Jerry Nadler: “I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chair, the right to vote has been called protective of all other rights.…”

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Chair, the right to vote has been called protective of all other rights. Without it, you can't protect your rights. That right has been eroded in recent years. We have seen many attempts on the State and local level to limit the right to vote for minorities, to close polling places, to limit the hours of voting, to put in phony requirements that prevent people from voting. We must restore, as this bill will do, the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that guarantee the right to vote, that stop local politicians from choosing their own electorates. We must eliminate the poison of large campaign contributions from hidden money. The dominance in our politics of large campaign contributions when someone anonymously can give $20,000 to $30,000--or millions of dollars--to various PACs which then funnel the money to politicians is subversive of our democracy. It is a metastasized cancer on our democracy. And if we don't excise this cancer through this bill, historians will eventually write, I fear, that the American Republic, like the Roman Republic, had a good 250-year run with democracy but then evolved into an oligarchy, which is the direction we are headed in. We must ban those huge campaign contributions, substitute a system of small contributions by ordinary people that will be matched so that the public, not the plutocrats, will dominate our politics and control our legislation.…”