On the recordMay 23, 2016
I would like to commend my distinguished colleague from New York and my distinguished colleague, the gentlewoman from Ohio, for this wonderful hour of power on voting. It is my great honor to stand with them, to rise today and to join with my CBC colleagues to discuss the reckless Republican assault on the right to vote in America. We began tonight by bringing attention to the ever-evolving crisis brewing in our democracy. Since the Supreme Court in the Shelby decision gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there has been nothing short of an assault on the right to vote-- the most sacred right to vote. This 2016 election will be the first time in my lifetime and, I daresay, in the lifetime of the gentleman from New York, that we will have a Presidential election in which there will not be the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the gentleman so rightly acknowledged, I welcomed, in 2015, 100 Members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, to my hometown of Selma, Alabama, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the historic Bloody Sunday march from Selma to Montgomery, where people shed blood and tears. Our own colleague, John Lewis, was bludgeoned on that bridge, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 50-some years ago in order to have the right to vote for all Americans.…
