Voting reform group says Trump Justice Department pivots away from voting rights cases News
The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Voting reform group says Trump Justice Department pivots away from voting rights cases

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicated a retreat from support of voting rights cases since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, according to a Votebeat report released Monday.

The report notes that the US solicitor general, the government’s top litigator, asked the Supreme Court last month to allow the federal government to participate in oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case. However, four days after Trump’s inauguration and only eight days after the original request, the acting solicitor general Sarah Harris withdrew that request. Harris wrote in the filing, “Following the change in Administration, the Department of Justice has reconsidered the government’s position in these cases.”

In another case, where the government was a plaintiff, the DOJ sought to pull out of the litigation after Trump came into office.

Both cases will continue as the government was either not a party or was not the only suing party, but the moves “shows how quickly the legal ground is shifting on voting rights cases.” Votebeat remarked that while some changed positions are not uncommon after changes in the White House, there is still some level of continuity maintained between administrations.

Given the shifts since Trump’s inauguration, though, judges in other voting rights cases are preemptively asking the DOJ to clarify its position. In other cases, state government leaders are asking the new Trump DOJ to drop such lawsuits; in Georgia, for example, the state’s top election official Brad Raffensperger formally requested Attorney General Pam Bondi drop their lawsuit over 2021 Georgia election reforms. The Biden DOJ alleged the reforms were enacted with “a racially discriminatory purpose.”

Voting rights organizations, such as the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), have raised the alarm about the new approach of the DOJ. CLC notes that the DOJ has a “responsibility to protect Americans’ freedoms to vote and is specifically charged with enforcing the nation’s federal voting laws,” and that if they choose “not to protect voting rights, historically disenfranchised communities… must shoulder the responsibility of fighting for these rights in court.”

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