Voting Rights
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, yesterday, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and honored civil rights leaders who fought against inequality and sacrificed so much to move our country closer towards justice for all. But this year, on a day when we should be coming together to commemorate these civil rights achievements and recommit to the road ahead, we are instead fighting a battle we thought was won decades ago.
In 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his ``Give Us the Ballot'' address, where he said:
The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.
But here we are in 2022 fighting back against hundreds of bills introduced in States across the Nation clearly intended to make it so much harder for certain people to vote.
Twenty-two States have already enacted 47 new laws that make it more difficult to vote by mail, that make it harder to stay on voting lists, that limit the availability of drop boxes for ballots, that limit the number of polling locations, that impose stricter or newer voter ID requirements, and the list goes on. But one of the most insidious is Georgia's law which allows any person to challenge the rights of an unlimited number of voters to cast their ballots.
If someone decides for whatever reason to challenge another person's right to vote, the voter then has to show up to their election office to defend themselves. Imagine being a single mom working two jobs and unable to afford childcare, and now she has to defend her constitutional right just because someone thought she shouldn't be voting at all.
Volunteers are already being recruited to pose these challenges. This isn't voter protection; this is vigilantism. These laws are clearly intended to target communities of color and make it harder for them to vote, period.
Our country's legacy of racial discrimination in voting is undeniable, and it is undeniable that we are witnessing history repeat itself.
In 1890, the House passed historic legislation that would have increased voting protections, particularly for Black voters, but the Senate failed to take up this legislation, failed to act at a critical time when it had the chance, and the results were devastating for decades to come. The Senate's failure to take up this legislation allowed Jim Crow and the plummeting of voter turnout among Black voters to continue for more than half a century, until the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 over 70 years later.
A recent Washington Post analysis said that this current wave of voter suppression bills potentially amounts to ``the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.''
Today, these attacks on our freedom to vote are taking us back to the time of Reconstruction.
We cannot wait another 70 years for this so-called deliberative body to act, which is why we need to pass comprehensive voter protection legislation. But not a single Republican supports the Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Act. Many of my Republican colleagues have joined Congressman John Lewis to commemorate the March from Selma to Montgomery, but today they won't even allow the Senate to consider legislation named in his honor and have called this bill radical. There is nothing radical about protecting a person's freedom to vote. What is radical is sending us back to the days of Reconstruction.
This legislation would restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act, which Congress reauthorized with broad bipartisan support five times-- 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992--and it passed 98 to 0 in 2006, which included 10 currently sitting Senate Republicans.
This bill would also expand opportunities to vote, prevent voter suppression, and improve election security. We are talking about provisions that would require States to offer early voting and no- excuse vote-by-mail, make election day a public holiday, crack down on voter intimidation, and require postelection audits. Again, I ask, how is any of this radical? What is radical is justifying overt attacks on our democracy by perpetuating the Big Lie of mass voter fraud.
For Republicans, this fight isn't about election security; it is about securing their power, because Republicans have decided that spreading misinformation and rigging elections by preventing people from voting is the only way they will retain their power.
Republicans should come to the Senate floor and tell the American people why they won't protect our freedom to vote. Instead, the Republican leader came to the floor to attack Democrats for fighting to change Senate rules to pass this critical legislation, calling it a power grab.
The Republican leader said that Democrats want to ``permanently damage this institution.'' He went on to say the filibuster is ``about compromise and moderation''--this from the Republican leader who refers to himself as the grim reaper as he prevents dozens of House-passed bills from being considered on the Senate floor; the same person who singlehandedly prevented President Obama from filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court for over a year, denying the will of nearly 66 million Americans who voted to give President Obama a second term in office; the same person who pushed through President Trump's Supreme Court nominee as over 159 million Americans were in the process of voting. So much for compromise and moderation.
Let's not pretend this is about the sanctity of this institution. We cannot sit back and let one political party continue to unravel the threads of our democracy one voter suppression bill at a time. While Republicans do nothing to protect our freedom to vote in the face of mass voter suppression bills enacted across the country, we Democrats cannot sit back and let 2020 be the last free and fair election in our country.
If we don't protect the right to vote, we won't have a democracy. It is that simple. That is the reality. Since the Republicans will not lift a finger to protect voting rights, we have no option but to change the Senate rules in order to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. This is something that every single Democratic Senator needs to get on board with.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source