Congressional Black Caucus--The Work Continues: Why Voting Matters in the African American Community

Floor Speech

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Mr. JEFFRIES. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman, Representative Beatty, from the great State of Ohio for her leadership and for moving us forward throughout the past several weeks as it relates to the Congressional Black Caucus' Special Order, this hour of power.

It is 60 minutes where we have the opportunity to speak to the American people about issues of importance to our country, to our economy, to the integrity of our democracy as we are doing tonight. It is an honor to share with you today.

I also want to acknowledge and thank our colleague, John Larson from the great State of Connecticut, for his continuing leadership and for taking to the House floor today to highlight both the historic significance of the speech that President Johnson gave from this very Chamber 51 years ago, on March 15, 1965, about voting in America and ensuring that every single person, regardless of their race or their color or their background had an opportunity to exercise their franchise, and to point out to the American people that the Congress will pause tomorrow to honor two true American legends, Representative Lewis and Representative Johnson, who served the American people before they arrived in the people's House and through their service here in the House of Representatives.

It is with great humility that I stand today to address a topic that I think is of particular significance at this moment in time that we face in America in terms of the turmoil that many may be feeling, watching, undergoing: the economic changes that have been experienced over the last few decades.

We know that the middle class, in many ways, has been left behind. Wages have remained stagnant, notwithstanding the increased productivity of the American people over the last 40-plus years. When the economy collapsed, many high-income earners were able to rebound in no small part as a result of the bailout that occurred. There are a lot of Americans who are still hoping, looking out for their opportunity to be brought back into the economic mainstream by the people they have sent to Congress to represent them.

Notwithstanding all of the challenges that we have to confront, whether that is our broken criminal justice system or the economy that has still not completely recovered, we have made substantial progress under the leadership of Barack Obama. But of course there is more that needs to be done, and we could welcome some cooperation from folks on the other side of the aisle because all of our constituents were hit hard in 2008, yet President Obama has largely been left to his own devices.

Notwithstanding all of these issues, central to how our government works is the fact that it is designed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Abraham Lincoln, of course, famously uttered those words in his Gettysburg Address.

If we are going to have that type of government, then everybody needs the opportunity to be able to participate in choosing their representatives in government without obstacle or obstruction.

We understand this is a great country, but it is also a country that has had a stain on its history as it relates to denying some the opportunity to participate fully in American democracy. That is the reason, after all, that, in the aftermath of the Civil War that threatened to tear this country apart, we had a Reconstruction amendment related to slavery and then a Reconstruction amendment related to the equal protection under the law and due process for all Americans; and lastly, of course, with the 15th Amendment designed to make sure that, in the Constitution, racial discrimination, as it relates to the exercise of the franchise, would be prohibited.

But, unfortunately, notwithstanding the 15th Amendment being ratified and put into our Constitution, more than 100 years would pass by until this country really confronted the denial of the right to vote in a meaningful way, particularly in the Deep South, and it happened because of the efforts and sacrifice of a great many people: Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Andrew Young, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP, and those foot soldiers who were on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, and almost lost their lives when they were attacked without provocation by Alabama State troopers as they endeavored to cross that bridge on the way from Selma to Montgomery. That, of course, then prompted President Johnson to deliver that address, where he so famously uttered the words upon his conclusion that ``we shall overcome.''

The 1965 Voting Rights Act continues to be the most significant piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by this Congress, but unfortunately we know that it is currently under attack. It is under attack because the Supreme Court effectively, in the Shelby v. Holder case, eviscerated its impact by striking down section 4, so-called coverage clause, which effectively eliminated the Department of Justice's ability to require States with a history of voting rights discrimination to have to preclear any changes that it makes.

Now, what I have been struggling to figure out during my brief time here in the Congress is why voting rights has become such a controversial thing when, it seems to me, it is so central to the integrity of our democracy. For decades, in the aftermath of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it was actually pretty bipartisan, this notion that in order for our democracy to work there should be no artificial obstacles erected to prevent people--African Americans, Latinos, immigrant families, and others--from being able to participate in what basically makes America great, what makes us unique: the ability to elect our representatives and for there to be peaceful transitions of power regardless of ideology, regardless of your region, regardless of what State a President may come from in order to keep the Republic going.

When you look at the history of the Voting Rights Act, as I indicated, it has largely been, until recently, a bipartisan endeavor. In fact, every time the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized--and it has happened four times--not only did it pass with bipartisan majorities in the Congress, but it was signed into law each and every time by a Republican President.

In 1970, Richard Nixon signed into law the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. In 1975, Gerald Ford signed into law the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Then in 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. This significant piece of civil rights legislation was enacted into law and then reenacted on every single occasion with the signature of a Republican President, indicating that voting, participation in the franchise, having the American people in their full, gorgeous mosaic elect their representatives is an American thing. But all of a sudden, it has become controversial.

Now, I don't know if the timing of the election of our current President has anything to do with that. Historians will make that analysis as they move forward. It is above my pay grade. I just find it interesting that this notion of voter fraud, which was always a fiction put forth by the defenders of the race-based Southern hierarchy to deny African Americans the right to vote--and was not an issue when Richard Nixon was elected; it wasn't an issue when Reagan was elected; it wasn't an issue when George Herbert Walker Bush was elected; it wasn't an issue when George W. Bush was elected, notwithstanding the fact that I am still not convinced he won the State of Florida--all of a sudden, in the aftermath of the election of President Barack Obama, apparently there has been an outbreak of this fever that we have got to deal with so-called voter fraud.

