I appreciate all the witnesses today and all of the testimony. I think it is a valuable hearing on the importance of the voting rights bill we have before us to set up a new standard in Section 4 and reactivate--restore Section 5 of the…

So the old expression in the song ``Dixie,'' ``Old times there are not forgotten'' maybe has more of a current ring than one would understand.

If they were under the preclearance requirement, the courts could have stopped them from doing it before they did.

I am extremely proud that we are here at the University of Memphis Law School, which is my alma mater.

We have since sought to sue to stop the implementing legislation that follows from that in state court.

It is, as has been said earlier, a keen source of concern from our perspective that there is currently a need to have Section 5 or a replacement available.

One makes some decisions about whether or not certain groups of people who tend to have one and not the other should be a part of the system.

I think that H.R. 4 does an effective job of doing that because it is a formula that will cover, that has the potential of covering different jurisdictions during different periods of time based on relatively contemporaneous records of…

I think the formula that Congress, that is in H.R. 4 actually responds effectively to the issues raised by the Supreme Court.

The state was found to have intentionally discriminated with almost, as the bipartisan federal court said, surgical precision.

I fear that that was the cause of the General Assembly's passage of the law, to inhibit people from doing mass voter efforts.

Our esteemed colleague, Representative John Lewis, was beaten and bloodied as he marched in Selma, Alabama, to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race, had an equal right to vote.