Before
I begin my formal remarks today, I want to pause to condemn the hatred
and violence that took eight precious lives last night in metropolitan
Atlanta. I grieve with Georgians, with Americans, with people of love
all across the world. This unspeakable violence, visited largely upon
the Asian community, is one that causes all of us to recommit ourselves
to [preventing] these kinds of tragedies from happening in the first
place. We pray for these families.
I
rise here today as a proud American and as one of the newest members of
the Senate – in awe of the journey that has brought me to these
hallowed halls and with an abiding sense of reverence and gratitude for
the faith and sacrifices of ancestors who paved the way.
I
am a proud son of the great state of Georgia, born and raised in
Savannah, a coastal city known for its cobble-stone streets and verdant
town squares. Towering oak trees, centuries old and covered in gray
Spanish moss, stretched from one side of the street to the other, bend
and beckon the lover of history and horticulture to this city by the
sea. I was educated at Morehouse College and I serve still in the pulpit
at Ebenezer Baptist church; both in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil
rights movement. Like those oak trees, my roots go down deep and stretch
wide in the soil of Waycross, Burke county and Screven county. In a
word, I am Georgia. A living example and embodiment of its history and
hope, the pain and the promise, the brutality and the possibility.
At
the time of my birth, Georgia’s two senators were Richard B Russell and
Herman E Talmadge, both arch-segregationists and unabashed adversaries
of the civil rights movement. After the supreme court’s landmark Brown v
Board ruling outlawing school segregation, Talmadge warned that “blood
will run in the streets of Atlanta.”
Senator Talmadge’s father, Eugene
Talmadge, former governor of our state, had famously declared: “The
South loves the Negro in his place, but his place is at the back door.”
When once asked how he and his supporters might keep Black people away
from the polls, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word on
it: “Pistols.”
Yet, there is something in the
American covenant – in its charter documents and its Jeffersonian
ideals – that bends toward freedom. Led by a preacher and a patriot
named King, Americans of all races stood up. History vindicated the
movement that sought to push us closer to our ideals, to lengthen and
strengthen the cords of our democracy, and I now hold the seat – the
Senate seat – where Herman E Talmadge sat.
And
that’s why I love America. I love America because we always have a path
to make it better, to build a more perfect union. It is the place where
a kid like me who grew up in public housing, the first college graduate
in my family, can now serve as a United States senator. I had an older
father, he was born in 1917; serving in the army during World War II, he
was once asked to give up his seat to a young teenager while wearing
his soldier’s uniform, they said, “making the world safe for democracy”.
But he was never bitter. By the time I came along, he had already seen
the arc of change in our country. He maintained his faith in God, in his
family and in the American promise, and he passed that faith on to his
children.
My
mother grew up in Waycross, Georgia. You know where that is? It’s way
‘cross Georgia. Like a lot of Black teenagers in the 1950s she spent her
summers picking somebody else’s tobacco and somebody else’s cotton. But
because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick
somebody else’s cotton went to the polls in January and picked her
youngest son to be a United States senator. Ours is a land where
possibility is born of democracy. A vote, a voice, a chance to help
determine the direction of the country and one’s own destiny within it.
Possibility born of democracy.
That’s why this
past November and January, my mom and other citizens of Georgia grabbed
hold of that possibility and turned out in record numbers, 5 million in
November, 4.4 million in January. Far more than ever in our state’s
history. Turnout for a typical runoff doubled. And the people of Georgia
sent the state’s first African American senator and first Jewish
senator, my brother Jon Ossoff, to these hallowed halls.
But
then, what happened? Some politicians did not approve of the choice
made by the majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each
side got the chance to make its case to the voters. And, rather than
adjusting their agenda, rather than changing their message, they are
busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a massive
and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen
since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.
Since
the January election, some 250 voter suppression bills have been
introduced by state legislatures all across the country – from Georgia
to Arizona, from New Hampshire to Florida – [all] using the Big Lie of
voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression. The same Big Lie that
led to a violent insurrection on this very Capitol – the day after my
election. Within 24 hours, we elected Georgia’s first African American
and Jewish senators, hours later the Capitol was assaulted. We see in
just a few precious hours the tension very much alive in the soul of
America. And the question before all of us at every moment is what will
we do to push us in the right direction.
So
politicians driven by that big lie aim to severely limit, and in some
cases eliminate, automatic and same-day voter registration, mail-in and
absentee voting, and early voting and weekend voting. They want to make
it easier to purge voters from the voting roll altogether. As a voting
rights activist, I’ve seen up close just how draconian these measures
can be. I hail from a state that purged 200,000 voters one Saturday
night – in the middle of the night. We know what’s happening – some
people don’t want some people to vote.
I was
honored on a few occasions to stand with our hero and my parishioner,
John Lewis. I was his pastor but I’m clear he was my mentor. On more
than one occasion we boarded buses together after Sunday church services
as part of our Souls to the Polls program, encouraging the Ebenezer
church family and communities of faith to participate in the democratic
process. Now just a few months after Congressman Lewis’s death, there
are those in the Georgia legislature, some who even dared to praise his
name, that are now trying to get rid of Sunday Souls to the Polls,
making it a crime for people who pray together to get on a bus together
and vote together. I think that’s wrong. In fact, I think a vote is a
kind of prayer about the world we desire for ourselves and our children.
