Feds to drop key objection to Texas strict voter ID law
HOUSTON — Signaling a significant change from the Obama administration on voting-rights issues, the Justice Department is preparing to drop a crucial objection to Texas’ strict voter-identification law, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.
The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country in 2011, requiring voters to show a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.
The Obama administration’s Justice Department sued Texas to block the law in 2013 and scored a major victory last year after a federal appeals court ruled that the law needed to be softened because it discriminated against minority voters who lacked the required IDs.
Opponents of the law said Republican lawmakers selected IDs that were most advantageous for Republican-leaning white voters and discarded IDs that were beneficial to Democratic-leaning minority voters. For example, legislators included licenses to carry concealed handguns, which are predominantly carried by whites, and excluded government employee IDs and public university IDs, which are more likely to be used by blacks, Hispanics and Democratic-leaning younger voters.
But the Justice Department under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought Monday to drop the claim that Texas enacted the law with a discriminatory intent, according to lawyers for the minority groups and voters who also sued Texas and are the Justice Department’s fellow plaintiffs in the case.
The move came before a federal judge in Corpus Christi was scheduled to hear arguments on the discriminatory-intent issue Tuesday. The Justice Department would be essentially dropping its accusation that the state was motivated by racial bias in enacting the voter ID law, but preserving its claim that the law had a discriminatory impact on minority voters, the lawyers said.
The Justice Department remains a party in the case but will most likely play a smaller role. The case will proceed, because the numerous parties that sued Texas — including voters, elected officials, civil rights organizations and black and Hispanic advocacy groups — will continue the lawsuit.
“We stay the course,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is part of the legal team representing the Texas branch of the NAACP and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
“I am appalled and disgusted that DOJ would abandon their claims, that they have advocated for years, that Texas’ photo ID law was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a lawyer who represents several of those who sued Texas, including the League of United Latin American Citizens and Marc Veasey, a Democratic Texas congressman who is African-American. “The facts on which they based those claims have not changed one bit. The only facts that have changed are Trump’s election and Jeff Sessions’ appointment as Attorney General.”
Officials from the Justice Department and the Texas attorney general’s office declined to comment on the case.
In July, the most conservative federal appeals court in the country — the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans — found that the law had a discriminatory effect on minority voters and set in motion a loosening of the ID rules for the November elections.
The judge in Corpus Christi — Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, who oversaw a trial on the voter ID case in 2014 — is weighing the evidence. If the judge finds discriminatory intent, Texas could be forced to seek federal approval before it makes any changes to its voting laws or procedures.