Memphis, Drawn and Quartered

I have been staring at the new map of Tennessee for two hours and I am beginning to suspect the cartographer was on something. The state's Ninth Congressional District — the one that has covered Memphis and its suburbs for as long as anyone living can remember, the one that elected Steve Cohen for two decades by margins of seventy and eighty percent — has been pulled apart like meat off a bone and stuffed into three new districts, one of which now runs two hundred miles. Two hundred miles. That is not a congressional district, that is a road trip. That is roughly the distance from Brooklyn to Boston. Whoever drew this thing did not own a ruler. Whoever drew this thing owned a chainsaw.

This is what happened on Thursday in Nashville: the Republican-controlled state legislature, working under the fresh authority of a Supreme Court ruling that just last week shredded the racial-discrimination protections of the Voting Rights Act like so much confetti, took the only majority-Black congressional district in the state — sixty-nine percent Black, by Cohen's own count — and scattered the Black vote into three different districts where it now sits at roughly thirty percent each. Thirty percent does not win primaries. Thirty percent does not pick a nominee. Thirty percent is the share of voters you tell the consultants to ignore so they can focus on the people who matter, which is to say the people who voted the right way last time.

I should pause here and admit that I am writing this dispatch with the map open on one screen and a tab full of legal filings on the other and a third tab playing the Steve Cohen interview on a loop, and the longer I look at any of it the more I feel like I am the one being gerrymandered. Like someone is redrawing the boundaries of my comprehension to make sure I never quite get there. Reader, if you are confused, you are paying attention.

Cohen, for his part, sounded exhausted on NPR. Twenty years he has held this seat, and now it is being mailed to Mississippi in three separate envelopes. He told Ailsa Chang that he is one of about ten plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed Friday morning. He told her the new districts have “no commonality of interest whatsoever.” He told her, with the specific flatness of a man who has run out of euphemisms, that the President of the United States is—

“basically a gangster who learned his trade in questionable activities in New York.”

He said the President “would like to be Orbán,” referring to Viktor Orbán, the recently deposed Hungarian autocrat — and credit where it is due, the NPR host fact-checked the comparison live on air, noting that Orbán has just been voted out of office. Which in this context felt less like a correction and more like someone reminding you that the iceberg you just hit was, technically, very large.

The Tennessee governor is term-limited. He is also, Cohen pointed out, looking for a job come January. The President of the United States happens to be hiring. Ambassadors, agency heads, cabinet seats — the Cabinet is a buyer's market right now and the Governor is moving quality goods. If you would like to deliver a permanent Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives as a parting gift on your way out the statehouse door, well, here is your engraved letter opener.

The geometry, though. The geometry is what does it for me. One of the new districts runs from the Mississippi line up to the Kentucky line. One runs from Memphis along the Mississippi border almost to Chattanooga. These are not districts, these are tongue depressors. They were drawn by people who were not concerned with whether the people inside them have anything in common because the people inside them are not the point. The point is the count. The point is, in a House of Representatives where every seat now matters more than ever, you take what you can take while the law is looking the other way. And the law is currently looking very intentionally at the wall.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. Cohen, when asked what his party should do differently, said there is no other way. He said the strategy of going high while they go low has failed. He said Gavin Newsom drew his California map out of necessity, not appetite. He said if Democrats do not respond in kind to the Texas map and the Tennessee map and whatever map is currently being typed up in some fluorescent state-senate office building with the blinds drawn, the Republicans will hold the House forever. This is a man who has been in Congress since 2007 telling a national audience that the only way to stop the system from devouring itself is to feed it more.

I am not sure he is wrong. I am also not sure I want him to be right. There is a particular kind of nausea that comes from agreeing, against your will, with the man who is being eaten.

Somewhere in Memphis tonight there is a precinct captain who has spent the last decade knocking on doors. She knows the streets. She knows the names. She knows which apartment buildings have working buzzers and which ones you have to call up from the sidewalk. On Thursday, the legislature in Nashville — which has never knocked on her doors and never will — took her precinct and put it in a district that ends two hundred miles away in a town she has never visited. They did this in broad daylight. They did this because they could. They did this because last week, the Supreme Court of the United States said it was now slightly more legal than it was last month.

The cartographer's hand did not shake. The governor's hand did not shake. The President, who started this entire round of pre-midterm grave-robbing by calling up the Texas governor and, in Cohen's telling, asking for “four or five new congressmen” the way you might order takeout, has not shaken in years. He has perhaps forgotten how. The only shaking, in fact, is being done by the rest of us — and by the mapmaker's compass, which keeps drawing circles around Memphis and finding, every time, that it is empty.

Buy stock in moving trucks. Memphis is going to need to leave the state in installments.