This week in the war on voting is a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades
Attorney General Eric Holder made clear this week that the Supreme Court's gutting of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act will not stop the Justice Department from going after states and other jurisdictions that discriminate against voters based on their race. Holder called the court's ruling "flawed." The attorney general announced that Justice will support a lawsuit that seeks to require Texas to gain pre-clearance for any changes in voting laws, just as was the case before the high court's ruling in Shelby County v. Alabama. But Texas plans to fight back.
“This is the department’s first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision, but it will not be our last,” [Holder said] Thursday. “Even as Congress considers updates to the Voting Rights Act in light of the court’s ruling, we plan, in the meantime, to fully utilize the law’s remaining sections to subject states to pre-clearance as necessary.”
Holder’s action uses Section 3 of the Act, which allows a court to “bail-in” a jurisdiction to the pre-clearance process if it has a history of discrimination. “Section 3 has been been seldomly used, but given there's no functioning Section 5, we will see increased utilization of remaining tools,” said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program.
Holder says Justice may also involve itself in a dispute of district boundaries in the Lone Star State. Steve Benen at the Rachel Maddow Blog writes:
It's not that Holder is ignoring the Supreme Court's ruling; it's that Holder believes the ruling still leaves him some room to maneuver. "We believe that the State of Texas should be required to go through a pre-clearance process whenever it changes its voting laws and practices," the A.G. said.
What's the basis for this? We'll know more as the process unfolds, but it appears that the Justice Department believes that under the remaining provisions of the VRA, when "intentional voting discrimination" is found, these changes to voting rights cannot be permitted to continue.
And because Texas' voter-ID law is very likely predicated on discriminatory grounds, Holder wants a federal court to intervene now -- before voter suppression can begin.
However, there's
pushback:
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) decried Holder's announcement. "The Supreme Court message to the Justice Department was clear - don't mess with Texas," Smith said in a news release. "But Eric Holder and the Justice Department aren't listening. They have decided to continue their vendetta against Texas by asking a federal judge to reinstate the preclearance requirement."
However, another Republican, Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a staunch backer of the VRA who helped shepherd it through congressional renewal in 2006, says Holder
is taking the right approach:
“Increased litigation will be one of the major consequences of the court’s decision as courts will have to litigate more allegations of voter discrimination under Section 2 and whether jurisdictions should be ‘bailed-in’ to preclearance coverage,” Sensenbrenner said.
There's more to read below the fold about the latest news in the war on voting.
• In the wake of the Shelby County decision, the North Carolina legislature has passed a new law that voter advocates say will make it more difficult for minorities, women and college students to vote. Among the changes it includes are strict photo I.D. requirements, a cut in early voting hours, an end to same-day registration, an end to a Citizen Awareness Week and an end to state-mandated high-school voter registration drives. House Bill 589 passed 33-14 in the Senate and 73-41 in the House.
However, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has formally asked that
Republican Gov. Pat McCrory to veto the law passed by the Republican-dominated legislature:
“I write to state my strong opposition to the election reforms contained in House Bill 589 and ask that you veto this regressive legislation,” Cooper wrote in a letter to McCrory on Friday. “For years, North Carolina has taken steps that encourage people to vote while maintaining the integrity of the system.”
Under the Voting Rights Acts, before
Shelby, all the changes would have had to be pre-cleared with the Justice Department.
• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the four associate justices who dissented in the Shelby case, arguing that gutting the law was "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." She said she's not surprised the Southern states have moved ahead with changes in voting laws in the wake of the court's ruling:
Ginsburg said in an interview with The Associated Press that Texas' decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month was powerful evidence of an ongoing need to keep states with a history of voting discrimination from making changes in the way they hold elections without getting advance approval from Washington. [...]
"The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn't make any sense to me," Ginsburg said in a wide-ranging interview late Wednesday in her office at the court. "And one really could have predicted what was going to happen."
•
Joey Fishkin at Balkinization tells it like it is in the post-Shelby world with his "And the Shenanigans Begin" piece:
However, the greatest impact of Shelby County will likely be at the local level—in places where media scrutiny is minimal, and litigation resources meager. You will hear less about these local cases. But I think that's a problem; they are really where the action is. And so, via the excellent Texas Redistricting blog (which has links to all the filings and so on), today I bring you the following report from Beaumont, Texas, a small city of about 120,000 in the southeast corner of the state, on the Gulf Coast south of the piney woods. The population is about 45% black; four out of seven school board members are black. Voting is pretty racially polarized. This is a convoluted tale, as these tales often are. But in brief, three candidates who lost in the last election to three of the four black school board members are trying to get a state court to oust those three black incumbents and install them (the losing candidates) instead. The losing candidates pulled off a sneaky, and rather brazen, subterfuge: they filed candidate papers for a special election that had not yet been announced, and then subsequently convinced a state court that state law required ordering the election, with a retroactive filing deadline that had already passed. Since the three black incumbents did not file candidate papers—understandably, since no election had been called for their seats, and they are only halfway through their terms—the non-black challengers say the court should just install them, the challengers, as winners by default. The Beaumont situation provides a particularly clear case of a local shenanigan that could occur only because of the demise of Section 5 [...]
•
California Judge Mark V. Mooney rules that Palmdale discriminated against black and Latino candidates:
In a new critique of how minorities are treated in the Antelope Valley, a judge has ruled that Palmdale violated state voting laws by maintaining an election system that stymied Latinos and blacks from winning office.
The judge's findings come a month after the U.S. Justice Department accused Palmdale, Lancaster and the L.A. County Sheriff's Department of a systematic effort to discriminate against minorities who received low-income subsidized housing.
Federal officials said deputies conducted widespread unlawful searches of homes, improper detentions and used unreasonable force that specifically targeted blacks and Latinos.