Sheila Jackson Lee: “Let me thank the distinguished gentleman from New York, who shows that the issues of voter empowerment are nationwide.…”

“Let me thank the distinguished gentleman from New York, who shows that the issues of voter empowerment are nationwide. Let me also thank the gentlewoman from Ohio, who has been steadfast on important issues that deal with the empowerment of all Americans. Mr. Speaker, I note that my colleague from Texas made his presentation, Congressman Veasey, who everyone knows was the plaintiff in Texas for the voter ID law. I wanted to come this evening very briefly to, one, submit a full statement into the Record and to make this point. And let me read the headline or the topic again: Democracy in Crisis: The Reckless Republican Assault on the Right to Vote in America. It did not have to be, for it is evident that we have dealt with voter empowerment in a bipartisan way. It is the very difficult journey that Lyndon Baines Johnson took in 1965 after the foot soldiers and Dr. Martin Luther King and others made their momentous march and statement, including a letter from a Birmingham jail that captured the history or the sentiment and the movement of the civil rights movement in the very basic words: Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. With that power behind him, he was able to frame the Voting Rights Act in a bipartisan manner with Republicans from the North and with whom we used to call Dixiecrats from the South. It can be done. Then, in 2006 and 2007, I was privileged to have another Texan, George W.…”