Plaintiffs won't revive federal lawsuit over Tennessee's redistricting maps

A group of Tennessee voting and civil rights advocates says it won't refile a federal lawsuit alleging that Tennessee’s U.S. House map and the boundaries for the state Senate amount to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. In a news release Friday, the plaintiffs whose lawsuit was dismissed last month said their efforts in court were facing “new, substantial and unjust standards to prove racial gerrymandering” under a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling dealing with South Carolina’s political maps. A three-judge panel dismissed the lawsuit in August but allowed it to be refiled if plaintiffs could “disentangle race from politics.”