If you are a Democrat in Tennessee, you may soon have zero representation in your party because Republicans in the state have enacted a new US House map that carves up a majority black district in Memphis, Tennessee. And this could eliminate really the only Democratic [00:00:17] district in that state. So this is reporting from the Associated Press that says the final Senate vote unfolded as demonstrators chanted loudly in the galleries and hallways. Democratic State Senator Charlene Oliver stood on her desk in the Senate chamber holding a banner denouncing [00:00:34] the redistricting as a Jim Crow effort, then clapping and dancing and other Democratic senators linked arms in the front of the chamber. And if you haven't seen the video, you should go check it out because it really was, it was interesting to see. And there was so many protesters in [00:00:50] that building that day too. And as all these lawmakers were coming out having done what they did, They were met with a very strong opposition. Of course, they'd already done what they did. But here's a look, if you want to see, of the old map and then the new map. And you can see on the old map, Memphis over there uh is all by itself a little blue island [00:01:13] in Tennessee. But all of Memphis was in one district, right? If you look at Nashville, that's not the case. Nashville had already been carved up. But now they've done the same treatment to Memphis. They've carved up Memphis. And so they've completely diluted the Memphis vote [00:01:28] and they did it very, very intentionally. And not long after that new map became law, the NAACP Tennessee State Conference sued in state court asserting that this mid decade gerrymandering is still illegal. It was never okay in the first place and they're like, we're [00:01:47] still like this is still not okay. So what they said is these maps are racist tools of white supremacy at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America and that is Donald Trump. And that was from Representative Justin Pearson and he's a black [00:02:03] Democrat from Memphis who is running for the US House and now his entire uh odds of winning are a lot less than they would have otherwise been. And it sucks Brett because it's like how is this a representative democracy at all? the history of what's going on right now. [00:02:23] And I was watching Abby Phillips show on CNN last night, and the narratives that Republicans try to spin on this subject are literally laughable. Everybody, including the Republican strategist who is on the panel with the dumb, dumb mouthpiece for right wing nonsense, that guy was laughing [00:02:42] at her, right? So the history of this is, uh gerrymandering sucks, everybody does it, it is bad. Now what the Democrats are saying is in 2021, they all voted, all of them in Congress, in the House passed when the Democrats had control, they passed a bill against gerrymandering, [00:03:01] outlying gerrymandering, period. And every single Republican voted against it. Then Trump in a year when you typically don't do redistricting, he immediately noticed he was going to lose the House. And so he then went to states and was like, please. in a time when no one has [00:03:18] ever done this before in the cycle, redraw your districts so that I can win the election because I can't win enough votes. I now need to draw lines different so that I can retain power and pass my agenda. An agenda that is so unpopular right now, it's horrible. The [00:03:35] person on the Abby Phillips show said, listen, she's like, oh the Democrats are the one redrawing all the districts. They're doing it in California, they're doing it all over the place. A, the way in which Democrats are doing it, most of them are more inclined to ask their people in the state, do you want this? um But essentially, in Indiana, people stepped up [00:03:59] against Trump and said, we're not going to do it. They're going against Trump. You can't pretend that Trump's the good guy when the people you cite are essentially just mutineers against Trump. They're not representative of the Republicans. What we need to do is get back to a policy. [00:04:14] where or get to a policy where you have independent people drawing up the districts. So you don't have situations like in Tennessee, where was a little like Trump did win the state, but not by 100%. Which is what the representation in Congress will end up being same for California, [00:04:33] same for Maine, same for all these places. Get rid of it so that the representation in Congress is more proportional to the representation throughout the country. They love to say that this is not a real democracy. It's like a representative democracy, but it's not even that anymore. [00:04:50] It's not even representative. They're just playing all these games, jigging the numbers. Is that a word? But they're fudging the numbers. They're doing whatever they can. They're redistricting everything because they can't win on just their platform. And they know that. And the ways that they try to just justify all of it without having to say that out loud is ridiculous. [00:05:09] But what's funny is You know who does say things like this out loud is all those tech billionaires. love to they acknowledge it. They say we can't win on policy. The things that we want to do the American people would never vote for. So we have to find other ways to get our whatever [00:05:25] we want done. We have to find ways to get that done. And before we get a break and before we go to the aftermath, we do have a frustrating update for you. Over in Virginia, the Supreme Court blocked the Virginia Supreme Court blocks Democratic congressional map. boosting GOP [00:05:42] midterms hopes. em Yeah, so the Republicans, they do this thing where they just get to do whatever they want. They change the map, they don't ask the voters if that's the thing that they want. But the Democrats in their attempts to kind of level things out again, they will [00:05:59] say, hey, what happened in California? Do you want us to redistrict? But whenever the Democrats do ask for permission, then the court steps in to block it before we can even get to that point. So it's very frustrating. This is why a lot of people are tired of the Democrats [00:06:14] because they simply don't fight hard enough. They don't fight back the way that I feel like they should, the way a lot of people feel like they should. And they also seem either unwilling or unable to anticipate the moves of their opponents of the other side. Because the other side [00:06:29] is fairly predictable. We know that they're not going to follow rules. We know that they're going to try to find ways around all the rules that do exist. And their Democrats are just like, I mean, if the Republicans are playing chess, I don't know what the Democrats are doing. So- listen, yes, there's establishment Democrats are typically pretty poopy. But there [00:06:50] are fighters in Virginia, the President Pro Tem, Louise Lucas, she spearheaded this redistricting fight and then the FBI raided all her businesses. Yes. The FBI raided her businesses cuz she [00:07:10] was doing basically fighting back against what Trump started. Like this is really is tit for tat and the Republicans are the one who started this round of it. Yeah, they need to get their ass kicked and it is true that emerging narrative at least in the last hour since this has happened [00:07:26] is that the Virginia like state legislature is letting this be the final word. And it sucks, it sucks cuz like If you're what you're going to do afterwards is count up all the votes in America during the midterm elections and the Democrats are going to have routed the [00:07:44] Republicans in overall general votes. And last thing I'll say there's a famous Princeton study that pointed in was like, how much something is supported by the people has no relation to our correlation or correspondence to whether it ends up happening thanks to the government. [00:08:01] The government does not enact. laws based on public opinion, it's just no correlation. Yeah, like, what even is this country anymore? But that is a good shout out. I did see that her house and her businesses were raided this morning. It's just unbelievable the lengths that people [00:08:20] are willing to go to just because they know that they have a very unpopular platform. And they can try to convince us all that it's very popular. They can try to convince us that Actually, things are a lot better than you yourself as a human living in this country can feel and tell.