Political Quotes

“Madam President, voting rights are really at the heart of our ``We the People'' Constitution. I will tell you, every time I look at a printed copy of the Constitution and I see those three words in supersize font, ``We the People,'' I think, you know, it is a beautiful thing that our Founders, when they were writing the Constitution, reminded us of the heart of what it is all about: not power that flows down from Kings or dictators but power that flows up from the people of the United States. And how does that power flow? It flows through elections. So if you don't have integrity in the elections, then, you really don't have government of, by, and for the people. Now, over the course of our Nation, we know that we have worked to expand the vision the Nation was founded on, but it wasn't reached in the beginning. It was often the case that only White Protestant male landowners got to vote in the beginning. And we recognized that every person created equal needs to have an equal part of the franchise, and so we have, through battles over more than 200 years, fixed those challenges. And there have been some dramatic debates over this, and it hasn't been easy. But I want to take us back specifically to the debate of 1890-1891. Now, this was during a period when, in the Southern States, more and more clever strategies were being developed to prevent people from voting, either through the registration process or through the polling process.…”