In 2011, the great state of Texas enacted one of the strictest voter-ID laws in the nation, requiring that each prospective voter present one of a very limited selection of forms of identification in order to cast a ballot. (In a very on-brand move for Texas, a handgun license is sufficient, but a student ID is not.) The Obama administration joined prompt legal challenges to the measure, with its opponents arguing that the Republican-controlled legislature crafted the law with "surgical precision" to exclude forms of ID disproportionately held by minority voters. The district court agreed, and last July, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this finding. The good guys, it seemed, had prevailed.

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Seven months later, the case is still winding its way through the court system toward a resolution, but this morning, the Department of Justice will ask the judge to voluntarily dismiss its claim that the Texas legislature acted with discriminatory intent in passing the law. After years of pressing its case in multiple federal courts—and winning on this point, too—the federal government simply wants to drop this line of argument altogether, and going forward, it will merely contend that whatever the legislature's intent, the law's only problem is that it has an unlawful discriminatory effect. The worst-case scenario here, the Justice Department now claims, is inadvertent prejudice. And the only facts that have changed between July's decision and Tuesday's withdrawal, of course, are the election of President Trump and the appointment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

To be clear, it's not necessarily untoward for the incoming White House to make changes to the previous administration's policies. What sets Tuesday's move apart, though, is that it wasn't only the Obama administration that believed that Texas's law intended to discriminate—multiple federal judges agree and have ordered Texas to fix the problem. The Department of Justice's request ignores those findings altogether, giving a silent nod of approval to state laws that interfere with the rights of citizens—say, octogenarian African-Americans denied their constitutional rights because they didn't have the right fucking plastic card with their picture on it—to cast their ballots. Even if the Texas court ultimately finds discriminatory intent in spite of this move, the administration's preemptive surrender sends a clear signal to Republican-controlled legislatures that future efforts to pass dubiously justified voter-ID laws will be on much firmer legal ground.

The Justice Department's decision is hardly surprising, given the attorney general's lifelong obsession with stamping out "voter fraud" in predominantly minority communities—giant scare quotes, of course, to reiterate that no evidence of such a phenomenon exists. But it neatly fits in with the worldview of the man who appointed Sessions to his position, too. Proponents of voter-ID laws argue that they are necessary to preserve the integrity of elections, which is music to the ears of President Trump, a man who for some godforsaken reason continues to insist that "voter fraud" is an urgent crisis of national import. Republican state legislatures eyeing draconian voter-ID proposals already knew that they have the president's tacit approval to move forward. Now they have the Department of Justice's explicit endorsement, too.

Thus far in his tenure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has busied himself with gutting federal protections for transgender schoolchildren and restarting a wildly expensive, comically ineffective drug war, but today's move is especially insidious because it is so transparently and unapologetically undemocratic. Under this Department of Justice, the federal government only cares about your right to vote if you happen to be the type of voter they want casting a ballot. Otherwise, you're on your own.

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