On May 7, 2026, Tennessee's Republican legislature passed a new congressional map. It carves up the Memphis-based 9th District — the only majority-Black congressional district in the state — and spreads its voters across three districts that stretch hundreds of miles east into rural Republican territory. It splits Nashville, the state's other Democratic city, into five.
Governor Bill Lee signed it. The effect, as NBC News reported it, is to put Republicans in position to pick up a House seat in November and take every single one of Tennessee's congressional districts.
The Tennessee House passed it without a single Republican speaking in defense of it. When one member finally rose to speak, the public gallery got so loud that the speaker simply called the vote while Democratic members stood up and walked off the floor. State troopers were ordered to clear the gallery. In the Senate, a member stood on a desk holding what looked like a bedsheet reading "No Jim Crow 2.0" and "Stop the TN Steal."
Chuck Fleischmann had a reaction to all of this. Here it is, in full, as he gave it to WATE:
"I am thankful that the state did what President Trump asked them to do, which was to specifically redistrict the state map. They have done it, and I will certainly approve that. The best news about this is that the great people of Oak Ridge, and Anderson, and Roane counties kept me as their member of Congress."
Read that again, because there are two separate things in it.
Thing one: he said out loud why the map exists
Republicans defending mid-decade redistricting usually reach for something about population or communities of interest. The bill's sponsor in the state Senate, John Stevens, went with: "Tennessee is a conservative state. Its congressional delegation should reflect that."
Fleischmann skipped the reasoning entirely and named the actual cause. The state redrew the map because President Trump asked them to.
He's right about that. Tennessee became the ninth state to enact a new congressional map ahead of the midterms, in a mid-decade redistricting wave that began when Trump urged Republican-run states to redraw their lines to protect the party's thin House majority. A Supreme Court ruling days earlier had gutted the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial gerrymandering, and Tennessee moved within the week.
So the record now shows a sitting congressman saying, on camera, that his state redrew its congressional districts on the president's instruction — and that he is thankful for it.
We have written about this pattern in other states. In South Carolina, Sheri Biggs argued that a 7-0 Republican map reflects the state's "values" in a state where four in ten voters pick Democrats. In Utah, Blake Moore helped launch the anti-gerrymandering movement and then turned on it once a judge enforced what voters passed. Fleischmann's contribution is the plainest of the three: he didn't argue the map was fair. He thanked the president for ordering it.
Thing two: what he was actually worried about
The second half of his statement is the part worth sitting with.
Out of everything in that map — a majority-Black district dissolved, protesters cleared out of the Capitol by state troopers, a whole city's voters distributed into districts hundreds of miles away — the "best news," in Fleischmann's telling, was that Oak Ridge, Anderson County and Roane County "kept me as their member of Congress."
That was the piece he had a stake in. Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and he told WATE that he appropriates about $10 billion each year into the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation. Oak Ridge is his district's crown jewel: the national laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, a growing nuclear industry.
When the redraw threatened to move that territory, the Oak Ridge City Council held a special meeting and passed a resolution opposing any map that didn't keep Anderson and Roane counties in the 3rd District — citing his importance to the local economy.
They got what they asked for. Oak Ridge stayed. Fleischmann's district instead gave up Morgan, Scott and Campbell counties and picked up Rhea and Meigs.
Asked about the threat, he said: "The funding was never imperiled, my representation of that area was."
His representation. That was the thing at risk.
What he had no problem with
Fleischmann was careful to say he had nothing to do with drawing the map. Just a handful of state lawmakers redrew Tennessee's districts, without any input from him, he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Fine. He didn't draw it. But he was asked about it, on the day it passed, and he had a choice about what to say.
He could have said that splitting the only district in Tennessee where Black voters make up a majority is a bad way to run a state. He could have said mid-decade redistricting at a president's request is a bad precedent no matter which party does it. He could have said nothing at all.
What he said was thank you.
Memphis Democrat Raumesh Akbari, the state Senate minority leader, put the question to her colleagues on the floor this way: whether Black Tennesseans "who pay their taxes, who work just like everyone else, have a right to be politically represented as well by folks who share their interest and who advocate for them on a federal level."
Tennessee's answer was no. Fleischmann's answer was that he was thankful, and that the best news was he kept his seat.
He has not held an open town hall since 2011, and last year told a reporter he would "never" hold one. So there is no room in the 3rd District where a voter gets to ask him to explain that answer.
Sources
NBC News, "Tennessee Republicans pass map dividing up state's lone majority-Black district", May 7, 2026, by Jane C. Timm. WATE 6 On Your Side, "Oak Ridge stays in Fleischmann's district under redrawn Congressional map", May 7, 2026, by Gregory Raucoules. Photo: Nicole Hester / The Tennessean / USA Today Network.
