Obama administration seeks oversight of Texas voting laws

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved aggressively Thursday to reassert federal power and block state laws that allegedly violate the civil rights of minority voters, an authority that the Supreme Court had substantially weakened last month by striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act.

The announcement by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. made Texas the administration’s test case and first target, all but guaranteeing a full-scale political and legal battle with that state’s conservative Republican leadership.

The battle comes with big stakes. Immediately in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision, several states, particularly in the South, announced plans to reinstate stringent voter ID laws and other practices that administration officials and civil rights groups see as aimed at reducing minority voting.

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The consequences in Texas are characteristically large. It is by a wide margin the biggest reliable Republican stronghold left among the states, but it has a rapidly growing number of minority voters who lean toward the Democrats.

Holder said the Justice Department would go to court to seek an order that would once again require Texas to submit all proposed voting-law changes to Washington for advance approval. That practice, known as pre-clearance, had been the law from 1965 until the Supreme Court’s ruling for nine Southern states, as well as parts of others, including California and New York.

Texas’ plan for redrawing political boundaries after the 2010 census intentionally discriminated against minorities, administration lawyers argue, citing judicial rulings on that point as evidence that the state needs continued federal supervision.

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The Texas filing is the department’s first legal action in response to the Supreme Court ruling that altered the Voting Rights Act, “but it won’t be our last,” Holder said in a speech before a meeting of the National Urban League in Philadelphia, hinting at similar actions in other states.

“We plan … to fully utilize the law’s remaining sections to ensure that voting rights of all American citizens are protected,” he said.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry reacted heatedly.

“Once again, the Obama administration is demonstrating utter contempt for our country’s system of checks and balances, not to mention the U.S. Constitution,” said Perry, a Republican. “This end run around the Supreme Court undermines the will of the people of Texas, and casts unfair aspersions on our state’s common-sense efforts to preserve the integrity of our elections process.”

Texas Atty. Gen. Greg Abbott, considered the front-runner to succeed Perry as governor, accused the Obama administration of colluding with the state’s Democratic Party. “This is an abuse of the Voting Rights Act for partisan, political purposes,” he said, “to put Texas elections under their thumb.”

Until last month’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision, pre-clearance applied automatically to the nine Southern states. The goal was to end the widespread practice of crafting voting laws to prevent blacks — and later Latinos — from registering and casting ballots.

The court ruled that Congress had erred when it last renewed the law because it continued to use outdated voting information from the 1970s to decide which states would be covered by the pre-clearance rules. Although the decision gave Congress the ability to come up with a new coverage formula, there seems little chance of congressional action.

Indeed, the administration’s announcement, which immediately triggered a strong rebuke among Republicans in Congress, seemed based in part on the belief that the chance of congressional action was so small that there was little to lose by moving unilaterally.

The new effort will employ a little-used part of the Voting Rights Act that was not affected by the recent high court ruling. Under this provision of the law, the federal government can gain authority over election laws in a state if a court has found practices there to be intentionally discriminatory.

“There is a reason they started with Texas,” said Spencer Overton, a professor of law at George Washington University. “It is pretty clear it has been one of the most flagrant violators of the Voting Rights Act.”

A panel of federal judges in 2012 found that the state’s congressional redistricting map “was enacted with a discriminatory purpose” — undercutting the power of black Democrats and diluting the voting power of a surging Latino population.

“The only explanation Texas offers for this pattern is ‘coincidence,’” the court wrote. “But if this is coincidence, it is a striking one indeed. It is difficult to believe that pure chance would lead to such results.”

Texas has experienced a surge in population growth over the last 10 years, with blacks and Latinos making up about 90% of the newcomers. Yet the political maps have been redrawn to limit the voting power of those minorities.

“The district lines that have been drawn in Texas have attracted quite a bit of controversy down there,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “So I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody who has been following this that that’s attracted the attention of the Department of Justice.”

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature also passed one of the nation’s most restrictive voter ID laws, which the Obama administration is trying to block. It requires that voters bring with them to the polls government-issued photo identification, such as a driver’s license, U.S. passport, a U.S. military ID card or a license to carry a concealed weapon. A panel of federal judges in Washington noted that in some cases would-be voters, some who don’t drive, could have to travel up to 250 miles round-trip to get such a document.

Latino and African American civil rights organizations, which had challenged the congressional voting plan, had gone back to court this month asking that Texas be placed back under the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance rules. The federal government had a Friday deadline to decide whether to take a position in that case.

If the administration wins its argument before federal judges in San Antonio, Texas officials already have vowed to try to return to the Supreme Court for another round.

Officials at the Justice Department would not say where they planned to take action next in this new round of litigation. But experts widely anticipate one target will be North Carolina. Its GOP-dominated Legislature is girded to approve one of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws.

While the new strategy could restore some of the authority the federal government lost in the Supreme Court ruling, it comes with limits.

“It will only be in those places where they have been able to prove ‘intentional’ discrimination, which is not easy,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine. In cases where judges have found that a law has the effect of discriminating against minorities, they usually have not taken the additional step of deciding if that discrimination was intentional, he said. The Texas case was unusual in that regard, he added.

evan.halper@latimes.com

Times staff writers Christi Parsons and Richard A. Serrano in Washington and Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston contributed to this report.