Department of Justice Press Release:
Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against the State of Texas to Challenge Statewide Redistricting Plans
The U.S. Department of Justice announced today that it has filed a lawsuit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act against the State of Texas and the Texas Secretary of State, challenging the State’s redistricting plans for the Texas congressional delegation and the Texas House of Representatives.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires that state voting laws – including laws that draw electoral maps – provide eligible voters with an equal opportunity to participate in the democratic process and elect representatives of their choosing,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The complaint we filed today alleges that Texas has violated Section 2 by creating redistricting plans that deny or abridge the rights of Latino and Black voters to vote on account of their race, color or membership in a language minority group.”
The United States’ complaint contends that Texas’ redistricting plan for its congressional delegation violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it has the discriminatory purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language minority group in that it deliberately minimizes the voting strength of minority communities. The lawsuit also claims that Texas violated Section 2 because its congressional redistricting plan has the discriminatory result of leading to an inequality in the opportunities for minority voters to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.
The United States’ complaint further contends that Texas’ State House redistricting plan violates Section 2 because it results in minority voters having less opportunity than other citizens to participate in the political process and elect legislators of their choice.
The United States’ complaint asks the court to prohibit Texas from conducting elections under the challenged plans and asks the court to order Texas to devise and implement new plans that comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The complaint also asks the court to establish interim plans pending a lawful state redistricting.
On Sept. 1, the department issued guidance under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, for redistricting and methods of electing government bodies.
More information about the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws is available on the Department of Justice’s website at https://www.justice.gov/crt/voting-section.
Complaints about discriminatory voting practices may be reported to the Civil Rights Division through the internet reporting portal at https://civilrights.justice.gov or by telephone at 1-800-253-3931.
This is the second lawsuit the Department of Justice has filed against the state pf Texas. Last month the Department sued the state of Texas over its voter suppression bills. Department of Justice Press Release:
Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against the State of Texas to Protect Voting Rights
The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas and the Texas Secretary of State over certain restrictive voting procedures imposed by Texas Senate Bill 1, which was signed into law in September 2021. The United States’ complaint challenges provisions of Senate Bill 1 under Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act and Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Our democracy depends on the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department will continue to use all the authorities at its disposal to protect this fundamental pillar of our society.”
“The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the fundamental right to vote for all Americans,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Laws that impair eligible citizens’ access to the ballot box have no place in our democracy. Texas Senate Bill 1’s restrictions on voter assistance at the polls and on which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible.”
The United States’ complaint contends that Senate Bill 1 violates Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act by improperly restricting what assistance in the polling booth voters who have a disability or are unable to read or write can receive. The complaint alleges that Senate Bill 1 harms those voters by barring their assistors from providing necessary help, including answering basic questions, responding to requests to clarify ballot translations or confirming that voters with visual impairments have marked a ballot as intended. The United States’ complaint also contends that Senate Bill 1 violates Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring rejection of mail ballots and mail ballot request forms because of certain paperwork errors or omissions that are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot. The complaint asks the court to prohibit Texas from enforcing these requirements.
The department also filed a statement of interest today in a Texas federal court, in litigation brought by private plaintiffs challenging Senate Bill 1. The statement of interest addresses issues related to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, including explaining that Section 2 permits private plaintiffs to file suit to remedy racially discriminatory voting practices.
More information about the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and other federal voting laws is available on the Department of Justice’s website at www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot. Complaints about discriminatory voting practices may be reported to the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division through the internet reporting portal at https://civilrights.justice.gov/ or by telephone at 1-800-253-3931.
View a list of the department’s actions to protect voting rights here.
Despite these actions, Jennifer Rubin explains, The DOJ is struggling to protect voting rights. The White House and Senate must help.
The [Roberts] Supreme Court in 2013 effectively nullified Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, gutting the main tool used to fight voting discrimination. In 2021, the court neutered much of the VRA’s Section 2, installing new “guideposts” on voting rights enforcement found nowhere in the statute. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats remain paralyzed by the filibuster in seeking real voting reform, and the White House so far has only pretty words to offer in defense of democracy.
