Sheila Ray-Reed
The Houston Sun
The 82nd U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was greeted by rousing chants of support, “Stand your ground! Stand your ground! Stand your ground! By more than 1000 NAACP delegates attending the Delegate Session at the 103rd National Convention in Houston, TX. The Attorney General did not directly address their “stand your ground” call in reference to him standing firm to his recent contempt of Congress charge for improperly withholding documents pertaining to the Operation Fast and Furious, that reportedly landed guns in the hands of Mexican Drug Cartel. Instead he told the delegates it was wonderful to be with them and thanked them for their love. “Let me just say, I love you back NAACP. Thank you all for those kind words and warm welcome. I am going to be very honest; it’s nice to be outside Washington, D.C. And it is also an honor for me to bring greetings from another brother, President Barack Obama,” he said.
Moving into the heart of his presentation, the Attorney General dove fully charged, blasting the Texas Voter’s Identification Law saying that, “Texas is the center of our national debate on voting rights.” He told the delegates that the measure hurts minorities who are less likely to have an ID. “Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them. And some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. We called these polled taxes,” he said.
He promised an aggressive effort to safeguard voting rights. “The arc of history has always moved toward expanding the electorate. It is what has made this nation exceptional. We will simply not allow this era to be the beginning of the reversal of that historic progress,” he said.
The Obama administration and national civil rights groups such as the NAACP believe that state laws that require people to show government-issued photo IDs at the polls could deny millions of them, mostly minorities and the elderly, who are more likely to lack such IDs the right to vote.
Under Texas’ law, Attorney General Holder noted, a concealed handgun license would served as acceptable ID to vote, but a student ID would not. He went on to say that while only 8 percent of white people do not have government issued IDs, about 25 percent of black people lack such identification.
In March of this year, the Justice Department’s civil rights division objected to photo ID requirements for voters in Texas saying the state did not prove that the bill would not have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. In-turn the Texas attorney general’s office filed suit against U.S. Attorney General Holder and the Department of Justice sending the case to federal court.
Just one day before, the Attorney General’s arrival in Houston, the trial started in federal court in Washington over the 2011 law passed by Texas’ GOP dominated legislature.
A group of representatives from the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund traveled to Washington to act as plaintiffs in Texas v. Holder, the first Voter ID case to be argued in U.S. District Court. As leaders in the fight to defeat Voter ID for the last year, the Texas League of Young Voters and African-American student organizers from Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University are serving as defendant-interveners in the lawsuit, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The case is to be decided in five days by a three-judge panel; Judge Rosemary Collyer, appointed by President George W. Bush, Judge David Tatel, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and Judge Robert Wilkins, appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama.
Texas v. Holder could pave the way for legal challenges by other states with Voter ID laws.