Cloture Motion
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to speak in favor of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 in the expectation that the body will soon have a vote to proceed to debate on the bill, to proceed to debate in a forum before the American public, with an offer to our Republican colleagues to offer amendments, offer improvements, offer adjustments. This is incredibly important.
We had a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act last week, a bill that I am proud to be a cosponsor of, along with the Presiding Officer. And I am proud to be a cosponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
What does the John Lewis bill do? It basically does two things. First, it restores a vigorous preclearance requirement that was part of the original Voting Rights Act, section 5, that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 in the Shelby v. Mississippi opinion.
The Supreme Court in Shelby said that you could have a preclearance requirement but you couldn't apply that requirement only to the geographic jurisdictions that were covered in the original 1965 act; Congress would have to analyze and come up with a new set of criteria for who should have to get preclearance done.
The second thing the John Lewis bill does is it responds to a Supreme Court decision that was decided this summer, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, to specifically lay out the elements of a claim under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act--a claim that a local election practice or a State practice dilutes the strength of minority voting.
The preclearance requirement is the one that is the most important to me because, as a former mayor and Governor of Virginia, of Richmond and then the Commonwealth of Virginia, I lived under preclearance requirements, and I will spend a little bit of time talking about what that is like because it is actually pretty easy and pretty helpful.
But the way the John Lewis bill, in my view, very adroitly fixes the Shelby problem is it says: OK. Starting now, we are not going to treat the South differently than anywhere else in the country; we will treat every part of the country exactly the same. You are subject to a preclearance requirement as a State government or a local government if you have had a pattern of Voting Rights Act violations during the previous 25 years.
If you had just one, that isn't enough. This has to have been a pattern. And if there has been a pattern of Voting Rights Act violations, you are subject to preclearance. You have to submit proposed electoral changes to the Justice Department, and you have to keep doing that until you have had 10 years in a row where you haven't been subject to any voting rights violation.
So it doesn't penalize the South. Every ZIP Code in this country-- North, South, East, West, Midwest--is only subject to preclearance if there has been a pattern of voting rights violations--a significant pattern--over the previous 25 years. And as soon as you have 10 years without a voting rights violation, you can ``bail out'' of preclearance, and you don't have to submit your electoral changes to the Justice Department anymore, unless you commit new violations.
How reasonable. How reasonable.
We would want to have additional scrutiny of jurisdictions' voting rights practices if they have committed voting rights violations.
I was a city councilman and mayor of Richmond from 1994 until 2001. And every time we changed a polling place or did redistricting after a census or contemplated new rules about the timing in primary elections, we had to submit it to the Justice Department for a preclearance because Richmond--the capital of the Confederacy--had a documented history of suppressing minority vote for a very long time.
I was the Governor of Virginia--Lieutenant Governor and Governor-- from 2002 until 2010. And the same thing at the State level: when we did redistricting after censuses, when we contemplated in our legislature new voting rules, we had to submit to the Justice Department, preclearance requirement. We would send it to them 90 days before the proposed change would go into effect. The Justice Department would analyze the change. And then they, almost in every instance, in my experience, would reach back out and say: That is fine. Your change is fine. You can go ahead and implement it.
Sometimes they would reach out and say: We have a question or could you think about this; might you make an adjustment? So it was a dialogue. And that dialogue was productive.
And then the Justice Department would give Richmond or Virginia a green light and we would make those changes and we would make them with some assurance. It was actually helpful. It was helpful to run a change by the Justice Department and have it looked at by voting rights experts to make sure that we weren't unwittingly, we weren't intentionally--but that we weren't unwittingly doing anything that would suppress anyone's votes.
And once we got that preclearance green light, we would move ahead with the voting changes with confidence. It was simple. It was easy. It was a standard practice that we were all used to. It didn't impose any additional burden or time on the city government or the State government.
And so it deeply troubles me that colleagues of mine now are reluctant to go back to a vigorous preclearance requirement for jurisdictions that have had an established pattern of voting rights violations. This preclearance fix in the John Lewis Act is extremely important.
Two more points. I want to plead with my colleagues in the GOP--the Republican Party--on this bill, and then I want to express my sense of urgency about it.
By my reading of our history, the Republican Party throughout most of its life has been a great voting rights party--a great voting rights party. In the aftermath of the Civil War, it was the Republican-led Senate and House that passed the 15th Amendment--the constitutional prohibition against any jurisdiction using race to disqualify a voter.
I would like to say that the Democrats in the late 1860s were supportive of those provisions; it was the Republican Party, frankly, that got the Constitution improved by passing the 15th Amendment.
The 19th Amendment, pages, guaranteed women the right to vote. Now, that was done in a Democratic administration, President Woodrow Wilson, at a time when Congress was majority Democrat, but it was done with the full support of the Republican Party. The 19th Amendment had strong Republican Party support.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the John Lewis bill goes in and amends--it was done at the time that Democrats had the majority in this body, but it would not have happened without Senate Republicans. In fact, Senate Republican were more supportive of the Voting Rights Act than were Senate Democrats in 1965.
