Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen to retire after GOP targets him with redistricting

Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), a liberal Democrat in his 20th year on Capitol Hill, announced Friday that he will retire at the end of the term, becoming the earliest casualty of the Republicans’ redistricting campaign ahead of November’s midterms.

Cohen, who will turn 77 later this month, hammered the Republicans for orchestrating what he called a power grab to disenfranchise Black voters in districts like his. But with the new map in place — and the cards stacked heavily against him — Cohen said he’d rather step down than go through the motions of an election contest he was sure to lose.

“I don’t want to quit, I’m not a quitter,” a tearful Cohen told reporters in his office in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill. “But these districts were drawn to defeat me.” 

There are several lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s redistricting. And Cohen made clear that he would seek to return his name to the ballot if the courts paused the new map for one more cycle. Tennessee’s primary is scheduled for Aug. 6.

But he also appeared resigned to the fact that those challenges are a long shot, lamenting that this will likely be his last year in Congress. He characterized it as “the most difficult moment” of his long career in public service. 

Cohen has long been the only Democrat in Tennessee’s nine-member House delegation, representing the Democratic stronghold in Memphis, which has a majority Black population. But last week, GOP leaders in the Tennessee Statehouse adopted a new House map to carve up Cohen’s district, splitting it into three sprawling districts — each stretching into the middle........

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