Tennessee Republicans Kick Out Democrats as They Vote on New Map

Tennessee Republicans kicked Democratic lawmakers, journalists, and constituents out of a special redistricting session Wednesday as protests over their new congressional map engulfed the state House.

After one round of protests forced Republicans to shut down their meeting, they relocated to a new room, according to The Tennessean, and prevented anyone from entering.

Democratic state Representatives Gloria Johnson and Gabby Salinas were both told to leave the Judiciary Committee meeting as lawmakers discussed the GOP’s new congressional map, which would eliminate Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s majority-Black Memphis area district and give Republicans a 9–0 majority in the state.

“Well folks, here we are—this special session where the people are yet again being ignored,” Johnson said in a video recorded outside of the meeting room doors, while dozens of chanting protesters raised their voices around her. “I thought I could go in the Senate Committee—they won’t even let me in. I got kicked out. I got kicked out. They are not letting members into committee.... The people were kicked out earlier.

“This is a travesty of justice,” Johnson continued. “If you can get down here, we need you down here fighting with us. Because this is a clear power grab taking away the voice of the people. This is the Republicans’ white power rally.”

Fellow Democrat Justin Pearson was barred from entering the meeting entirely, instead standing in the doorway while Cohen spoke.

The Senate Judiciary Committee later approved the map by a vote of 9–2, pushing it to the wider chamber, where it is expected to pass.

The 29-year-old woman Kristi Noem handpicked to oversee ICE’s billion-dollar budget just lost her nomination bid in an Ohio congressional primary.

Madison Sheahan, a former ICE deputy director, was in third place Wednesday when the Associated Press called the state’s 9th district Republican primary for former state Representative Derek Merrin.

Republican operatives consider Ohio’s 9th district one of the party’s best chances to flip a House seat, The Washington Post reported. The seat is currently held by Representative Marcy Kaptur, who has held onto it for 22 terms.

Sheahan had left her role at ICE to pursue her congressional campaign, shortly before her apparent mentor Noem was unceremoniously fired.

In her role, Sheahan reportedly wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 custom-wrapped vehicles that read “ICE.” The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window. The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But the fleet of ostentatious cars proved useless to the masked militia, which prefers to disappear people using unmarked vehicles.

On the campaign trail, Sheahan touted her work with ICE, but political analysts found that immigration did not play as large a role in the primaries as economic issues such as the job market and tariffs, the Post reported.

Her candidacy was considered an early bellwether for how voters felt about Trump’s handling of immigration policy, and her resounding failure could signal disaster for other candidates too closely tied to the president’s unpopular policy initiatives.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee claimed Wednesday that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lied several times during his testimony about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

During a closed-door hearing to discuss his ties to the alleged sex trafficker, Lutnick reneged on past claims about Epstein recording his guests’ sexual misconduct and using it to blackmail them, Representative Ro Khanna told reporters after the hearing. Lutnick had previously called Epstein “the greatest blackmailer ever.”

“So, somebody obviously got to him, from the administration. In fact, he said he talked to people in the administration and that’s why he’s changed his tune,” Khanna said. “And the question is not just why he’s lying, the question is why he’s covering up. The question is why he’s no longer willing to share what he knows about Epstein’s abhorrent behavior.

“If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick. It was very embarrassing,” the California Democrat added.

Lutnick swore in an interview last year he did not see Epstein after 2005, but it was then revealed he coordinated a family trip (with his young kids) to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012. Lutnick then confirmed he’d kept in touch with Epstein over the years, even after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

“Howard Lutnick should resign,” Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam told reporters following the hearing. “That was absolutely mind-boggling, what we just heard in the room. He was evasive, nervous. He was dishonest.”

“He would not admit to lying, which he clearly did in the podcast,” Subramanyam said, referring to Lutnick’s remarks on the New York Post’s Pod Force One in October 2025, when the secretary claimed that after meeting Epstein, he decided he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

“I had to ask him whether he and I were in the same room, just now, because I couldn’t understand his meaning of ‘we were in the same room together,’” Subramanyam said.

