Did You Know Nashville Doesn't Have Congressional Representation?

No, really.

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Not pictured: Cranes, and whatever else has been built since this picture was taken earlier this year. ["Nashville Skyline from Ft Negly 2024" by Jschnake is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.]

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Well, this has been a scary week, hasn’t it?

It remains to be seen whether Everything Changed™ (truly, in a lasting way) in the presidential race after that disastrous debate between President Joe Biden and the convicted felon, traitor and adjudicated rapist he’s running against — whether Biden will remain in the race, whether he will step aside and we will rally around the vice president. But that happened. And then the Supreme Court Donald Trump helped to steal affirmed that, at least while they’re around, their patron is allowed to commit any crimes against the Republic he wants, as long as he promises they’re part of his official duties.

All this has people understandably incredibly anxious, and poring through and sharing things like Project 2025 to really get a sense of what America’s white conservative Christian fascists are really up to, what kind of dictator they want to make Donald Trump into, should he find his way back into the Oval Office in 2025.

So, um, happy Independence Day! Hope you had whatever kinds of fun you wanted to have yesterday, or that you’re planning to have it this weekend! You deserve it.

In the first month of the Moral High Ground’s existence, we’ve had occasion to talk about a bunch of anti-LGBTQ assholes, and we’ve talked about why Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is the patron saint/mascot of white conservative Christians who have failed up into places of power they don’t deserve, and who don’t believe the rules apply to them by virtue of their holy status as white conservative Christians.

This week, briefly, I want to talk about something a bit different, but which relates to the thesis of this site just the same. Something that underscores how much more work we have to do after we save the world in November.

Have you ever been to Nashville?

If you don’t know, your Moral High Ground newsletter boss is a longtime Memphian (that’s the demonym if you didn’t know). I’ve been going to Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, for decades. It’s three hours away.

There’s long been a rivalry between Memphis and Nashville, which I personally think is kind of silly. They are very different cities, with very different histories, and very different strengths and struggles. Also, quite frankly, Nashville is a lot bigger than Memphis now. The metro population is over two million and growing, and at any given time there are 5,000 bachelor and bachelorette parties in town, drunkenly riding the streets on pedal taverns listening to Chumbawamba and getting their pictures taken in front of the same five murals. (You can make fun of them, everyone else does.)

It’s kind of, um, White-Lanta. (Cool Nashvillians correctly understand that as an insult.)

It’s the home of commercial country music, but it’s also the home of real country music and Americana the Ryman Auditorium and untold numbers of independent musicians and songwriters who’ve come to town to make their way. It’s teeming with celebrities, and real estate prices are through the roof. (Cranes, cranes, and more cranes!)

All this in the middle of one of the reddest states in the South. (Which is part of why Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire loudly moved their offices from LA to Nashville a few years back, to do their part to make Nashville like Hollywood, but for talentless racist conservatives.)

That said, it’s a very, very blue city, just like Memphis is.

This past weekend I popped into town for a quick couple nights to see Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy 30th anniversary tour, which was excellent. It was full circle in a way, as I road-tripped many a time in high school and early college to see McLachlan’s Lilith Fair tours in Nashville, and also Atlanta. (Indeed, that’s how I fell in love with the other Nashville, the one that’s the home of living geniuses like Emmylou Harris.)

Our seats were OK.

On this trip, though, and every time I’ve gone up since last year, I couldn’t help but notice that this thriving, growing, insanely busy traffic jam of a blue metropolis does not have representation in Congress.

Wait what?

Don’t get me wrong, there are technically people in the United States Congress who have parts of Nashville in their districts. But just like the six partisan hack conservative members of the US Supreme Court don’t have a legitimate claim to representing the interests of real Americans, these congressmen are not qualified, nor have they earned the right to represent a real city like Nashville, full of brilliant, dynamic, vibrant people who are doing something with their lives.

Look at this map:

Those are the nine congressional districts of Tennessee since 2023.

Before that, the map looked like this:

Notice the difference?

If you don’t know this area intimately, let me Tennessee-splain.

Over there in the left southwest corner is Memphis, where I live. Shelby County, which contains Memphis and some suburbs, is wildly blue, voting 64.4 percent to 34 for Joe Biden in 2020. The 9th Congressional District, which roughly overlaps with most of Shelby County, has been protected by what little was left of the Voting Rights Act as a Black-majority district. (Shockingly, the illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court just made racial discrimination in redistricting a lot easier in May of this year.) The 9th has been represented for years by Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen.

Nashville, near the geographic middle of the state, shares a municipal government with Davidson County. (The populations of the proper cities are similar, though Nashville’s explosive growth means it’s effectively twice the size of Memphis now, from a metro area perspective.) Davidson County in 2020 voted 64.5 percent to 32.4 for Joe Biden.

Similarly wildly blue!

But the Nashville area wasn’t protected by that pesky old Voting Rights Act, which meant when it came time to redistrict in 2022, the white supremacist Republican supermajority in the legislature — yep, the same one that showed its entire ass last year when it started expelling Black Democratic state reps for trying to protect Tennesseans from gun violence in the direct wake of the Covenant school shooting that devastated Nashville — felt free to go totally fucking ripshit disenfranchising many of the voters whose tax dollars actually pay to make the state worth a damn.

