Justice Department files suit over Texas voter ID law

The U.S. Department of Justice will is filing a new lawsuit against Texas Thursday, asserting the state's controversial voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.

After a recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down a state pre-clearance provision of the Voting rights Act, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to fight the Texas law that had been deemed by the DOJ to be unconstitutional.

"We will not allow the Supreme Court’s recent decision to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights," Holder said in a statement.

The suit names the state of Texas, the Texas secretary of State, and the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety as defendants.

DOJ says SB14 and in violation of Section 2 of the VRA, as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

"The department will take action against jurisdictions that attempt to hinder access to the ballot box, no matter where it occurs," Holder said. "We will keep fighting aggressively to prevent voter disenfranchisement.”

DOJ says the voter photo ID law proposed in Texas "was adopted with the purpose, and will have the result, of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group."

Some critics of the law say it also disproportionately affects students and the elderly, who tend to vote Democratic.

Republicans have denounced at the DOJ calling for new pre-clearance requirements for Texas. They say photo ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, yet, almost no cases of in-person voter fraud exist.

Even a voter fraud indictment in Texas just this week was allegedly carried out using absentee ballots under five different names, a case poll identification would not have prevented.

But Republican lawmaker and former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said Justice is within its rights to bring the suit.

Also on Thursday, DOJ will file a motion to intervene in the redistricting case Perez v. Perry, in order to allow the government to present arguments about “the purpose and effect" of the redistricting plans.

Justice claims that Texas’s 2011 redistricting was planned “with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group," and is thus in violation of Section 2 of the VRA.

Prior to the Supreme Court's ruling, a federal court in Washington, D.C. found that Texas had not proved its redistricting plan and voter ID law were were not discriminatory under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. After the SCOTUS ruling, the federal court's decision was vacated.