Lutnick also refused to provide any explanation for why he and his family traveled to Epstein’s island.

“We asked him over and over again, ‘Why did you go to the island?’ He says he doesn’t remember, that it was inexplicable, and he simply didn’t know how to answer the question at that point,” Subramanyam said.

The Tennessee GOP’s new election map would eliminate the state’s only Democratic representative and carve up the majority-Black Memphis-area district he represents.

The map would gerrymander away Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s Shelby County district and likely give Republicans a 9–0 majority in the state. The Memphis metropolitan area would be divided up into three separate districts.

“This is insane. The GOP’s newly proposed TN Congressional maps would have people in Shelby County all the way to Williamson County—200+ miles apart—being “represented” by the same Congressman,” Cohen wrote on X after the map was announced. “It’s a blatant, corrupt power grab that would destroy the Black community’s and our entire city’s voice.”

The redrawn map is the latest in a barrage of Republican gerrymandering efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that crippled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last month. Section 2 granted protections to African Americans and other racial minorities against redistricting.

The new map is expected to pass in a Thursday vote.

The Justice Department sued the state of Colorado Wednesday over a gun control law that has been on the books for more than a decade.

The state passed the law, House Bill 13-1224, in 2013, months after a gunman opened fire on a movie theater in Aurora, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. The law formally banned the sale, transfer, and possession of magazines carrying more than 15 rounds of ammunition within state lines.

It’s the second such attack this week by the Trump administration on Colorado’s various attempts to curb gun violence. On Tuesday, the DOJ took aim at the city of Denver for a 1989 city law that banned assault weapons.

The nation’s premier law office has argued that both laws violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In its complaint, the DOJ claimed that the state’s use of the phrase “large capacity” amounted to “politically charged rhetoric.” The agency further claimed that the phrase “large capacity” was incorrect due to the popularity of semiautomatic guns such as the AR-15, which DOJ attorneys said would make 15 round ammunition “standard capacity.”

Mass shootings are a global scourge that only the U.S. has failed to adequately address. Gun violence in America has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent: In the first five months of the year, 145 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 185 victims and injured another 561 people, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.

AR-15s are nothing short of civilian-killing machines. As The New Republic’s Colin Dickey noted in his review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner’s 1954 invention “exists to extinguish human lives.”

The gun’s popularity within the contemporary American canon comes from an early failure to land its place in the military arsenal that it was designed for, kneecapped by Army bureaucracy that frowned upon a weapon developed out of house.

The gun’s subsequent infiltration of the public sphere has made the AR-15 the best-selling rifle in America. It’s estimated that roughly a third of Americans own a gun, according to a 2022 Ipsos poll, while one in 20 U.S. adults are expected to own an AR-15, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos survey that same year.

Further still, the modular rifle has become ingrained in the American consciousness by way of mass-casualty events, and is favored by killers who are looking to do as much damage to the human body as possible. At least 10 of the 17 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history involved a gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle.

Despite Republican attempts to portray Democratic efforts to curtail the weapon’s availability as an infringement on the lifestyles of blue-collar countrymen, invoking images of farmers and backwoods hunters, the vast majority of AR-15 owners are actually non-rural, with 48 percent living in suburban sprawl and 24 percent living in cities. Additionally, AR-15 owners tend to be some of the wealthier among us, 56 percent having annual incomes in excess of $100,000, according to the Post/Ipsos survey.

Over the last decade, gun rights groups have spent more than $141 million on political lobbying, with GOP legislators reaping the bulk of it, according to data from OpenSecrets. Meanwhile, the money behind “gun rights” lobbying groups has dwarfed gun control efforts every year dating back to 1998.

By 2024, six of the top 10 congressional recipients who profited the most from gun rights groups were MAGA. Among them was now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who received more than $376,000 from gun rights groups during his time in office. The lobby’s unbroken influence over the political right has swept votes on issues ranging from bans on assault weapons to high-capacity magazines.

This story has been updated.