Fortunately, the Justice Department has not given up its role as the principal defender of voting rights. On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta announced a new lawsuit under Section 2 against Texas, contending its radical gerrymandering in the wake of the 2020 Census is a case of straight-up intentional discrimination.
Garland announced, “The complaint we filed today alleges that Texas has violated Section 2 by creating redistricting plans that deny or abridge the rights of Latino and Black voters to vote on account of their race, color or membership in a language minority group.”
While the Supreme Court this year, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, made it more difficult to protect voting rights by weakening one part of Section 2 that prohibits voting measures that have a “disparate effect” on protected groups, this lawsuit goes to the heart of the VRA’s protections against intentional discriminatory redistricting. “The United States’ complaint contends that Texas’ redistricting plan for its congressional delegation violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it has the discriminatory purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language minority group in that it deliberately minimizes the voting strength of minority communities,” the Justice Department said in a written statement. The suit challenges the Texas State House redistricting plan as well.
Garland emphasized that the rationale behind the suit goes to “a core principle of our democracy” that “voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.” Even without Section 5′s pre-clearance provisions and other setbacks at the Supreme Court, his department intends to force states to comply with the law. (He has also filed statements of interest in private litigation in Arizona and Florida, allowing the department to weigh in on those cases.)
Gupta explained that the VRA prohibits intentional “voting dilution” of minority voters. “Texas’ 2021 redistricting plans were enacted through a rushed process, with minimal opportunity for public comment, without any expert testimony, and with an overall disregard for the massive minority population growth in Texas over the last decade,” she noted. (This is the second lawsuit that the Justice Department filed against Texas this fall regarding voting rights. In the first, the department claims Texas violated voting provisions that allow officials to assist voters who have difficulty filling out their ballot.)
Texas, due to the 2020 Census, will gain two seats in the House. But the state designed both seats to have White majorities and redrew lines to eliminate a Latino-majority district, Gupta pointed out. She recalled that this is the third time in three decades that Texas has tried to limit the voting rights of Latinos in that district.
Texas’s reckless, repeated efforts to diminish Black and Latino voting power is a vivid example of the new Jim Crow-style measures that would have been blocked had the pre-clearance provisions of Section 5 been in effect. Gupta noted, “Decade after decade, courts have found that Texas has enacted redistricting plans that deliberately dilute the voting strength of Latino and Black voters and that violate the Voting Rights Act.” This blatant attempt to put the thumb on the scale on behalf of White votes is what the VRA was designed to prevent.
Garland was pointed in calling for Congress to reauthorize Section 5, which would require scrutiny of Texas’s plan before it goes into effect. Without a chance to look at plans in advance and with the burden of the proof now on the department, the odds are stacked against the Justice Department and voting rights complainants.
The department is facing a fusillade of voting rights attacks launched exclusively by Republicans in red states. Unless and until the Senate dispenses with the filibuster to pass meaningful voting reform, including reauthorization of Section 5, Republicans will have room to disenfranchise minority voters. The Justice Department cannot protect our democracy alone; it’s long past time for the Senate and White House to give them the tools they need to fight a wholesale effort to artificially inflate White voting power.
Earlier, Eric Lutz wrote at Vanity Fair, Democrats Still Have A Chance To Stop Democracy From Getting Trampled:
Despite holding the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats have not yet been able to stem the tide of GOP disenfranchisement laws. Now, with time running out to pass something ahead of the 2022 midterms, the party is preparing what may be their final push to pass voter protections before next year’s election. “It’s an open question as to whether we can get to 60 votes in the Senate on voting,” Hakeem Jeffries, one of the top Democrats in the House, told Axios on Sunday. “And if we can’t, then the Senate is going to have to make some decisions as it relates to filibuster reform.”
“The integrity of our democracy hangs in the balance,” the House Democratic Caucus chair added.
In July, President Joe Biden described the laws Republicans have enacted in states across the country based on Donald Trump’s election fraud lies as a “21st century Jim Crow assault.” But while his administration has sought to defend against those attacks through the Justice Department and with voter outreach efforts, his party has failed to come up with a legislative solution. The House, where Jeffries is the number five Democrat, has teed up a voting rights package named for the late civil rights leader and congressman, John Lewis. But it has been a non-starter in the Senate, thanks to the filibuster rule that conservative Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have steadfastly refused to touch.
