The Biden administration on Monday sued Texas for a second time over its election practices, alleging Republican state lawmakers discriminated against Latinos and other minorities by approving new congressional and state legislative districts that officials said would dilute minority voting power. The action represents the Justice Department’s first major challenge to redistricting, as states are undertaking the once-a-decade process of redrawing their legislative districts.

Monday’s action by the Justice Department comes roughly a month after it sued the state over aspects of a separate, new voting law...

The Justice Department’s ability to enforce voting rights is limited by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that ended the department’s authority to sign off on state voting changes before they went into effect, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday. He urged Congress to restore DOJ’s so-called preclearance authority, which he said “had been the department’s best tool for protecting voting rights.” In the court’s 2013 decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the inequities the preclearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act sought to address had largely diminished, citing 2004 figures that showed a higher percentage of Black than of white Mississippians registered to vote. While the Voting Rights Act was “immensely successful at redressing racial discrimination and integrating the voting process,” the chief justice wrote, it had done so by undermining “the integrity, dignity, and residual sovereignty of the States.”

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