This story is a partnership between the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Scene. The Nashville Banner is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on civic news. Visit nashvillebanner.com for more information.
How much leeway should the Tennessee General Assembly have to redraw legislative districts? Thursday morning, the Tennessee Supreme Court heard arguments in two challenges to the state’s Senate and House district maps.
Francie Hunt and Gary Wygant brought lawsuits against the state over its district maps — Hunt against the Senate map and Wygant against the House map. While a three-judge panel ruled in 2023 against Wygant’s case that the House map is unconstitutional because it split the maximum of 30 counties — a move that is allowed only under the Tennessee Constitution if it is required to appease federal redistricting laws — it made a 2-1 ruling in Hunt’s favor, finding that the Senate map was unconstitutional because the Davidson County Senate districts were not numbered consecutively.
With Republican lawmakers carving up Nashville’s congressional district, state Democrats can only find recourse in the courts
On Thursday, the bulk of the arguments revolved around standing — whether or not Hunt or Wygant had the ability to bring the suits — with the state challenging whether the redistricting actually injured either of the plaintiffs and if they had a right to make a legal challenge.
“Even if Ms. Hunt did have some constitutional interest in having the opportunity to vote for a stable Senate delegation, violation of that right by itself is not an injury,” said Assistant Solicitor General Philip Hammersley. “There has to be something else concrete.”
Hunt lives in Senate District 17, which encompasses all of Wilson County and a small piece of Davidson County and is represented by Republican Mark Pody. She lives in the Davidson County piece. When a single county has multiple Senate districts, the state constitution requires those districts to be numbered consecutively so that the senators’ election is equally staggered every two years. The current map has districts 17, 19, 20 and 21 all within Davidson County, meaning three of the four senators representing Davidson County face reelection in the same year.
“This particular Senate district includes part of Davidson County and Wilson County,” said Chief Justice Holly Kirby in response to Hammersley’s argument that Hunt was uninjured.
“She would have an interest in her senator being in as strong a position as possible if Davidson County gets attacked. And certainly, Davidson County has been criticized. How does that not manifest if there’s not stability if the configuration of this district and the non-staggering of terms places her senator in a less advantageous position to be cohesive with the other Davidson County senators?”
Hammersley went further, arguing that voters would not have standing to argue the redistricting injured them, and that “if forced to speculate,” the only people he could think of who could show they were injured were either county commissioners whose jobs were made more difficult by having to run three elections at once, or an incumbent in the misnumbered district.
“So the only injury that you can pose to us is a county commissioner who says that’s too much trouble?” asked Kirby. “That’s not why the constitutional provision was enacted. It has to do with continuity of the representation within the populace counties.”
Nashville tries to fight back against anti-Metro legislation
Turning to the Wygant case, attorney Scott Tift argued that the Supreme Court should overturn the three-judge panel’s ruling. While Tift acknowledged that the splitting of counties, which goes against the Tennessee Constitution, is allowed and sometimes necessary to align with federal redistricting laws, he argued that the burden of proof lies on the state to show that 30 divisions are necessary.
“Our founders decided to ban the dividing of counties," said Tift. "We don’t know why they did; it’s been in there for 200 years. And when you divide a county, you are expressly violating that constitutional provision. The state has to justify that divide.”
Most of the court’s questions revolved around the argument that the state legislature needs flexibility when redrawing the House districts, and that constitutional factors, such as political subdivisions, geography and population equality can be used to draw districts. However, Tift argued that while those factors are available to the state legislature, they do not override the prohibition on splitting counties.
“What this language isn’t sufficient to do is show that everything else in the constitution doesn’t apply,” said Tift. “If that were the case, districts would not need to be contiguous anymore. They wouldn’t need to be adjacent. You could pick the left and right side of the state and make that into a district, they wouldn’t have to be divided. Everything else that’s a clear prohibition in the constitution would be overridden.”
But Hammersley argued that the General Assembly has the discretion to pick other factors when drawing the districts and that the courts are “ill-equipped to second-guess legislative determinations” on how to draw the districts in a balanced way.
“So if we were to find that this is a political question and say we should not be involved, the legislature could divide every county in the state with no consequences [from the courts]?” asked Justice Jeffrey Bivins.
“The legislature could do that, yes,” said Hammersley, arguing that the consequences could come from the people of Tennessee choosing to vote out the legislators due to the redistricting.
While the three-judge panel ruled in 2023 that the Senate maps would have to be redrawn by January, which would have affected the November elections, the Supreme Court in December stayed that order, allowing the maps to remain as is until the higher court comes back with its ruling. If the Supreme Court rules in either of the plaintiffs’ favor, the ruling would likely not be effective until 2026.
