Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called a special legislative session for Tuesday to consider a new congressional map that could eliminate the state’s only remaining Democratic-held House seat, giving Republicans a clean 9-0 sweep of the delegation before the 2026 midterms.
The move came days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district, ruling it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That decision in Louisiana v. Callais has sent Republican-led legislatures across the South scrambling to redraw their own maps, and Tennessee is moving fastest.
Lee announced the session after consulting with Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, House Speaker Cameron Sexton, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, and Secretary of State Tre Hargett. As Fox News Digital reported, the governor framed the effort as a constitutional obligation triggered by the high court’s ruling.
“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters. After consultation with the Lt. Governor, Speaker of the House, Attorney General, and Secretary of State, I believe the General Assembly has a responsibility to review the map and ensure it remains fair, legal, and defensible.”
Lee also said any map changes must be “enacted as soon as possible” to comply with mandatory election qualifying timelines.
The governor’s announcement followed a direct conversation last week with President Donald Trump. On Thursday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Lee “would work hard to correct the unconstitutional flaw in the Congressional Maps of the Great State of Tennessee.” Trump added that the change “should give us one extra seat.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the leading Republican candidate to succeed the term-limited Lee as governor, moved even faster. Hours after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Wednesday, Blackburn posted an image of a proposed new Tennessee map on X and urged the legislature to reconvene.
“I urge our state legislature to reconvene to redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis. It’s essential to cement @realDonaldTrump’s agenda and the Golden Age of America.”
Blackburn went further, tying the redistricting push to her gubernatorial ambitions: “I’ve vowed to keep Tennessee a red state, and as Governor, I’ll do everything I can to make this map a reality.”
The proposed map targets Memphis, where Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat, holds the state’s lone blue seat. Under the new lines, Memphis’s Black voter base would no longer be isolated from surrounding rural areas, a change that would almost certainly flip the district red. The Supreme Court’s landmark Voting Rights Act ruling narrowed the legal grounds on which such majority-minority districts had previously been defended.
Cohen, who represents the Memphis district, did not go quietly. He issued a statement calling the redistricting effort a “transparent” attempt to install a rubber stamp for the administration’s agenda and warned it would “dilute the Black vote in Tennessee to the point of irrelevance.”
He also pointed to a procedural problem. The filing deadline for candidates for the 120th Congress has already passed. Cohen argued that redrawing districts now would create an “absurd situation” in which candidates already running in one district could find themselves in another, what he called “a wholesale injustice to voters and a mockery of democracy.”
“Republican state lawmakers clearly have the votes to make this Machiavellian move. I hope fairness is part of their consideration and that they abandon it.”
Cohen told WMC Action News 5 on Sunday that he believes the change might be delayed until 2028 through legal challenges. “I think maybe it can be put off until 2028, but after 2028, it’s toast,” he said. He also acknowledged he has been “consulting with voting rights lawyers and other experts to fight this move with every option available, political and legal.”
That admission, “it’s toast”, tells you what even Cohen knows about the long-term trajectory here. The Supreme Court has spoken. The legal terrain has shifted. The only question is timing.
Tennessee is not acting alone. AP News reported that Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana are all considering redrawing congressional districts in the wake of the Callais decision. The ruling gave Republicans grounds to try to eliminate or alter majority-Black districts that have reliably elected Democrats to Congress.
Trump himself has encouraged more states to join the effort. On Sunday, he posted on social media that Republicans could gain as many as 20 House seats through redistricting nationwide. “We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done,” Trump said, as Newsmax reported. “That is more important than administrative convenience.”
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has also called a special session to consider new maps. Alabama Republican legislative leaders said a redrawn map “would give our state a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress.” Other states reportedly weighing similar action include South Carolina and Mississippi, as Just The News noted.
The Supreme Court’s willingness to strike down race-based redistricting has been building for years. The Court has also recently reversed lower courts to uphold Texas’s congressional map, signaling a consistent skepticism toward race-conscious line-drawing that doesn’t meet strict constitutional standards.
Predictably, Democrats and progressive groups have framed the redistricting push as an assault on minority representation. Cohen’s “mockery of democracy” language was echoed by civil rights organizations across the region.
Blackburn responded Monday on X with a pointed comparison.
“Since the ruling on Wednesday, liberals have bemoaned that redrawing the lines would create a ‘lack of representation.’ It’s funny, you’ve never heard a liberal bemoan the lack of conservative representation in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Hawaii, or Delaware.”
It is a fair observation. The same Democrats who defend deep-blue state delegations without a single Republican seat rarely extend that concern for representational balance when the shoe is on the other foot. Tennessee’s Republican supermajority in the General Assembly reflects the state’s political reality. A map that produces a delegation matching that reality is not a scandal, it is an alignment.
Cohen himself inadvertently made the comparison easier. He noted that after the 2020 census, Nashville’s district was redrawn and split among three districts. That redraw diluted Nashville’s urban Democratic vote, and Cohen raised no comparable alarm at the time about the process itself, only the outcome.
The Supreme Court has now delivered a series of consequential rulings this term, from redistricting to unanimously backing pro-life pregnancy centers against government overreach. The pattern is clear: the Court is enforcing constitutional limits that progressive institutions had long taken for granted.
Republican lawmakers control the Tennessee General Assembly and will have the decisive say when the special session convenes. State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, a Republican from Williamson County, made the stakes plain in comments to WMC Action News 5.
“Tennesseans have made it clear they want strong borders, a strong economy, and common-sense leadership, not the failed policies coming from Washington Democrats. We have been presented with a critical opportunity to send another Tennessee Republican to Washington who will support President Trump and prevent radical Democrat Hakeem Jeffries from becoming the next speaker. We’re not going to let that opportunity slip.”
Legal challenges are inevitable. Cohen has promised to fight. Civil rights lawyers will file suits. But the constitutional ground has shifted beneath them. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais did not merely resolve one state’s map, it redrew the legal framework for redistricting nationwide.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 was used to mandate majority-minority districts, often producing oddly shaped seats designed to guarantee racial outcomes rather than reflect communities of interest. The Court’s decision narrows that tool. States now have wider latitude to draw maps based on traditional redistricting principles, compactness, contiguity, political subdivisions, without being forced to prioritize race above all else.
Other major cases before the Court this term, from abortion pill disputes to questions of executive accountability, have drawn intense public attention. But the redistricting ruling may carry the most immediate political consequences heading into 2026.
Democrats will frame this as a power grab. They will call it voter suppression. They will invoke the Voting Rights Act as though the Supreme Court did not just redefine its application.
But the facts are straightforward. The Court ruled. The governor consulted his state’s top officials. The legislature will vote. If the map passes, it will face legal review, as every redistricting plan does. That is the process working, not the process failing.
Tennessee’s voters chose a Republican governor, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and two Republican senators. The idea that those voters should be locked into a congressional map that guarantees a Democratic seat, because the old legal framework demanded it, was always a political arrangement dressed up as a civil rights imperative.
The Supreme Court pulled back the curtain. Tennessee’s lawmakers are walking through the door.
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