As discussed in the posting here on August 28, 2026, the Tennessee state legislature enacted a new statute on May 7, 2026, to reapportion Tennessee’s nine Congressional Districts. The only occasions for this reapportionment was the United States Supreme Court’s decision of April 29, 2026, re-interpreting the federal Voting Rights Act,[1] and President Trump’s nearly immediate request of the Tennessee legislature to reshape Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District pursuant to that decision. The Ninth Congressional District is currently represented by a long term incumbent who belongs to the Democratic Party. The President wants someone from his own Republican Party to win the upcoming mid-term Congressional election in November. Predictably, lawsuits were filed under the federal Constitution to challenge the validity of the Republican-controlled state legislature’s immediate compliance with the President’s request.
On October 1, 2026, a three-judge panel of lower-level federal judges sitting in Nashville, Tennessee dismissed the combined lawsuits brought under the Constitution.[2] Those judges admitted that the legislature had split the black majority of people in the Ninth District who had been controlling the outcome of Congressional elections there for several years into three separate, gerrymandered districts. The majority white voters in those newly formed districts had elected Republican Party members to Congress for the same period of time. The Republican Party leaders of the state legislature maintained that their party members had engaged in the “political” gerrymandering approved by the Supreme Court back in May, and had not engaged in the “racial” gerrymandering disapproved by the Court in that same Case. The lower level federal judges in Nashville accepted the self-proclaimed good faith of the Republicans argument and threw the plaintiffs’ cases out without an evidentiary hearing or trial on any disputed facts.
At this point, none of the litigants have denied that the explicit language of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the “racial” gerrymandering of Congressional districts. The perceived defect in the plaintiffs’ lawsuits is the absence of proof in the cases that the Tennessee legislature intentionally discriminated against black people by enacting a new redistricting statute.[3] However, the plaintiffs have never been given the chance to prove, with evidence, that “racial” discrimination did in fact occur in the legislature’s very quick work to approve President Trump’s request.
The Nashville judges should have read the Supreme Court’s recent case a little closer. Section 2 of the 15th Amendment authorizes Congress to enforce Section 1 thereof, and Congress has made a reasonable effort to do so by enacting the Voting Rights Act, particularly for redistricting matters like this one, at 52 U.S.C. § 10301(a) and (b). In its Louisiana v. Callais Case,[4] , the Supreme Court did go far in narrowing down the current coverage of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act. But, in the end, the Court offered this description of a plaintiff’s burden-of-proof in a modern 15th Amendment redistricting case. Tracking the language of 52 U.S.C. § 10301(b), the Court said:
What must be shown is exactly what the [Voting Rights Act] call[s] for. A [Voting Rights Act plaintiff] in a vote dilution case must show that a districting scheme denies members of a racial group the same ‘opportunity’ as other voters to elect the candidates they prefer. When that is shown, the circumstances are comparable to those in White [case citation omitted], the decision from which the new language added by Congress in 1982 was drawn. That is, the circumstances must give rise to a strong inference of racial discrimination.
Louisiana v. Calais, 146 S.Ct.1131 at 1162 (2026) (explanatory brackets added).
The black-majority citizens of the City of Memphis, Tennessee, which comprised most of the old Ninth District, are a distinct “racial group.” Before the legislature’s redistricting enactment, they all used to live and control the outcome of elections in the old Ninth Congressional District, without any gerrymandering. The state legislature’s new “districting scheme” of May 2026 denies that “racial group” “the same ‘opportunity’ as other voters [i.e., the white-majority voters now living in the newly gerrymandered districts of 2026] “to elect the candidates they prefer.”[5] In the dismissed lawsuit, those facts had at least been alleged by plaintiffs. Those allegations should have been given a full evidentiary hearing by the judges before throwing the allegations out. Instead, they were dismissed “with prejudice” on the basis of a “presumption” that has been rebutted by a “strong inference of racial discrimination” contained in the plaintiffs’ written complaints. If that “presumption” remains in the Constitutional Law of the United States, our country runs the risk of our judicial branch of government reducing the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution into a dead letter. All of the soldiers who died in the American Civil War, that ultimately produced the 15th Amendment, deserve better than that.
/s/ Dan Rhea
[1] Louisiana v. Calais, 146 S.Ct. 1131 (2026)
[2] Sherman v. Hargett, (M.D. Tenn. 2026, docket no. 3:26-cv-00616)
[3] See case cited in footnote two supra.
[4] See footnote one supra.
[5] The legislature therefore at least “considered” the color of those citizens in its redistricting decision, and that gives “rise to a strong inference of racial discrimination” in violation of the 15th Amendment. See 15th Amendment phrase “’On Account of’ in Account, N., Sense P.1.d.iii.i.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8434459699.
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