No evidence of the fraud, not a scintilla of evidence has been produced by a single proponent of this argument, but when people were elected in 2010, in the immediate aftermath of that election during President Barack Obama's first term, more than 180 different pieces of legislation in 41 States were introduced, all, in the opinion of many objective observers, designed to suppress the right to vote. And at the same time, this challenge was working its way through the Supreme Court from, of all groups of people, Shelby, Alabama.

Now, the irony of that, John Lewis almost lost his life, as Representative Larson indicated, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge down in Selma, Alabama; and yet the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, in a case brought by the folks from Shelby County, apparently thinking that they were victims because of the oppressive nature of the preclearance provision, the Supreme Court, at least for the time being, bought that argument.

So we find ourselves now in a situation here in the Congress where the Court has said to us: Fix it; update the coverage formula. So bipartisan legislation has been introduced, championed by folks like Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the 2006 reauthorization and a very distinguished and respected former Republican chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and, of course, John Conyers, John Lewis, Joyce Beatty, and many others on the Democratic side of the aisle. Yet we can't get a single hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary on something seemingly so fundamental to the integrity of our democracy.

We are not asking you to turn into progressive Democrats. Just act like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, whom you hold up as someone who is the classic embodiment of conservative politics. Just act like Ronald Reagan did in 1982 or George W. Bush.

Let's fix the Voting Rights Act in advance of the American people having to determine what comes next as it relates to both this Congress and the Presidency--not because it is a good thing for Republicans or because it is a good thing for Democrats; it is a good thing for the country: full and robust participation.

I just want to add, as I close, that it seems to me that this would be a particularly significant time to deal with the Voting Rights Act and to make sure that everybody can participate fully in our democracy at a moment when many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the Senate have said: We want the American people to decide who fills the Supreme Court vacancy.

Now, I am a little skeptical about that, but let's assume that that is really your view of the world. If, in fact, you don't want to do your constitutional job right now--once the President sends up a Supreme Court nominee and gives that person an opportunity to be heard before the Senate and the American people--because you claim you want the American people to decide who that nominee is through the vehicle of a Presidential election--then let's make sure that all of America can participate in that process. That means let's remove any obstacles to voting in every community.

We haven't seen a hearing in the House, and we haven't seen a hearing in the Senate. I just don't understand. We have had no hearing on the Supreme Court nomination. We have had no hearing on the Voting Rights Act when the Supreme Court told us to fix it. What exactly is going on? The American people are wondering.

We see a lot of frustration right now out there in America directed at Washington. That is because oftentimes there are so many critical issues that we simply fail to deal with.

So I am just hopeful today that, as we mark this occasion tomorrow of these two American heroes being honored--Representative Johnson and Representative Lewis--we can get back to doing the business of the American people in the spirit of service that they themselves have displayed through their life's work and deal with something so central to our democracy such as the right to vote in an unfettered fashion.

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Mr. JEFFRIES. Well, it is a great question. I look at it in two ways. First, when you think about mass incarceration as a phenomenon, one that, hopefully, in this Congress we will be able to do something about, in recognition of the fact that America imprisons more people than any other country in the world, increasingly, we have become a country that over-incarcerates and under-educates. As a result, we have lost generations of young people, disproportionately, African Americans and Latinos.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared publicly that drug abuse was public enemy number one. At the time, there were less than 350,000 people incarcerated in America. That was the starting point of the war on drugs.

More than 40 years later we have now got 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. A significant number of those folks-- approximately 50 percent at the Federal level and similar numbers at the State level--are there for nonviolent drug offenses.

Yet, every single one of those people who have been incarcerated in America has lost the right to vote, some permanently, some temporarily with an opportunity to perhaps recover it. More than a million people are currently incarcerated from the African American community. So our system is broken. Our democracy is in need of adjustment.

If there is not an understanding that the absence of refraining from participating in that democracy through exercising the franchise yields consequences that public policymakers will choose either intentionally or through benign neglect to allow things like mass incarceration to overwhelm a community, then we are going to continue to see things happen that are not in the best interest of America. Certainly, electoral participation matters to the African American community.

The other thing that we have got to look at in the context of the right to vote--and there is some bipartisan support because Senator Rand Paul on the other side of the Capitol has been very visionary in this regard--is that disenfranchising people who have been incarcerated in America, paid their debt to society, have moved on with their life-- but to permanently restrict them, even in some cases when the conviction is for a misdemeanor offense, is un-American.

But some have used this type of disenfranchisement related to the prison industrial complex to overwhelm many communities because of mass incarceration to, again, set up obstacles to full participation in American democracy.

So we have got to put everything on the table in terms of our effort to fix our broken criminal justice system, which I am pleased, to date, at least in the House on the Judiciary Committee, has been bipartisan in nature.

But we have to take an expansive approach to repairing the damage that has been done over more than 40 years of a failed war on drugs, with millions upon millions upon millions of people stamped with a criminal record, I believe in excess of 65 million people during that time period, disproportionately African Americans and Latinos.

It is one of many issues that is on the table that, hopefully, will result in folks understanding that the stakes are high as it relates to who represents you. And the vehicle is just to participate.

That is the great majesty of our democracy as it was conceived by the Founders and those who came after: Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, through electoral participation.

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