Voting Rights

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, yesterday, the U.S. Senate was once again presented with the opportunity to protect the will and the voices of the American people. We had a chance to protect the sanctity of our electoral processes and to preserve our democracy. We had a chance to extend voting rights. But yesterday, for the second time this year, Republicans unanimously chose obstruction over debate, suppression over representation.

All Democrats agree: The Freedom to Vote Act is commonsense legislation. It would enhance access to the ballot for all Americans--a right enshrined in our Constitution. It would enact badly needed election integrity reforms and eliminate emerging threats to our democracy. The Freedom to Vote Act would put in place key voter protections, such as automatic voter registration, making election day a holiday, and uniform early voting. It includes provisions that are broadly popular with the American people: ending partisan gerrymandering and removing special interest money from our politics.

Every single Democrat voted for this bill. Democrats are united behind voting rights. Yesterday, we came to the floor together, ready to start the debate.

My Republican colleagues have said that Democrats are attempting to frame voting restrictions as voter suppression, implying that voter suppression is some figment of our imagination, a figment of the imagination of those across the country who are suffering from these practices. Well, to my Republican colleagues, look around. Nineteen States have passed 33 new laws this year that make it harder to vote. We know that these laws disproportionately disenfranchise Black voters, Brown voters, immigrant voters; voters like a mother in Georgia, who can't vote because she can't take time off from the job she works to cover the bills in the midst of a pandemic; or the poll worker in Arizona, who was arrested--arrested--for giving a bottle of water to a woman waiting in extreme heat to vote; or the person in Texas, who couldn't vote because he didn't have a ride to the polls.

Stories like these are not exaggerations. They are facts, and they are unconscionable facts. If Congress does not step up to the plate on voting rights, then we are signaling to every person in this country that their voice does not matter. We are telling them that we are a country that cares about representation for some but not for all in our country.

Ensuring voting rights is how we show, no matter a person's background or race or hometown or economic status, that their voice can be heard and represented. Not just the wealthy, not just big corporations, not just White Americans--everybody in our country is fully protected so that they can vote, so they can express that central right in our country.

Inaction on voting rights is not an option. Voting rights are the people's power, and the people's power is how we unlock opportunity, representation, and justice for everyone in our Nation. Ensuring the right to vote is how we restore faith in our democracy and how we turn popular opinion into legislative action here on the floor of the Senate.

This is how we take action to save our planet from the existential threat of the climate crisis that is impacting us right now. This is how we take action to respond to the ongoing COVID- 19 pandemic. This is how we take action to address racial injustice across our country. This is how we create the future for our children that we want to see for them.

Republican obstruction does not mean this fight is over. Next week, the Senate will prepare for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and here is how we can get this done: abolish the filibuster. Abolish the filibuster. We must abolish the filibuster so that Democrats who were elected into the majority can begin to operate like a majority.

The filibuster is yet another Jim Crow-era relic that silences the voices of disenfranchised people in our country, and this antiquated, parliamentary rule is halting progress in our country.

As legislators, our job is to both listen to the people of this country and act on what we have heard from our country. Democrats have listened, and we are working toward action.

So, to my Republican colleagues, for the sake of your constituents, I urge you to join us in taking action.

If they do not, then, in the face of continued obstruction, we must abolish the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation.

The Republicans can no longer be allowed to stand behind the filibuster--a Jim Crow-era policy, a set of rules that is used on the floor of the Senate to actually deny progress for every single part of our society. The time has passed. These rules are antiquated. They are used in a discriminatory way to deliberately minimize the political power of those who are most vulnerable, and it must end. We must abolish the filibuster.

The message we are receiving from the Republican leadership is that they are going to stand fast as a party, and that their political strategy is, in fact, disenfranchisement. It is, in fact, obstructing our ability to hear every single voice in our country.

So this is the time. This is the body that must act. We have to change these rules. These rules do not work for everyone. We know that this is our constitutional time.

Back when the first Constitution was being drafted, they excluded women, and they excluded the slave population, the Black population, from being able to vote. It was a deliberate plan that had to be rectified. It was rectified by the suffrage movement for women, and it was rectified by the Civil War so that former slaves would be given the right to vote.

Well, this is our time. We see this moment for us to act on the filibuster. In the same way that the Civil War was the impediment, it has to be removed because we can see who is harmed if it is not.

So I call upon everyone to begin this action to repeal the filibuster to ensure that everyone's voice is heard in our country.

I thank the Presiding Officer for this opportunity.

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