And our prayers are stronger when we pray together.
To
be sure, we have seen these kinds of voter suppression tactics before.
They are a part of a long and shameful history in Georgia and throughout
our nation. But refusing to be denied, Georgia citizens and citizens
across our country braved the heat and the cold and the rain, some
standing in line for five hours, six hours, 10 hours just to exercise
their constitutional right to vote. Young people, old people, sick
people, working people, already underpaid, forced to lose wages, to pay a
kind of poll tax while standing in line to vote.
And
how did some politicians respond? Well, they are trying to make it a
crime to give people water and a snack, as they wait in lines that are
obviously being made longer by their draconian actions. Think about
that. Think about that. They are the ones making the lines longer –
through these draconian actions. Then, they want to make it a crime to
bring grandma some water as she is waiting in the line they are making
longer! Make no mistake. This is democracy in reverse. Rather than
voters being able to pick the politicians, the politicians are trying to
cherry pick their voters. I say this cannot stand.
And
so I rise because that sacred and noble idea – one person, one vote –
is being threatened right now. Politicians in my home state and all
across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a
full-fledged assault on voting rights. They are focused on winning at
any cost, even the cost of the democracy itself. I submit that it is the
job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen.
And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the
viability of our democracy.
That’s why I am a
proud co-sponsor of the For The People Act, which we introduced today.
The For The People Act is a major step forward in the march toward our
democratic ideals, making it easier, not harder, for eligible Americans
to vote by instituting common-sense, pro-democracy reforms like:
Establishing national automatic voter registration for every
eligible citizen, and allowing all Americans to register to vote online
and on election day;
Requiring states to offer at least two weeks of early voting,
including weekends, in federal elections – keeping Souls to the Polls
programs alive;
Prohibiting states from restricting a person’s ability to vote absentee or by mail;
And preventing states from purging the voter rolls based solely
on unreliable evidence like someone’s voting history, something we’ve
seen in Georgia and other states in recent years.
And it would end the dominance of big money in our politics, and ensure our public servants are there serving the public.
Amidst
these voter suppression laws and tactics, including partisan and racial
gerrymandering, and in a system awash in dark money and the dominance
of corporatist interests and politicians who do their bidding, the
voices of the American people have been increasingly drowned out and
crowded out and squeezed out of their own democracy. We must pass “For
The People” so that people might have a voice. Your vote is your voice
and your voice is your human dignity.
But not
only that, we must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue. The last time the voting
rights bill was re-authorized was 2006. George W Bush was president and
it passed its chamber 98-0. But then in 2013, the supreme court rejected
the successful formula for supervision and pre-clearance, contained in
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They asked Congress to fix it. That was
nearly eight years ago, and the American people are still waiting.
Stripped of protections, voters in states with a long history of voting
discrimination and voters in many other states have been thrown to the
winds.
We Americans have noisy and spirited
debates about many things. And we should. That’s what it means to live
in a free country. But access to the ballot ought to be nonpartisan. I
submit that there should be 100 votes in this chamber for policies that
will make it easier for Americans to make their voices heard in our
democracy. Surely, there ought to be at least 60 people in this chamber
who believe, as I do, that the four most powerful words uttered in a
democracy are “the people have spoken”, and that therefore we must
ensure that all the people can speak.
But if
not, we must still pass voting rights. The right to vote is preservative
of all other rights. It is not just another issue alongside other
issues. It is foundational. It is the reason why any of us has the
privilege of standing here in the first place. It is about the covenant
we have with one another as an American people. E pluribus unum: out of
many, one. It above all else must be protected.
So
let’s be clear, I’m not here today to spiral into the procedural
argument regarding whether the filibuster in general has merits or has
outlived its usefulness. I’m here to say that this issue is bigger than
the filibuster. I stand before you saying that this issue – access to
voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting – is so
fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage
by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the
expansion of voting rights. It is a contradiction to say we must protect
minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights
in the society. Colleagues, no Senate rule should overrule the
integrity of the democracy and we must find a way to pass voting rights
whether we get rid of the filibuster or not.
As
a man of faith, I believe that democracy is a political enactment of a
spiritual idea – the sacred worth of all human beings, the notion that
we all have within us a spark of the divine, to participate in the
shaping of our own destiny. Reinhold Niebuhr was right: “[Humanity’s]
capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [humanity’s]
inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
John
Lewis understood that and was beaten on a bridge defending it. Amelia
Boynton, like so many women not mentioned nearly enough, was gassed on
that same bridge. A white woman named Viola Liuzzo was killed. Medgar
Evers was murdered in his own driveway. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman,
two Jews and an African American standing up for the sacred idea of
democracy, also paid the ultimate price. And we in this body would be
stopped and stymied by partisan politics? Short-term political gain?
Senate procedure? I say let’s get this done no matter what. I urge my
colleagues to pass these two bills. Strengthen and lengthen the cords of
our democracy, secure our credibility as the premier voice for
freedom-loving people and democratic movements all over the world, and
win the future for all of our children.
