Tennessee Democrats were absolutely chimping out this week, throwing tantrums, locking arms on the House floor, blasting air horns, and storming out like toddlers denied a juice box after the Republican-led state legislature convened a special session to finally torch an unconstitutional racially gerrymandered congressional district. The majority-Black 9th District in Memphis had been meticulously carved out for decades under Voting Rights Act contortions to pack in Democratic voters and guarantee a safe blue seat, but with the Supreme Court recently gutting those racial engineering protections, the GOP pounced. They split Shelby County into three pieces, diluting the Black vote across rural Republican strongholds and handing Tennessee a realistic shot at an all-red congressional delegation. Dems cried racism, Jim Crow, and voter suppression, of course, because nothing says “defending democracy” like clinging to a map drawn by race rather than people.

That district had been a perpetual embarrassment, rigged to keep electing the same obnoxious Jewish guy, Rep. Steve Cohen, who somehow parlayed his white liberal credentials into dominating a heavily Black area since 2007. Critics long called it a textbook racial gerrymander—race as the predominant factor in drawing lines to ensure “representation,” even if it meant ignoring compact communities or actual voter preferences outside the partisan lock. Tennessee Republicans finally fixed it mid-decade after Trump’s nudge, repealing their own old ban on such shenanigans during the special session. The result? No more automatic Democrat handout in Memphis. Democrats howled that it was a “power grab,” conveniently forgetting how they’d cheered racial line-drawing when it locked in their seats elsewhere. Cohen himself vowed lawsuits, labeling the move “shameful” and a “racial gerrymander” of all things—pot, meet kettle.

What really capped the absurdity was the guy they kept propping up: Cohen, who once mocked his own constituents by chowing down on a bucket of fried chicken right in the middle of a congressional hearing. Back in 2019, he brought KFC and a ceramic chicken prop to troll then-AG William Barr for no-showing, dubbing him “Chicken Barr” while munching away on camera. In a district full of Black voters where fried chicken stereotypes have been weaponized for generations, it was peak tone-deaf clownery from the obnoxious incumbent who treated the seat like his personal fiefdom. Now that the gerrymandered gravy train is derailed, Tennessee Dems are left sputtering about “erasing Black voices” while the rest of the state shrugs—finally free from a rigged map that prioritized skin color over sanity.

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