After Supreme Court ruling, Tennessee Republicans target Memphis House seat

Tennessee Republicans seized on a Supreme Court decision on April 29, 2026, to renew their push for a special session and a new congressional map that could erase the state’s last Democratic House seat. The target is Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District, the Memphis-based seat held by Steve Cohen since 2007 and the only majority-minority district in the state.

The pressure campaign follows years of partisan cartography in Tennessee. Gov. Bill Lee signed the state’s current congressional map into law on Feb. 7, 2022, after lawmakers split Nashville and Davidson County into three separate districts. That map gave Republicans control of eight of Tennessee’s nine U.S. House seats, leaving Cohen as the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.

Now Marsha Blackburn and other Tennessee Republicans are publicly pressing lawmakers to reconvene and redraw the lines again. Their goal is not subtle: eliminate the 9th District and move Tennessee from an 8-1 congressional delegation to a 9-0 Republican map before the 2026 midterms. For Memphis, the stakes are immediate. The city would lose its only Democratic voice in the House, and Black voters would lose the state’s only district drawn as a majority-minority seat.

The political opening came from Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling that weakened a key tool of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and eased constraints on race-based district drawing. The decision reverberated far beyond Louisiana. In Tennessee, it gave Republicans a clearer path to revisit lines that courts have already scrutinized and to argue for a map that would entrench their advantage for another decade.

Those earlier court fights matter. A federal appeals court in 2024 upheld Tennessee’s House map and said the evidence fit a possible political gerrymander rather than a proven racial gerrymander. That ruling left the map in place until 2032 unless lawmakers changed it, preserving the structure that carved up Nashville and locked in Republican control.

Cohen has already scheduled a press conference to denounce Blackburn’s push and discuss the Supreme Court ruling. The confrontation is about more than one district in Memphis. It is a test of how far states can go in redrawing maps to protect power, and how much room remains for Black voters, urban communities and competitive elections in Tennessee to matter at all.