ongi etorri my twisted mind era

CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.

No referendum. No special election. No public vote.

Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.

This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.

150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.

The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.

Firstly, I found a data-focused analysis of the redistricting. The tl;dr is that Republicans claim the redistricting was done to balance urban/rural voting blocks, BUT the actual data indicates that urban voting power was ONLY broken up in Black-majority Memphis and other urban centers in east Tennessee were left alone (Nashville was also chopped up a bit, but my potentially flawed understanding is it was already divided up a lot from a previous redistricting). There's also statistical evidence that gerrymandering increased across the board. The NAACP of Tennessee has already filed a lawsuit.

Secondly, in a really heinous move, a bill was passed* that eliminates the requirement to inform voters of district changes. That means a lot of people are not going to know their voting place and/or precinct changed until they actually show up to vote because there's no legal obligation to tell them (they would have to know to go online and check), UNLESS everyone gets really loud about this. Also, learn this lesson: double and triple check your voter registration leading up to elections, because shit like this can happen. *All news coverage I found was written before it was passed, but this bill tracker indicates it was signed by the Governor May 7.

Finally, I wanted to note that the redistricting happened ultra fast and after some primary elections had occurred on May 5 (the new district map was adopted May 7). That means that: 1) the process of candidates qualifying and campaigning was already in full swing and now many candidates will have to scramble to either re-qualify or continue in a new area. I don't have any sources to back this up, but my hunch is that is will disproportionately affect Black candidates running in previously majority Black districts, whose entire voter base just changed overnight. And then 2) because this happened AFTER primaries, that means some voters will be forced to vote in a general election for candidates that were not in the primary they participated in. Both prospects are insanely undemocratic. (For further context, the May 5 primaries were only for a handful of smaller positions and primaries for bigger positions will be in August, so that's why a lot of coverage of this is sort of just ignoring some primaries already happened.)