee on May 7, 2026. House Bill 7003 thereby served its purpose of splitting the majority black Democratic vote in Shelby County, Tennessee three ways, to assure the election loss of any Democratic candidate for Congress coming from Shelby County in the upcoming mid-term Congressional elections set for November 3, 2026.

Tennessee House Bill 7003 was and is patently unconstitutional. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted shortly after the Civil War fomented by both the enslavement, and the official discounting of black people[2], provides that

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

U.S. Const., Amendment XV, Section 1.

The federal Voting Rights Act, enacted by Congress to enforce the 15^th Amendment, provides that

A violation of [the 15^th Amendment] is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by [the 15^th Amendment] in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. 

52 U.S.C. § 10301(b) (bracketed words paraphrase the technical words in the statute)

In short, the 15^th Amendment prohibits the gerrymandering of election districts to dilute, i.e., “abridge,” the collective voting power of black people living in a single voting district, like Shelby County, Tennessee. Tennessee House Bill 7003 was deliberately designed to do just that. The enacted Bill is “repugnant to the Constitution” and should therefore be declared “void” by the courts. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 180 (1803).

/s/ Dan D. Rhea

[1] To see what this means, see “Gerrymander.” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/gerrymander.

[2] See U.S. Const., Art. I, § 2 (The “Three-Fifths” Clause) now repealed by the 13^th Amendment.