So there has been a pattern--1870, 1919, 1965--of the Republican Party being a party through much of its life--being a party that was interested in expanding the franchise and encouraging more people to vote.
It happened again when Richard Nixon was President.
The 26th Amendment, pages, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote, changing the Federal voting age in Federal elections from 21 to 18, that was done under President Richard Nixon--again, with both Republican and Democratic support.
The Voting Rights Act, after it was passed in 1965, had to be reauthorized every 5 or 10 years. And it was often reauthorized by unanimous vote, with Republican Senators largely being on board.
It really only was about the time of the beginning of the Obama Presidency, frankly, that the GOP, which had been rock-solid stalwarts for expanding the franchise, began to change.
When the Shelby decision was reached in 2013, it was just a couple of years after the Voting Rights Act had been reauthorized with solid and overwhelming Republican support.
And this particular fix in the John Lewis bill to say, OK, preclearance; we are not going to put a scarlet letter on you if you are in a Southern State; we will have everyone precleared if you had a pattern of demonstrated voting rights violations--we went to Republican colleagues with that in a bill near immediately after the Shelby decision and were not able to find even one--even one--Republican in the House or in the Senate that would sponsor a fix to this bill.
It is my hope that when we call this vote up in the next couple of days that colleagues of mine in the Grand Old Party, who have had this more than century-long tradition of being a party willing to expand the franchise and encourage people to vote, will reclaim their own heritage and decide to be a pro-voting rights party.
Last thing, sense of urgency. I was not only the mayor of Richmond and the Governor of Virginia--a State with a significant African- American population and a State with a very notable history, a challenging history, a painful history, a triumphant history as well; like most history, Virginia history is so mixed; there is so much pain and tragedy and triumph and hard to make sense out of it--but I have always been passionate for voting rights because of my understanding of our history and, particularly, the disenfranchisement that African Americans, women, and others have faced.
One thing I have never faced, though, is I have never faced disenfranchisement. I have been a supporter of voting rights for those who have. I was a civil rights lawyer. I did voting rights cases. So I have been a supporter. I have been an ally. I have been an advocate. But never in my life--never in my life--did I feel like Tim Kaine, a Caucasian male born in 1958--that somebody was trying to disenfranchise me.
I had that experience for 1 day of my life. And as passionate as I was before that 1 day, I now understand this in a completely different way. That day was January 6, 2021. As we were here in the Capitol and the Capitol was under attack by people who were attacking to try to stop the certification of the November 2020 election, they were basically trying to disenfranchise 81 million people who had voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
And my overwhelming reaction that day was complicated, and I was having a hard time figuring out what I was feeling. Even when we heard gunshots, even when we were being escorted and could see the rampagers not far from us, I was not afraid; I was furious. I wasn't feeling fear; I was feeling anger. And I realized later that that anger stemmed from the fact that at age 62, almost 63, for the first time in my life, just for a moment, I had a sense of what it meant to have someone else trying to disenfranchise me.
Many of my friends and constituents in Richmond--they have felt that sense for their entire lives. They felt it very personally. They feel it very personally. They hate that feeling. They want us to be that small ``d'' democracy, where everyone can participate. I had never felt that personally, but on that day, I did. And that day gave me just a glimpse--just a glimpse--of how devastating, demoralizing, frightening, angering it is to know that society is trying to keep you away from participation.
So that experience, which was just for a day because on January 7 I was back to my norm, where no one was trying to disenfranchise me--and yet those actions that are being taken in statehouses around this country to take away people's rights to participate, they mean something different to me than they did on January 5 because I had that one moment where I felt like this is me.
I sort of hated that day, but if it took that day to help me realize the importance of this issue, then that day had a purpose in my life that was not just a negative purpose, a positive one. And it is my deep hope that both parties, as we have before--Democrats and Republicans-- will join together to protect people's rights to participate in this greatest democracy on Earth.
I look forward to this debate. I look forward to getting a voting rights protection measure that is meaningful through this body, as has happened before. If we can do it here, we will be honoring a history, where, even when it has been tough, we have been able to do it. And we can do it again.
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Mr. KAINE. Madam President.
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Mr. KAINE. Our public health Agencies, including the CDC and NIH, already release their studies publicly, and it is important that they have control over the release of this information.
Forcing researchers to put out studies on an arbitrary timeline--this bill requires all studies to be released within 14 days from the passage of the bill--could force the release of studies before data collection is complete, before they are done analyzing and reviewing the data, before it is peer reviewed. It might force them to put out studies that were funded that came to inconclusive results that might be confusing to the public.
So I think having a bill that would force release of material based on a date when a particular bill passed rather than when the science is done and it is ready to be released could be a recipe for disinformation and distrust.
The bill seems to imagine a scenario where there is critical science being hidden away or stonewalled, and I have no reason to believe that is true. That would be a dangerous suggestion at a time when we are trying to encourage people to follow the guidance of these Agencies, and the Agencies are working around-the-clock to provide lifesaving cures and up-to-date information about how people can keep their families safe from COVID.
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