Justice Department officials announced Friday that the government would file a federal lawsuit against Georgia over its enactment of a controversial law that seeks to suppress and disenfranchise Black voters in the state. The law, SB202 or the so-called Election Integrity Act, was pushed through by Georgia Republicans in late March and immediately signed into law by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp behind closed doors.

At a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland charged that recent changes to the state’s election law were undertaken with the express purpose of “denying or abridging the rights of black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color” in direct violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said the Justice Department had not made the determination lightly, but government lawyers had concluded that Georgia’s SB202 had been “passed with a discriminatory purpose” that violated federal voting laws.

“The Justice Department will not stand idly by in the face of unlawful attempts to restrict access to the ballot,” Clarke said.

Clarke noted that SB202 had been enacted through a “rushed process” that included the law ballooning from just three pages as passed by the state Senate to over 90 pages several days later as passed by the state House. The House held less then two hours of debate on the bill before Kemp ultimately signed it into law that same day.

Clarke said the bill specifically aimed to restrict access to absentee voting at a time when the practice had reached historic highs in 2020 and “black voters are now more likely to use than white voters.”

“The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at each step of the process pushing more black voters to in-person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines,” Clarke explained. “SB202 then imposes additional obstacles to casting an in-person ballot.”

Garland also said federal authorities would be stepping up their efforts to combat a “dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats” toward election officials and election workers alike. In particular, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his family have received a number of disturbing threats, though Garland did not mention them by name. 

Garland said the department would be issuing a directive to all federal prosecutors and the FBI instructing them to “prioritize investigating these threats.” He also promised prosecution for any violations of federal law. 

Overall, Georgia Republicans welcomed the announcement of the legal challenge as an opportunity to score political points. The level of projection was deep and real.

“This lawsuit is born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia’s Election Integrity Act from the start,” said Kemp, whose party used the Big Lie pushed by Donald Trump about election fraud as a pretext for the new voting law.

Raffensperger, arguably the most beleaguered GOP official in the state, also bogusly accused the Biden administration of leveraging lies to their political benefit.  

“The Biden Administration continues to do the bidding of Stacey Abrams and spreads more lies about Georgia’s election law,” he said in a statement. “It is no surprise that they would operationalize their lies with the full force of the federal government. I look forward to meeting them, and beating them, in court.”

Kemp and Raffesnperger have been the targets of enduring scorn from Trump supporters in the state for their failure to illegally overturn the rightful results of the election. The Justice Department’s lawsuit isn’t likely to alleviate that, but it was surely a nice reprieve for them to try to redirect that anger at the Biden administration. But in the process of scoring some short-term political points, they also continued to push a Trumpian narrative that Democrats are the liars, not Republicans.