CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas The Department of Justice walked a fine line Tuesday on its commitment to ensuring voting rights when it asked a federal judge to give Texas a few months to try to fix a voter ID law that courts have found violates the Constitution and federal law by discriminating against minority voters.

John Gore, the No. 2 in command at the departments Civil Rights Division, stopped short of denying that Texas purposefully discriminated against the states Hispanic and black voters when it passed a law in 2011 requiring citizens to present photo IDs to cast a ballot a position the Obama administration had taken for years.

In a shift for the federal government, he urged U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos to hold off on resolving that key question in the long-running case, which was once regarded as a test case for whether the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had any life left in it after the Supreme Court scrapped one of its major provisions. To add to the symbolism, Gores plea came on the same day Attorney General Jeff Sessions closed out Black History Month with a paean to civil rights for all .

Gore told Gonzalez Ramos that the Trump administration s new position in the case, unveiled Monday in a last-minute court filing , speaks for itself.

Which is to say, Texas Republicans who hold majorities in both houses of the state Legislature are already taking steps to pass a new voter ID law. While cautioning that the proposal might fail or be amended, Gore said the Justice Department now believes the proposed legislation will probably fix the problems the court found with the original law and that theres no need for Gonzalez Ramos to take action now to determine whether lawmakers intended to disenfranchise black and Latino voters when they enacted the law in 2011.

A new law might fix some of the issues the 5th Circuit identified, Gore said, in a reference to an appeals court ruling last summer that kicked the case back to the lower court so that DOJ, voting rights advocates and Texas may address claims that lawmakers took race into account when approving the original voter ID bill.

If the judge moves forward with a ruling now, Gore added, the court might have to do its work all over again, and so he advised waiting for legislators to act so the case can be resolved only once and not potentially twice.

In 2014, following an eight-day trial, Gonzalez Ramos ruled that Texas voter restrictions amounted to a poll tax that violated the Voting Rights Act and the equality guarantee of the U.S. Constitution, among other findings.

But in a partial reversal, the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in July disagreed with Gonzalez Ramos that Senate Bill 14 was passed with a discriminatory intent while concluding more broadly that the voter ID provision did have a disproportionate effect on minority voters.

My primary theme is very simple, and that is your honor got it right the first time, said Ezra Rosenberg of the judges sweeping 2014 ruling. Rosenberg is an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the several civil rights organizations challenging the Texas law.

These groups found themselves in an awkward position Tuesday, sitting on the plaintiffs side alongside the DOJ lawyer while attorneys for Texas, the longtime defendant in the case, sat on the opposite side of the courtroom. On the very day Donald Trump was elected president, the federal government signaled it would take a different position in the case after years of opposing the law in court during the Obama administration.