MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Sheila Jackson Lee

Interview

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MADDOW: Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee today urging senators to ditch the filibuster and pass federal voting rights legislation. You heard her talk about civil disobedience there. Well, shortly after those remarks from the congresswoman, several of the activists and leaders she was speaking alongside as well as one fellow member of congress, Congressman Hank Johnson who you saw in the background there, she spoke, several of those men were arrested in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience at the Senate office building.

It`s the latest protest in what civil rights leaders have called a summer of activist and nonviolent direct action to try to win new federal protections for voting rights.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee represents a congressional district that`s ground zero for the current battle over these rights. Houston is the most diverse city in Texas, had a record voter turnout in the last presidential election. That was thanks in part the ways in which county leaders made it easier for people to vote.

Republicans in the Texas legislature looked at that and promptly wrote a bill outlawing basically by all the methods in which Houston expanded voter access last year. The bill incurring those restrictions is currently blocked from passage only because Texas Democrats got on a plane and left the state en masse, so there can`t be a quorum back home.

Those Texas Democrats are still in D.C. pressuring the U.S. Senate for the same thing Congresswoman Lee was with them and Congresswoman Hank Johnson and those leaders demanding today, passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to set a federal voting rights standard that would block the voting rights attack in Texas and other Republican-led states around the country.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas joins us now live.

Congresswoman, it`s a real pleasure to have you with us tonight. Thank you for taking time. I know it`s been a long day already.

LEE: Thank you for having me. It`s certainly good to be with you this evening.

MADDOW: Let me ask you about this event today and this dramatic protest today including this nonviolent civil disobedience that resulted in multiple arrests including one member of Congress, your colleague Hank Johnson. Let me ask you whether I sort of fairly portrayed it and what the aim was of that event.

LEE: Rachel, it was a powerful moment, and I was glad to be there as a supporter of black men who if we look historically at racism, discrimination and slavery, they bore the brunt. They were the ones that were beaten the most, discriminated against the most, incarcerated the most. And even as black women have suffered, black men were the examples of what white racism is could do to a human being.

So it was a powerful moment that reflected members of Congress, organizations such as fraternities and one of the black men in pastoral groups, et cetera. We saw Congressman Hank Johnson offered himself with the others to be arrested, we are fighting for our voting lives. In essence, we`re fighting for the life or death of the ability and the right to vote.

When I spoke, I indicated that we were standing in front of the Supreme Court. And when Thurgood Marshal walked into that Supreme Court, he walked in after the aftermath of those who lost their lives in the fight of the civil rights movement that John Lewis came out of to right the wrong, to have civil rights and to be able to vote. People died.

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And now we are here some 56 years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Rachel, I ask the question why. Why can we not have the protection of the 15th amendment, which instructs the Senate constitutionally that they have a duty to end all laws that abridge the right to vote on the base of race. And it has not occurred.

And so I`m a legislator. I`ve been told I`m a legislator. I know I`m a legislator and I sit on the committee. I have written voting rights legislation years ago often and they`ve been passed in a bipartisan way. But because we have the cancer of the big lie, we now have this fight.

And because we have the reincarnation of the filibuster used in the 1960s to block civil rights laws, and it is now being used -- and I don`t know if the senators today realize what tradition they`re in. They`re in a tradition of segregationist senators who use that filibuster.

And frankly, we`re all going to be participating in civil disobedience. We`ll be back again next week with women, and you`re see members of Congress engaging in civil disobedience as legislators because we want to legislate, but we`ve got to move in order to legislate.

MADDOW: Talk to me about the tactical decision to move into direction action? We spoke with the Reverend William Barber last night and Beto O`Rourke who are planning a Selma to Montgomery-style march in Texas, Georgetown, Texas, to Austin, Texas next week. We`ve spoken with a number of other people who have talked to us and sort of let us know we should expect non-violent civil disobedience and direct action to only continue but to escalate over the course of this summer.

Is the idea that sort tactics outside the electoral system as it`s nearly defined are needed to break this impasse?

LEE: I believe that we are Americans, and we live in America. And over the history of America, we have seen direct action, nonviolent. Can anyone remember the outraged taxpayers in Boston who threw tea into the Boston harbor? Didn`t get a chance to have some good tea they probably wanted because they were outraged. They did it as civil disobedience.

We have seen over the years as I`ve served in the United States Congress, I participated in a quarter of a million person march in New York against the Iraq war, against the continuation of the Afghan war. And people have come from all over.

We have (AUDIO GAP) voices that are spoken and people who are not listening. So I think the idea, Rachel, is that one, one, those of us who are legislators, organizations, regular citizens, we want to teach them. We want to do this nonviolently.

We expect not to throw any stones and not to represent any form of violence. But we do expect as I said in the book that`s just been written with John Lewis` name on it, it`s a carry on. I`m saddened as he was a dear, dear friend only one year since his death, one year of his death was on Saturday. And we were christening a ship at that time in San Diego.

To think that all that he did, that it had come to a point where we have friends, allies in the United States Senate who want to put a rule -- and let me be very clear. The filibuster is a rule. It has no place in the Constitution. It is not a constitutional amendment or provision. And therefore from my perspective, Rachel, it has no authority.

And the Senate -- and I know that the leadership there are eager to do two things. One, roll the filibuster off in compromise to those who believe it`s sacred, to be able to pass budget reconciliation. If we have to the infrastructure bill, the voting rights bill, the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, and I hope HR-40, the commission study to develop and repair, reparations.

But even so I think it`s important to note the Constitution never wanted the tyranny of the minority to overcome the majority. The majority should be protected. In this instance, it is Mitch McConnell. They should be protected, but they cannot dominate. They cannot undermine the voices of the American people that spoke in November of 2020.

And so, we`re taking that lead, frankly. Hearing those voices who ask us every day why can you not protect us. The Texas Democratic delegation leaving their families, their jobs, their income, their livelihoods, as one would say, and living in conditions that are not the best.

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And they have come.

And so I believe (INAUDIBLE) cannot tolerate that bill. Texas cannot their bill, and neither can the other 46 states that have put these onerous anti- voting bills in place.

MADDOW: Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, joining us tonight from Houston -- thank you so much for being here tonight, ma`am. I know this was an intense day and I appreciate you being here to help us understand. Thank you.

LEE: Thank you for having me. Look forward to seeing you again. Thank you.

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