Again, Nashville is an international tourism destination (and not just for bachelorette parties), the capital of country music, an epicenter for independent music in general, and so much more. Nashville is riiiiiich. It’s probably fair to say Nashville pays for much of the rest of the state to exist.

But yet these pigfucks in the Tennessee legislature cracked all those voters in Nashville apart (one of the two methods of gerrymandering) and divvied them into all the rural districts, fully eliminating the safe Democratic congressional seat — the former 5th District — that used to roughly sit atop Davidson County, and was represented for years by Democrat Jim Cooper.

That means the entire state of Tennessee now only has one Democratic congressman, out of nine. (Helps Christian extremists like Speaker Mike Johnson preserve their razor-thin House majorities!)

For reference, Tennessee went 60.66 percent to 37.45 for Trump in 2020. Class, is that how math is supposed to work in a free and fair society?

And Who ‘Represents’ Those Vibrant, Diverse Nashvillians Now?

Get a load of these specimens!

Those in southern Davidson County who are now in the transmogrified 5th District are represented by Andy Ogles. Most recently he was promoting his “No Juice Joe” bill to require Joe Biden to tell America about all the “mind-altering stimulants” he was going to take before the debate. He wants to ban gag orders against criminal defendants, three guesses why. He thinks climate change is fake because it was real cold when he took his kids trick-or-treating in 2023. Surprise, there are accusations of some pretty serious ethics violations against that guy.

Ogles represents the area around Covenant School, where the horrific school shooting was, but he wasn’t sorry he sent out a Christmas card where the whole family was carrying AR-15s. He’s an absolute piece of shit.

The hipster outpost of East Nashville — which is like if Austin and Brooklyn had an extremely expensive baby and dressed it in little cowboy boots, awwwww — plus the Opryland Hotel and the airport, that’s all in the 6th, with Rep. John Rose.

John Rose was one of the Republican seditionists who voted to overturn the 2020 election.

John Rose met his wife when she was 17 and he was over 40, at a farming convention. They married when she was 21 and he was 45. Say it with me: OK, groomer! So obviously, when SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was being confirmed, Rose jumped on the Republican bandwagon to lyingly accuse her of being soft on sex traffickers.

Yup.

The 7th, which includes downtown Nashville (bachelorette parties), Vanderbilt University, West Nashville, as well as many of the historically Black neighborhoods across the Cumberland River to the north, that’s repped by Mark Green.

He was about to retire, but now he’s not going to anymore, because Marsha Blackburn and Donald Trump convinced him not to. (Maybe because it’s one of the two seats here that seem most likely like they could maybe get peeled off by Democrats, based on pure numbers, if Democrats applied themselves. The other is the 5th.)

Mark Green thinks vaccines cause autism. Mark Green doesn’t like government involvement in healthcare, because he thinks it prevents people from having to beg Jesus for help, and thus become Christians. Mark Green thinks being transgender is a “disease.” Mark Green is a raging, flaming anti-LGBTQ bigot. Mark Green was going to be Trump’s Army secretary, but he had to pull out of consideration because his raging bigotry came to light.

Mark Green is, of course, also a seditionist who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

These men are not valid representatives for the people of Nashville, Tennessee, who are being held hostage by the pigfucks who live in the surrounding rural regions, and by the supermajority in the legislature.

Now, one day in the future, if Nashville keeps explosively growing, we could see a scenario where the scales in one or more of these districts could start to go the other way, which would really confuse and piss off the Republican dimwits in the lege, and they’d have to come up with a new way to redraw the lines to steal democracy from the people.

But for now, Nashville does not have congressional representation. Good, decent people in Nashville have nobody to call if they need to call their congressman.

They just have this garbage.

Nashville Isn’t The Only Place Like This

It’s just the one closest to my house. You might know about places in your area that are similar.

And again, this isn’t breaking news. It happened in 2022 and went into effect in 2023.

Gerrymandering is a prime example of white conservative fascist Christians’ fervent belief that they have the The Moral High Ground, that the rules don’t apply to them, and that God chose them to have dominion over the rest of us.

It’s also part of the tantrum I reference in the elevator speech for this joint: “We are living through a world-historical temper tantrum from white conservative Christians over their loss of control, relevance, and supremacy.”

On some level, they know God did not give them the interpersonal skills, the likability, the charm, the kindness, the loving nature, to persuade actual normal human beings to admire them, to look up to them, to vote for them, to hope their children grow up to be just like them. And in very real ways, they don’t have the numbers, even in still-red Tennessee.

So they have to steal it. And they think they have the right to steal it, because they think God gave it to them.

So yeah, on this 4th of July weekend, we have just been hit with some grave reminders that we have to get through November without letting fascism take over the presidency.

But that election is merely step one in declaring independence from these fucking freaks.

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Thank you, love you all!

-Evan