Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Criminal Justice Reform

Floor Speech

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I thank the Speaker and acknowledge that 1965 is a very unique and special year. It is the commemoration of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, which symbolized to the world the cry and passion to have your voices heard through the vote.

I stand here today asking this body and its leadership to put on the floor of the House the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a bill that was reauthorized in 2006, 2007, under the leadership of President George W. Bush and the Members of the United States Congress, in a bipartisan manner. The vote in the Senate was 98-0, and we had an equally impressive vote here in the United States House of Representatives.

The question would be why, a simple task of updating this legislation to ensure that thousands, maybe millions, are not denied the right to vote.

I start with that because the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was particularly brutal, and I want to give credit to all those who marched, many names that I know, our own colleague John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and many that we have met over the years in Selma. They marched and stood nonviolently against violence and, might I say, under the auspices of the misinterpretation of the law, those law enforcement officers--misguided, of course--that stopped those individuals from expressing their rights.

Today, I come to match the need for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act to the enormous need, in a bipartisan manner, to reform our criminal justice system.

Over the news airwaves of the last 24 hours, right here in Washington, D.C., there was a statement about a young father who stood on his doorsteps in Fairfax, Virginia, that, finally, his two beautiful daughters had a settlement from that law enforcement department. He was shot on his doorsteps. The facts are such that I won't discuss today, but one can almost assume that that father did not need to lose his life.

Yesterday, the #marchtojustice, the Justice League of New York City, came to the west lawn to petition the government to end racial profiling and to begin to address the question of how do we have a criminal justice system that meets the equality and justice of America.

Sadly, just a few miles a way, in Baltimore, we understand that a young man was picked up and, ultimately, went into a coma and died. What happened in the midst of the time where his spinal cord was nearly severed in the custody of law enforcement officers?

Let me be very clear. As a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, my commitment is that law enforcement officers go home to their families. In a few days, we will be honoring those who fell in the line of duty. We will be standing and respecting the fact that they provide a protection for this Nation and they serve us. We thank them for that.

But we must come to a point where we hold the Constitution dear and that citizens of the United States have the right to access and speech and protest and that protesters are not dangerous outsiders.

Mr. Speaker, I have introduced two initiatives that I would ask my colleagues to join me on, initiatives that should draw bipartisan support. One is the Build TRUST legislation that simply indicates that there should be a process by which local jurisdictions use various citations and nuisance citations and stopping people on the street as a source of revenue, the same kind of issue that confronted Eric Garner--who, by the way, Mr. Speaker, was a large man who everybody knew, who was simply trying to support his family, maybe selling a few cigarettes.

No one has suggested that, dealing with the laws of New York, that that wasn't against the law. What we are saying is that Eric Garner did not need to, in essence, lose his life, nor did Walter Scott in South Carolina, shot five times in the back because he ran.

We are legislators. We know the law. We understand that there is a framework for dealing with police officers, and we need to get there.

The Build TRUST bill says, however, that you cannot heavily burden a particular community, and you must report where all your revenue is coming from in terms of, if it is overly excessive, then you will lose Federal funds because we know that you are going into certain communities.

The other is the CADET Act, which I hope will draw bipartisan support. It does what South Carolina is doing. It codifies the collection of data of lethal force by law enforcement and citizens.

Mr. Speaker, it is time now to use the CADET bill for the science of criminal justice reform and the Build TRUST bill to rebuild trust and have police accountability.

I believe that this 50th year of Selma, Mr. Speaker, pushes us to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and move toward a just criminal justice reform.

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