Herb Kohl: “today the Senate will debate and consider the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. We can all…”

“today the Senate will debate and consider the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. We can all agree that the Voting Rights Act was one of the most significant civil rights laws ever enacted in this country. Yesterday, the Judiciary Committee unanimously supported this bill, and today we hope the full Senate will pass it as soon as possible. This landmark law reversed nearly 100 years of African-American disenfranchisement. It took years for Congress to devise a law that could not be circumvented or ignored through lengthy litigation or creative interpretation. After numerous failures, a stronger remedy free of litigation was needed to break the 95-year-old obstacle to Black voter participation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided the solution. That law was and remains unique by enforcing the law before a new State voting statute goes into effect rather than fighting it out after the fact for years in court. The section 5 ``pre-clearance'' procedure--along with the banning of literacy texts, poll taxes, and the like--finally worked. Soon, African-American voters did not face an unequal burden to simply exercise their constitutional right to vote. Yet our work was far from over in 1965. Arguably, the great successes of the act we speak of today would not have been realized had Congress not amended and extended the act in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 1992.…”