Defending Voting Rights

Floor Speech

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Ms. LEE of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank our convenors for the opportunity today to talk about this important issue of protecting our voting rights.

I am one of the new wave of younger Black legislators who never had the opportunity to meet or serve with Representative John Lewis but who are now tasked with finishing what he started.

It is disappointing that we still have a need to explain the urgency of voting rights. But during a time when Black history is under attack, I will still give a brief course, as some of my colleagues here have done.

Today, on March 7, but in 1965, 58 years ago and over two decades before I was born, John Lewis and his comrades risked their lives to demand more of our democracy on what is now known as Bloody Sunday.

You see, months before Bloody Sunday, civil rights organizers celebrated the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, but they demanded more: the right to vote.

So 58 years ago, John Lewis joined over 600 others, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were brutalized by police simply for demanding access to the right to vote, the right to be a full citizen in our democracy just like everyone else, a right that is under attack once again today.

Just saying the right to vote is incomplete. There are still multiple impediments today toward what is really at risk: access to our democracy.

We must fight to modernize voting; we must fight against unduly burdensome voter ID laws; we must fight against gerrymandering; and we must fight to get money out of politics, which locks us out of our fully representative democracy.

Voting rights is a question of economic justice, of racial justice, of LGBTQ rights and women's rights. All our rights are at stake when we vote and, indeed, when we are denied the right to vote.

It is often said that my ancestors died for the right to vote, but I believe that that doesn't paint the entire picture. They died for our right to participate fully in American society and citizenship, to not only vote but to self-determine, to run, to serve, to lead.

I regret that I was never able to call Representative John Lewis a colleague, but I feel a sense of urgency to finish what he started. I strongly urge my colleagues across the aisle to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and I similarly urge them to wake up or move out of the way.

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