Previous calls to amend or abolish the filibuster, or create a carve-out for voting rights, have not moved those two hold-outs. But with the clock ticking, and dire warning signs both for the party and the state of democracy—“backsliding” is how one international think tank described it Monday—advocates are redoubling their efforts. “Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act,” more than 150 scholars said in a letter urging Democrats to pass the Freedom to Vote Act through a simple majority. “But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”
With Senate Democrats spinning their wheels on voting rights, the party has appeared to invest its hopes for 2022 and beyond in boosting turnout enough to overcome obstacles to the ballot box. That’s never been a particularly strong strategy. “We cannot out-organize voter suppression,” as NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson told me back in August. But as Jeffries suggested to Axios Sunday, failure on the part of Democratic lawmakers to protect their voters could itself dampen the enthusiasm the party seems to be relying on. Asked what Democrats can tell their voters if they can’t use their majorities to deliver on ballot protections, Jeffries replied: “There’s no message to communicate to Democratic voters now.”
Sens. Manchin and Sinema are appeasing the enemies of democracy. They have it in their power to reform the Senate filibuster rule to save American democracy. They must be called to account for why they will not do so. There is no negotiation with the enemies of democracy – one does not ask an enemy for permission to do what they have no intention of granting. It is insanity to insist on a bipartisan agreement when there is only one political party interested in defending democracy. Democrats must save democracy on their own.
History always condemns the appeasers who empower an enemy to sell out their country.
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Farhad Manjoo writes at the New York Times, “The Year America Lost Its Democracy”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opinion/american-democracy.html
[I]f the assaults on democracy that occurred in America in 2021 had happened in another country, academics, diplomats and activists from around the world would be tearing their hair out over the nation’s apparent unraveling. If you were a reporter summing up this American moment for readers back home in Mumbai, Johannesburg or Jakarta, you’d have to ask whether the country is on the brink: A decade from now, will the world say that 2021 was the year the United States squandered its democracy?
If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the year’s many lowlights. Begin, of course, on Jan. 6: “Followers of Ousted President Storm National Legislature.” Then, when Republicans in Congress turned against an independent inquiry into the Capitol attack and punished the few in their party who supported it: “Bowing to Former Strongman, Opposition Blocks Coup Investigation, Expels Dissenters.” Or when, despite turning up no evidence of significant electoral mischief in the 2020 presidential election, Republican-led legislatures in more than a dozen states began pushing new laws to restrict voting rights, including several that put partisan officials in charge of election administration: “Provincial Lawmakers Alter Election Rules to Favor Deposed Premier.”
And then last month, when more than 150 academic scholars of democracy put out a letter urging Congress to pass legislation to protect American elections from partisan takeover. Headline: “Experts Sound Alarm Over Democratic Backsliding in Nuclear-Armed Superpower.” Pull quote: “This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy,” the scholars wrote. “It is a moment of great peril and risk.”
[T]here’s another reason I’m more upset at the left than the right: Republicans are acting unethically, but also rationally, out of political necessity. They see their coalition diminishing. The Republican base is white and Christian in a nation that is growing more diverse and less religious. The party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1992. Its fortunes would seem to depend on reducing access to the polls and, if that fails, on embracing the electoral strategy Donald Trump made explicit in 2020 — when the results don’t go the way you like, push to overturn them.
The Democrats’ survival depends on the very opposite idea: on letting people vote, counting their votes and respecting the count. In this sense Democratic efforts to expand and uphold voting rights ought to be just as urgent as the Republicans’ efforts to restrict them.
Yet that is not the case: While Republicans have put the undermining of democracy at the top of their political agenda, Democrats [“Manchinema”} appear to have put voting rights at the bottom of theirs.
“I regard this as the great political clash of our time,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law, a policy institute that focuses on democracy and political reform. “On the one hand you have states rushing to restrict the vote or change who counts the vote. On the other hand, you have Congress, which has the power to stop it cold, legally and constitutionally.” The important question, Waldman said, is whether the Democrats have the political will to stop it.
“So far, the answer would seem to be, not yet,” he said.
