Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, today, we in the Congressional Black Caucus gather to observe the 11th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision and to reflect on the state of voting rights in America. It was exactly 11 years ago today when the Supreme Court's conservative majority gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating voter protections and removing Federal oversight from States with a proven record of voter discrimination. We have seen, in those 11 years, 31 States institute at least 103 new laws to restrict voting rights. It is no surprise that those laws disproportionately target African-American and minority voters. The consequences of the Shelby decision have been clear and devastating: long lines, strict ID requirements that require time and money to obtain, closed polling stations in communities of color, bans on early voting and absentee voting, the purging of voter rolls, and the list goes on and on. In my home State of Alabama, lawmakers have recently made it a felony to assist someone with their absentee ballot. While these tactics may be new, we know that they are borrowed from the same playbook that has been used for generations to silence the voices of African-American and other minority voters. While Black voters may not need to count the number of jelly beans in a jar, modern-day barriers to voting are no less pernicious than the poll tax and the literacy tests of the past. In Shelby v.…”