There’s plenty of material to work with.
A group of Democratic state lawmakers on Friday asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate potential violations of federal law and civil and voting rights related to Texas state leaders’ recent voter roll purge, raids of Latinos’ homes in connection to alleged election fraud, probing of voter registration organizations and ongoing scrutiny of groups that work with migrants.
“Collectively, these actions have a disproportionate impact on Latinos and other communities of color, which is sowing fear and will suppress voting,” twelve Texas senators wrote in the letter. “We urge the DOJ to investigate Texas … and to take all necessary action to protect the fundamental rights of all Texans and ensure all citizens’ freedom to vote is unencumbered.”
The request for federal authorities to intervene is the latest escalation in response to what Texas leaders have often described as efforts to secure elections.
The efforts, however, have just as often provoked condemnation and worries from civil rights groups and Democrats that the state is violating Texans’ rights and trying to scare people away from the polls.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, a large Latino civil rights organization founded in 1929, made a similar plea to the feds earlier this week. Several of the group’s elderly members were the targets last week of search warrants related to an investigation into alleged election fraud being conducted by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.
“These actions echo a troubling history of voter suppression and intimidation that has long targeted both Black and Latino communities, particularly in states like Texas, where demographic changes have increasingly shifted the political landscape,” the letter states. “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy, and LULAC stands firm in its commitment to defending that right for all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity.”
The Justice Department had received LULAC’s letter, a spokesperson confirmed Friday but declined to comment further.
See here, here, and here for some background; there’s way too much ground to cover to do it all. I’m reasonably confident that the DOJ will pick this up and do something with it. I’m far less confident that there will be any actual enforcement of the law that they will be able to accomplish. What leverage do they have, and what are the odds that a Paxton handmaiden judge and the Fifth Circuit wouldn’t provide a restraining order against it? The more lawless and brazen that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton get, with the boost from their cheerleaders on the bench, the more I’m convinced that coming up with some way to curb that behavior needs to be a top priority. I don’t have a good idea about what can or should be done, and I’m fully aware that anything done here could be wielded against blue states in the future by a Republican administration. But right now it feels like there are few to no checks and balances on the state of Texas (and to be fair, on many other red states), and that’s not sustainable. I would like to see more talk about this by national Democrats, because it’s going to take all of us to do something about it.
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