Right the wrong and redraw the districts!

by guest blogger J. Lee Douglas

It's been a good harvest and now we need to get the grain to the threshing floor.

Ten years ago in 2001, Jimmy Naifeh and seventy-eight power-hungry democrats agreed to redraw Tennessee's nine US congressional districts into serpentine patterns that grouped conservative-leaning neighborhoods into one single district that would give conservatives such as Marsha Blackburn an almost 95% voter selection. Among conservatives, she could almost not lose because the bulk of conservatives were strategically placed in her district. Sucks, eh? Get mad!!

The net effect for the democrats was that the remaining areas would contain conservatives who would be the minority and never able to have a fair chance to choose someone who might represent their views. An example of this thievery is Jim Cooper's district which consists mostly of Davidson County which was drawn in a way to almost guarantee his election regardless of his obedience to Madame Pelosi.

Look below at the Tennessee congressional map and notice Marsha Blackburn's (teal) district #7 how it runs from outside of Memphis, pinches off where Williamson and Hickman counties touch and then all the way to the Kentucky border in middle Tennessee north of Clarksville! Is that reasonable division of the populous? Mad yet?

This was done for the simple reason that these geographic areas are largely conservative and doing the districting this way creates an imbalance that gives a material edge to people such as Cooper or Lincoln Davis. The math becomes that we get one, they get two, three or four!

The irony? You are disenfranchised and the dems accuse you of their crime and the Tennessean carries their story. Get this, the dems who controlled all houses of the state were so happy with their divisions of congressional districts that from 1902 for sixty years they refused to reapportion the districts and finally relinquished when the US Supreme Court ordered reapportionment in 1962. Let's now act to have this injustice righted. Let's also lobby all of our representatives to NOT do to them what they did to us. We'll reap what we sow. Trust me, justice will prevail.

With the 2010 census now being complete, the new republican legislative body has a chance to right this wrong and to insure that conservative, fair policies and block redrawing of the districts takes place January 11, at the beginning of the next legislative session.

J. Lee Douglas is a practicing dentist in Brentwood Tennessee. He is married, father of four and grandfather of five. He established a Christian dental/medical clinic in Iraq in 1996 and had done oil and gas exploration in West Africa and lived for several years in Switzerland.  He is a local political activist and a Middle Tennessee leader in the TEA party movement and helped start the 9-12 Project Tennessee within 3 months of President Obama’s taking office. Prior to that time he had not been involved in political activity.

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