Category Archives: Department of Justice

John Fund at National Review.

HuffPo’s Ryan J. Reilly sits down with Tom Perez and asks him if DOJ is making contingency plans if Section 5 is struck down.

USA Today reports.

Here, in the New Yorker.

In response to my January 3 post, Texas Remarkably Fails to Mention in Amicus Brief Against Voting Rights Act That Court Found It Engaged in Purposeful Racial Discrimination in Voting Last Year, Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell sends along the following reply (posted with his permission):

Thanks for your interest in the amicus brief that Texas filed with the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder.

Your blog posting expresses surprise at the amicus brief’s lack of discussion of the Texas redistricting litigation and the discriminatory-purpose finding issued by the district court in that case.  But as you know, Texas has already filed both a jurisdictional statement and a reply brief with the Supreme Court that explain in great detail why the district court’s discriminatory-purpose finding was mistaken.  Indeed, the district court in the redistricting case itself admitted that there was “no direct evidence” of discriminatory purpose, and the analysis in its opinion improperly equated partisan motivations with racially discriminatory motivations.  The Justices are well aware of the discriminatory-purpose finding in the redistricting litigation, and they are equally aware of the State’s response to it.  Your insinuation that  the State’s lawyers are attempting to sweep this under the rug is unwarranted.

Our amicus brief (like most amici briefs filed in the Supreme Court) was narrowly focused:  It was written to explain the unique burdens of the preclearance regime and to explain how the Department of Justice has aggravated rather than mitigated these burdens after Northwest Austin.  The brief used Texas’s experience with its voter-identification law to illustrate these features of the section 5 regime.  Whether those burdens can be justified is a question that Shelby County’s brief and the other amici briefs have capably addressed.  It was not necessary to repeat our discussion of the redistricting decision in the Shelby County amicus brief, especially when discriminatory-purpose claims will remain viable in section 2 litigation after section 5 is struck down.

Ilya Shapiro blogs.

A remarkable omission in the Texas amicus brief in the Shelby County voting rights case before the Supreme Court: there’s all this talk about how burdensome the law is in relation to the DOJ fight over Texas’s voter identification law. But no acknowledgement—much less excuse or explanation—of the district court’s findings just last year that Texas engaged in purposeful discrimination against minority legislators and voters in its most recent round of redistricting.

Does Texas think the other side will forget to bring this finding up to argue that section 5 is still needed?  A very odd choice by the lawyers here.

Via the Project on Fair Representation (representing Shelby County):

Amicus Briefs

Alabama

Alaska

American Unity Legal Defense Fund

Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota

Cato Institute

Former Government Officials

John Nix, Anthony Cuomo
and Dr. Abigail Thernstrom

Judicial Education Project

Justice and Freedom Fund

Landmark Legal Foundation

Mountain States Legal Foundation

National Black Chamber of Commerce

Pacific Legal Foundation, Center for Equal Opportunity, and American Civil Rights Foundation

Project 21

Reason Foundation

Southeastern Legal Foundation

Texas

Here is how Alabama’s brief begins:

In 2013, there should not be the Uncovered States of America and the Covered States of America. There should be the United States of America. Other States have persuasively explained why their experiences support this proposition. This brief provides Alabama’s own, unique perspective. George Wallace and Bull Connor used to be in Alabama, and Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge still are. These people and places were particularly responsible for making the preclearance mechanism necessary and appropriate in 1965. Things that have happened in Alabama in the meantime should thus be particularly instructive in determining whether Congress can employ the same extraordinary measure now.

Alabama’s experience on these fronts is consistent with the Court’s assessment four Terms ago. Things in the South have, indeed, changed. See Nw. Austin Mun. Utility Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193, 202 (2009). Alabama has a new generation of leaders with no connection to the tragic events of 1965. The effects of those events on voting and political representation have now, thankfully, faded away. These on-the-ground realities show that the 2006 Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibilities when it simply reimposed, on Alabama and other States ready to be equal partners in the Union, burdens that previously were necessary and appropriate only because of a defiance and recalcitrance whose vestiges no longer exist.