NASHVILLE — When Representative Jim Cooper announced last week that he would be retiring after 32 years in Congress, the 67-year-old did not mince words about his reasons for stepping down: “I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole.”
He was even more direct with WPLN News: “The Republicans could not beat me at the polls, so they have chosen to wreck the Nashville district. And that’s a tragedy not for me but for Nashvillians because soon you’ll have to look for your congressman in Nashville, not in Nashville but in Clarksville or Cookeville or Columbia.”
“All of this is not about me. This is a crisis for Nashville,” Mr. Cooper told The Tennessean. “Gerrymandering is an extinction event for the political life of Nashville.”
That kind of language may sound dramatic, possibly a bit hysterical. In truth, given what has happened to Nashville under the congressional redistricting plan approved by the Tennessee General Assembly last week, it’s restrained.
Mr. Cooper’s Fifth Congressional District currently consists of three tidy counties — all of Dickson and Davidson Counties, along with most of Cheatham — lined up in a row. Under gerrymandering, it will resemble spilled coffee on a crumpled map that someone tried to pour off before the stain set. The new district will meander east through parts of rural Wilson County and south through parts of wealthy Williamson County, then further south through Marshall and Maury Counties, before turning west to enfold Lewis County. Hohenwald, the Lewis County seat, is 83 miles and an entire world away from Nashville.
It would be a ludicrous map by any definition. What makes it an outrageous map from a civil rights standpoint is that it exists solely to silence the voters in this city, one of the most racially and culturally diverse in Tennessee. Under the new redistricting plan, Republicans in the legislature kept intact the counties in virtually all other House districts, but they carved Metropolitan Davidson County into three districts. Each one begins in Nashville and extends far into the overwhelmingly white surrounding counties.
Clearly this is a matter of crucial importance to Nashville voters, but it’s also a stark example of the unfairness inherent in gerrymandering itself, which is so widespread and so undemocratic as to be nothing less than a national tragedy. Gerrymandering allows elected officials to choose their own voters, instead of the other way around.
A corollary effect of this practice is to reinforce the political polarization that now makes it so difficult for elected officials from opposing parties to work together. And it’s getting only worse. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, “The current redistricting cycle will be the first since the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling that gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court, which has set the stage for perhaps the most ominous round of map drawing in the country’s history.”
To be clear, both parties engage in statehouse gerrymandering when they are in power, but at the federal level, it’s Democrats who are trying to stop it. In 2019, the For the People Act — which would expand voting rights and end partisan gerrymandering, among other reforms — passed in the House but stalled in the Republican-held Senate when Mitch McConnell refused to bring it to the floor for a vote. An updated version of the bill passed the House again last year but failed once more in the Senate when Republicans filibustered. It’s very clear which party wants reform and which does not.
As for who will now represent the bleeding stumps of this dismembered city, the journalist Steve Cavendish identified some likely suspects in a demoralizing article for The Nashville Scene last week. A large portion of North Nashville, which is more than 70 percent Black, will now be part of the seventh district, which is currently nearly 80 percent white.
That district is represented by Mark Green, a Republican from Clarksville (52 miles from Nashville). In Congress, Mr. Green voted, as Mr. Cavendish put it, “against background checks for firearm sales, against net neutrality, against raising the minimum wage, against requiring campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance, against restoring parts of the Voting Rights Act, against the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill in 2020, against the pandemic aid bill and against raising coronavirus stimulus payments from $600 to $2,000.” Mark Green, in other words, votes against basically everything that Nashville stands for.
Things look no better in the redrawn sixth district, which will now include the creative-class hub that is liberal East Nashville. Representative John Rose — who is based in Cookeville, 81 miles from Nashville — votes against so much of what we stand for that he even voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to one of the officers who defended the Capitol during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s not clear yet which Republicans will run in the newly drawn fifth, from which Mr. Cooper is retiring, but you can be sure that every option will be odious. One name being floated is that of former Fox News commentator Morgan Ortagus, who has already received the endorsement of Donald Trump.
Joe Biden won Nashville with almost 65 percent of the vote, a greater share than Mr. Trump won Tennessee with. To have these anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-history philistines representing this city would seem to be the real point of the redistricting map. Republicans don’t want simply to solidify their power. They want to silence anyone who disagrees with them, even when those people are in the majority.
This is a blue city, but it isn’t an unvariegated shade of blue. Nashville is also the buckle of the Bible Belt, the birthplace of the Grand Ole Opry and the harbor of a lot of old Southern money. In many ways, Jim Cooper has been the perfect representative for a place like Nashville.
A member of the Blue Dog Coalition, he was just liberal enough to make the conservatives in Belle Meade roll their eyes but vote for him anyway. He was just conservative enough to make the liberals in East Nashville take to Twitter but not to the streets. Every two years, Republicans tried to unseat him, and every two years they lost. Progressive primary challengers met the same fate. Jim Cooper has always been resoundingly re-elected, only once with less than 60 percent of the vote.
He is a skilled politician with his finger directly on the socially liberal/fiscally conservative sweet spot for voters in a vibrant, raucous, contentious old city now undergoing meteoric growth. But Mr. Cooper won re-election again and again because he is also a good man. People on both sides of the aisle like to disparage elected officials as crooked, self-interested sellouts, but no one could ever make such a claim about Jim Cooper.
This is how representative democracy is supposed to work: Good people, well-informed and energetic, take office to represent the voters who elected them and also the voters who did not. Demagogue-wannabes need not apply.
That Nashville is losing such a faithful public servant to a gerrymandered map is a travesty of justice. I may have disagreed with more than a few of my congressman’s votes, I may have wished that he had been more often a full-throated advocate, but I always trusted him. I understood that his job was to represent all of Nashville and not just people like me. Jim Cooper is a deeply intelligent, caring, even-minded public servant, and no one in the Tennessee Republican Party is fit to lick his boots.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
