When a state's red rural areas turn on its blue urban ones

Margaret Renkl writes in the New York Times today about what's happening in Tennessee, where 65% of Nashville voters supported Biden but the state's rural reaches tend to vote Republican.  The headline is "This is How Red States Silence Blue Cities.  And Democracy."  Renkl writes of the Republican-controlled state legislature's backlash against blue Nashville (which presumably also extends to blue Memphis.)

What matters here is that the state of Tennessee is once again interfering in the self-governance of the blue city that drives the economic engine of the entire red state. And state lawmakers are doing it for absolutely no reason but spite.

There is, of course, a long history of legislative pre-emption in Tennessee. The tactic is also used by Democratic-controlled legislatures, but it is especially egregious in Southern states governed by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker here introduced a bill that would ban local governments from helping residents fund out-of-state abortions — a policy that members of Nashville’s council have already proposed.

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Thanks to a brutally gerrymandered election map, we didn’t send a moderate Democrat, one who could reasonably represent the interests of both Nashville liberals and Nashville conservatives, to Washington this year. Instead, the newly mutilated Nashville is represented by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.

Renkl also explains the national consequences of these events in Tennessee by reference to what the congresspersons elected under this gerrymandered scheme are doing in Washington, DC.  

The same, by the way, can be said of Arkansas, where recent gerrymandering has left Pulaski County/greater Little Rock metropolitan area (racially diverse and at least light blue) divided among three of the state's four state's congressional districts.