The Trump Administration filed a motion to delay a hearing set for Tuesday about whether a Texas voter ID law was intended to discriminate against minorities. According to the Justice Department this postponement is due to the change in leadership.
“The United States requires additional time to brief the new leadership of the Department on this case and the issues to be addressed at that hearing before making any representations to the Court,” the Justice Department petition states.
The hearing has been moved to Feb. 28, further agitating the plaintiffs who have fought against the law for years.
“This delay for us is not in the interest of resolving a case that has been going on for far too long,” said Leah Adeh, senior counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represents one of the plaintiffs. “We all have been expending far too many resources on it, and we really want a hearing to get to a decision that this law needs to be struck down.”
The law in question was instituted in the state of Texas upon the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013. The Supreme Court had freed nine states, mostly in the South, from the act, allowing them to change their election laws without federal approval. Directly after the ruling, Texas announced the harshest voter ID law in the country would go into effect immediately. The Texas State Conference of the NAACP and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House challenged the law in federal court in 2014 and the judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, ruled the Texas law unconstitutional. Despite the ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the law to remain in effect for the 2014 election.
The case was then brought to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and last July, the court ruled the law had a racially discriminatory effect.
“The evidence in the record demonstrates that proponents of SB 14 within the 82nd Texas Legislature were motivated, at the very least in part, because of and not merely in spite of the Voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate…The record as a whole (including the legislator’s knowledge that SB 14 would clearly impact minorities disproportionately and likely disenfranchise them) shows that SB 14 was racially motivated,” stated the United States District Court Southern District of Texas Corpus Christi Division.
The law had been recognized as deliberately racist, but the fight for justice has continued as the appeals court sent the case back to Ramos for another review, which is the hearing that has now been delayed by the Trump administration. This motion filed by the Trump administration is symbolic of the 45th’s president regressive stance on the civil rights of people of color in the United States. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his distaste for people of color and his appointment of Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Steven Mnuchin display his penchant for white supremacy. This transfer of power leaves this critical court case in the hands of Jeff Sessions, attorney general, and John Gore, the reported head of the Civil Rights Division.
Jeff Sessions was deemed to racist to be a federal judge, called a white lawyer working for black clients “a race traitor”, referred to civil rights groups as “un-American” organizations trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them,” and said that the only issue he had with the Ku Klux Klan was their drug use. John Gore has an abysmal history on civil rights as well. When he’s not defending anti-transgender bathroom bills, Gore spends his time defending electoral redistricting plans against claims of civil rights violations.
These appointments and the Trump administration’s blatantly bigoted policies do not bode well for this case and do not bode well for the future of voting rights in the United States. This makes all forms of resistance to the Trump administration vitally important to the preservation of the enfranchisement of people of color. At Affinity Magazine we welcome all forms of resistance whether it be through petitioning, forming first responder groups, or protesting in marches like the Women’s March. Do not let yourself be silenced and fight back #Resist.
