Political Quotes

“Our colleagues object to guaranteeing the peoples' right to vote through the vehicle of a NASA bill of all things. A quarter of a century ago Republicans changed Texas State law to permit astronauts to vote absentee from space. They want to make it easier to vote from space, and they want to make it harder to vote on Earth. In the last election, tens of thousands of citizens in Texas waited in line for 6 hours to vote and an astronaut on the International Space Station could have orbited planet Earth four times in the 6 hours that Texas forced some of its citizens to wait in line to vote. Across the country it is voter suppression, GOP gerrymandering of our districts, rightwing Supreme Court packing and judicial activism to destroy the voting rights in cases like Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich and deployment of the filibuster to block voting rights legislation--the whole matrix of GOP democracy suppression today. It is time to protect the right to vote here on Earth. If it takes a NASA bill to do it, then I invite my GOP colleagues to boldly go where none of them have ever gone before--to planet Earth on a mission to defend the voting rights of the people.”