President Biden offered a strong defense of voting rights in a speech in July. He called Republican efforts to put partisan officials in charge of election results “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” He called passing strong federal election rules “a national imperative.”
And then, crickets. Biden has said little in public since then about the issue. The Freedom to Vote Act, the Democrats’ comprehensive proposal to protect voting rights and undo Republican anti-democratic efforts, is stalled in the Senate. In their letter, the democracy scholars called on Democrats to suspend the filibuster in order to pass the bill, but that seems increasingly unlikely — Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have repeatedly said they oppose that idea.
If Democrats fail to uphold the integrity of our elections, what then? I fear total loss. Not for the party, but for the country. If Republicans prevail, America will become one of those faraway, seemingly lawless places where every election is in doubt and no part of our political culture remains above the partisan fray.
Joe Manchin is the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain. He is committed to appeasement of the enemies of democracy. Now he is asking Republicans for permission to change Senate rules. “Please Mitch, may I?”
The Hill reports, “Manchin quietly discusses Senate rules changes with Republicans”, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/584916-manchin-quietly-discusses-senate-rules-changes-with-republicans
Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), a key Democratic holdout on reforming the filibuster, is discussing small changes to Senate rules with Republicans.
Manchin’s discussions with GOP colleagues — which haven’t been previously reported — come as Democrats are trying to win over their conservative colleague on their push to “restore the Senate,” including making changes to the 60-vote legislative filibuster.
Members of GOP leadership told The Hill that Manchin had reached out to them to float potential ideas with an eye toward making it easier to get votes and bills to the floor.
[He] is trying to come up with some fairly, I would say, creative ideas about the rules,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican.
Thune added that Manchin had spoken with other GOP senators and that there was a “considerable amount of interest in trying to make the Senate functional.”
Key:
Manchin says he hasn’t changed his mind on the filibuster, where he’s opposed to nixing the 60-vote threshold altogether or making a carve out. But, asked by The Hill if he was open to smaller changes like making it easier to get amendment votes or bills to the floor, Manchin indicated that talks are ongoing.
[T]he discussions involving Manchin and GOP senators come as a group of Democratic senators, tapped by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), are trying to come up with rules change proposals that would help break the stalemate on voting rights and elections legislation, which has been filibustered by Republicans.
Two Democratic senators taking part in the Democratic-only discussions — Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) — indicated that Manchin’s talks were a separate effort and said that they had not dispatched him to go talk with Republicans.
“You know, Joe will be Joe. … We don’t control anybody around here,” Tester said.
Thune floated that Manchin’s talks could be a backchannel effort to dial down pressure on Democrats to make changes to the filibuster.
“I think part of maybe his motivation too is just to take the pressure off of that and if we could get some things done that would make it more conducive to accomplishment then he wouldn’t feel, and others wouldn’t feel, as much pressure to nuke the filibuster,” Thune said.
Frustration in the Senate has been growing among Democrats as they’ve seen some of their biggest priorities, including voting rights, stalled in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to advance most legislation. Though Schumer wants to pass voting rights this year, Democrats have acknowledged it could get kicked to at least January.
[A] growing number of Senate Democrats support nixing the 60-vote filibuster, arguing that it’s being abused by Republicans, though both Manchin and Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are opposed to doing so.
Some of the ideas being discussed by the Democratic-only group include changing the filibuster to require 41 “no” votes to block a bill rather than 60 “yes” votes to advance a bill or reverting to a talking filibuster.
Because Republicans are unlikely to support filibuster reform, Democrats would need to invoke the “nuclear option,” something Manchin has not previously supported and indicated to The Hill that he still doesn’t.
“Everyone should be looking at how we make the place work better,” Manchin said. “We’ve had good conversations. We’ll see if something comes out of it. It should be done bipartisan.”
Asked if he would support using the nuclear option, Manchin added: “I just said it should be bipartisan—why would you go nuclear option? …I’ve never voted for that. I’ve never voted for that, okay?”
Excellent point from Paul Waldman, “The same Supreme Court that took away the Justice Department’s ability to fight voter discrimination will rule on its suit. Good luck with that.”
“Merrick Garland’s Texas lawsuit shows the war on democracy is succeeding”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/07/justice-texas-lawsuit-shows-war-on-democracy-succeding/