The NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit Thursday afternoon challenging the legality of the state’s new congressional map, redrawn so a majority-Black voting district was eliminated.

NAACP Tennessee President Gloria Sweet-Love filed an emergency petition to stop the map from going into effect in Davidson County Chancery Court. The lawsuit was filed less than three hours after Gov. Bill Lee signed the new map into law.

The Tennessee Legislature’s Republican supermajority passed the map — carving up a historic Democratic-held district in Shelby County — during a whirlwind special session called at President Donald Trump’s behest days after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened a key section of the Voting Rights Act. Protesters opposing the redistricting flooded the Capitol for the three-day session’s entirety.

When Lee called the special session, the lawsuit argues, he did not specifically state that its purpose included repealing or suspending a Tennessee law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting. The General Assembly passed a bill nullifying that law during the session, and Lee signed it into law shortly before the final vote on the new map.

The Tennessee Constitution stipulates that the General Assembly “shall enter no legislative business except that for which they were specifically called together,” and the map therefore violates “clear and unambiguous Tennessee statutory law and the mandates of the Tennessee Constitution,” the lawsuit states.

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.

Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.

Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.

Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.

The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. She got back to her car and wept.

The Alabama Senate gave final approval Friday to a congressional gerrymandering plan designed to strip Black voters of political representation and upend an active primary election — even though voters have already begun casting absentee ballots.

The bill now heads to Gov. Kay Ivey (R), who is expected to sign it.

The measure won’t immediately go into effect. Alabama is currently bound by a legal agreement to use its court-ordered congressional map until 2030, and it can only implement the redistricting legislation if federal courts lift the injunction.

During the session, state Sen. Rodger Smitherman (D) condemned his Republican colleagues for ramming through the bill. He said they were playing with Black people’s lives for the sake of politics.

South Carolina Republicans took the first step Friday to cancel the state’s June primary election — to give more time to potentially pass a new gerrymandered congressional map — as absentee voting is already underway.

A South Carolina House subcommittee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance a bill that would move the state’s June 9 primary election to August 11, with the expectation that the legislature would redraw the state’s congressional map to dismantle its lone Democratic district, represented by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn.

The vote came after the committee heard hours of public testimony urging lawmakers to reject pressure to delay the state’s primaries and draw new congressional maps. In all, 23 South Carolina residents testified against redistricting and moving the state’s primaries. No one spoke in support of either measure.

More than 6,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters for the June primary — more than 200 of those ballots have since been returned, according to the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC). Should the legislature approve the measure to delay the state’s primary, those ballots will be disqualified.

Conway Belangia, the executive director of the SCEC, said at Friday’s hearing that moving the primary to August “will be difficult… but it is possible.”

The redistricting news for Democrats has gone from bad to worse.

A week after the US Supreme Court effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to Southern states invalidating majority-Black districts across the South, the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday overturned a redistricting referendum approved by voters last month that was expected to net Democrats four new US House seats.

These two decisions by conservative-dominated courts now put Democrats at a significant disadvantage in the gerrymandering arms race launched by Donald Trump last summer when he ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican seats.

With the passage of the Virginia map, Democrats had mostly succeeded in reaching a draw with Republicans in the redistricting wars. But with the Virginia map overturned and Southern states—including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina—rushing to pass new maps before the midterms, Democrats could face a four to five-seat disadvantage heading into November, according to Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report. While that is not insurmountable in a wave election—and Democrats could still pick up two seats in Virginia under the existing map—it gives Democrats little margin for error in the effort to take back the House.

In the 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the April referendum violated the state Constitution because amendments must be passed twice by the legislature, with an election in between. The first time they passed it was after early voting started, so it doesn’t count. “This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote,” the court wrote, “and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

Alejandra Caraballo
‪@esqueer.net‬

My entire lifetime has seen Republicans benefit from every structural bias in the system: two republican presidents elected while losing the popular vote,the senate being biased towards small rural conservative states,house and state legislatures being heavily gerrymandered, and a captured SCOTUS.

And now they're using that structural bias in the system to turn it into a permanent advantage that will make it nearly impossible to vote them out of power. It's turning us into an illiberal democracy with a permanent ruling class dominated by white men.

People point to Hungary but it took 15 years to get Orban out and that's after he destroyed the country and made it the poorest in the EU with a massive brain drain. Unfortunately, that's the only way out. Republicans have to fuck up so badly that the voters finally say enough, and even then...

Most states in the deep south have had permanent republican rule since the 90s and there's no hope to change it for generations given the polarization along racial lines. This is despite rampant corruption, dysfunction, and disasters in all these states. It'll take near collapse to dislodge them.

So realistically, we're just going to have to deal with Republicans having substantial structural advantages for decades while we watch everything around us degrade and crumble. Living standards, cost of living, education, healthcare, the environment, etc. will all just get immeasurably worse.

It's depressing to know that the best years of your life were likely in the 2010s and we'll all be looking back in a decade or two wondering how this country could be so stupid to throw it all away. We can't say they weren't warned because they were. Unfortunately, people only learn from disaster.

The case is about whether early voting nullifies Virginia’s power to amend its constitution

Scott turns on the provision of the Virginia Constitution that governs the state’s constitutional amendments. Briefly, in order to amend the constitution, the state legislature must vote to propose an amendment. Then, “after the next general election of members of the House of Delegates” is held, the legislature must again vote to approve the same amendment.

After that amendment is approved twice, by two subsequent legislatures, it is then submitted to the voters for their approval. If a majority of the voters approve of the amendment, it becomes part of the state constitution.

The majority of the state Supreme Court, however, claims that the more recent amendment is invalid because, when the state legislature first proposed this amendment in October 2025, it did so after early voting had already begun in the state. This is a problem, they claim, because it means that “1.3 million or so Virginians” had already cast their ballots before the amendment was proposed, and thus they were denied their opportunity to express support or disapproval of the proposed amendment when they cast their vote for state lawmakers.

In essence, the majority argues that Virginia voters who opposed the amendment were disenfranchised because they were denied an opportunity to vote for lawmakers who oppose it in the 2025 state legislative elections.

But there’s a pretty glaring problem with this disenfranchisement argument: The amendment was submitted to the voters in a referendum. Virginia voters were, in fact, given an opportunity to cast an up or down vote on the redistricting amendment. And a majority of them voted to approve it.