I appreciate that and applaud that.

The American people understand that we need to keep firearms out of the wrong hands, and yet it is 20 years later and we at the Federal level have shamefully done nothing about this issue.

Much of our work here in the Congress is ultimately making sure that the world she inherits is a better one than perhaps the world that we inherited.

I am grateful to Congressman Mike Thompson and this Committee for prioritizing H.R. 8, the bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019.

There is no constitutional impediment to passing life-saving gun laws.

I am very excited about the opportunity to take comprehensive, holistic, and significant action to solve this issue, actions like the Green New Deal, which I support.

I would respectfully disagree with Dr. Curry, in terms of your framing around the existential nature of this issue. I think climate change is an existential threat.

We must invest in our collective future.

At the end of the day, I think this was the defining issue of our time.

The only thing standing in the way of saving lives is a lack of political will.

H.R. 1 also aims to end voter intimidation, the dissemination of deceptive voting information about times and places, and other voter suppression tactics.

Gerrymandering is a uniquely American phenomenon, and yet, H.R. 1 really goes a long way to prevent intentional manipulation of district lines for partisan advantage.

Not only is ex-offender disenfranchisement wrong and anti-democratic in and of itself, many of these laws were deliberately designed and--admittedly at the time--designed to entrench white supremacy.

this bill will return power to the people and restore our democracy. It will help us clean up the culture of corruption in Washington and focus on making sure our government works for the people of this country.

it is so important that we pass H.R. 1, which will repair our democracy by restoring real power to the people of this country and away from the special interests and powerful corporations.

I hope our witnesses today will help dispel the dangerous myth of widespread voter fraud.

Restoring pre-clearance is essential to preventing the further erosion of voting rights.

So we want to make sure to the maximum extent possible that each American when they vote for whoever their representative is has the same opportunity to cast that vote.

H.R. 1--so much of what it is doing, frankly, is about restoring the legitimacy of government and the role of civic participation in young people's lives.

It also closes the shadow lobbying loophole and requires that those who provide legislative, political, and strategic counseling services in support of someone else's lobbying activity is also required to register under the Lobbying…

Without fixing our broken system and taking power from the powerful special interests and returning it to the people of this country, it will be almost impossible to make progress on the issues that are important to the American people.

And so that is why H.R. 1--so much of what it is doing, frankly, is about restoring the legitimacy of government and the role of civic participation in young people's lives.

A core component of H.R. 1 looks at partisan gerrymandering in our country, and ensuring that every voter and district is represented equally instead of carving out districts so that one party is favored over another is critical to restore…

I want to associate myself with the remarks of Congresswoman Bass about the sort of very disappointing positions of two of our witnesses.

Republican opposition to these reforms, as seen by the almost farcical arguments that we have heard during this hearing, is obvious because they benefit from this broken system.