Strengthening Democracy: the People United Will Never Be Defeated

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding and for organizing this Special Order hour on the most important problem of our time, which is democracy.

Will we have democracy, or will we lapse into some other form of government, like autocracy or theocracy or plutocracy?

I thank the gentlewoman for her leadership and for leading us in that beautiful and moving moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attack on our country on 9/11.

A true Republican President, the founder of the Republican Party, spoke of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That has been the beautiful, tantalizing vision of America, but we can't say that is how America began. We began as a slave republic of White, male property owners over the age of 21 years old.

It has been through successive waves of popular, political, social struggle and constitutional amendment that we have opened America up and come much closer to forming a more perfect union and reaching the ideal that President Lincoln proclaimed from the battlefield of Gettysburg in 1863.

Still today, Members will come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, and say: We are not a democracy. We are a republic. My colleagues think that they have struck some kind of knockout blow against the overwhelming sentiment of the American people, including President Reagan, who gave a great speech in Europe about American democracy and never once used the word ``republic,'' but constantly invoked democracy.

Yet, there are Members who say: We are not a democracy. We are a republic.

Well, what is a republic? A republic is just a representative democracy because 300 million people can't fit in the U.S. House of Representatives or in a school board meeting. We use republican institutions in order to have the democratic will expressed.

If the Constitution is read the way I read the Constitution, the whole trajectory of American historical and constitutional development has been toward greater democracy.

Look at the amendments we have had since the original Bill of Rights.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

The 14th Amendment gave us equal protection and due process.

The 15th Amendment said no race discrimination in voting.

The 17th Amendment shifted the mode of election of U.S. Senators from the legislatures to the people.

The 19th Amendment doubled the franchise in America by giving women the right to vote and establishing their political equality in the country.

The 23rd Amendment gave people in Washington, D.C., at least the right to vote for President of the United States, although not voting representation.

The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes and the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. The whole movement of our history has been toward incorporating, encompassing, and including people who had been formerly disenfranchised, marginalized, and excluded from equal political participation.

It has been a seesaw struggle throughout our history. There have always been people who have wanted to revoke other people's voting rights, undermine other people's voting rights, disenfranchise them, strip away their ability to register to vote.

Tocqueville said in ``Democracy in America'' that he observed that democracy and voting rights in our country are either shrinking and shriveling away or they're growing and expanding.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Progressive Caucus for this session because we have got to get democracy back on the growth track in America. We have got to get away from all of the voter suppression and interference tactics that we have seen grow up, at least since 2013 when the Supreme Court rendered its dreadful decision in Shelby County v. Holder, essentially decapitating the Voting Rights Act, knocking out the preclearance requirement for covered jurisdictions, saying that no longer did they have to submit voting changes to the Department of Justice or to our Federal district court before they could implement those voting changes.

We have since seen more than 100 voter laws passed all over the country, around half of them in the original covered jurisdictions under the Voting Rights Act. We have seen new obstacles to voter registration. We have seen massive closure of precinct voting places, mergers of different precinct voting places.

I just got back from Texas where a group of students came to see me from the University of Texas to say this is going on there right now where the Governor has closed down a polling place and then relocated one in Austin on the campus of the University of Texas away from a well-traveled thoroughfare, a big, bright building to putting it in the basement somewhere else on campus. These kinds of tactics are used all over the country in order to suppress the vote.

We need to be moving forward in terms of voting rights, and I am very eager to hear what my colleagues have to say about that.

Mr. Speaker, I will point just a couple of things out.

We are in 2024. This is the 21st century. It is time for us to be electing the President of the United States the way we elect Governors, Representatives, Senators, mayors, and everybody else. Whoever gets the most votes win. We have had five popular vote losers become President, twice in this century in 2000 and 2016, under the creaky, antiquated, and obsolete mechanisms of the electoral college, which is subject to fraud and manipulation.

As we saw in this very Chamber, the electoral college can get you killed in the 21st century because it offers more opportunities for strategic bad faith actors like former President Donald Trump to try to revisit a result and reopen results in an election.

We need to be moving forward to a national popular vote for election. We spend tens of millions of dollars a year all over the world teaching people about democracy and the one thing they never come back to us with when they are writing a new Constitution is the idea that, oh, you know that electoral college thing you have? We think we will import that to our country. We never hear that, right? We should be able to learn from our own experience and from the experience of democracies around the world.

Another important ingredient to democracy is statehood. That is how communities that have been formerly disenfranchised and subordinated have been able to lift themselves up. We are in the Nation's Capital, which is the only Nation's Capital on planet Earth which is not represented in their own national legislature. Mr. Speaker, 713,000 taxpaying, draftable U.S. citizens are completely disenfranchised in the House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate. They don't have representation.

If you told the people of Paris they could not be represented in L'Assemblee nationale because they breathed the same air that other people's representatives breathed, you would have another French Revolution on your hands.

When we passed it in the 117th Congress, the D.C. statehood legislation, and I was one of the floor leaders for that, I had the honor of telling the people of Washington, D.C., this: Thank you for having a bona fide real political grievance and not coming down here and beating the daylights out of our police officers the way that the MAGA mob did when Donald Trump falsely convinced them that they had won the Presidential election, which Trump had lost by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college.

They didn't come down and storm the Chamber and try to overthrow the Constitution. They did it the right way. They had a Statehood Constitutional Convention. They are asking for admission. We should admit the people of Washington, D.C., as an equal State into the Union using our powers under Article IV of the Constitution.

It is the same thing with 3.5 million American citizens in Puerto Rico. They should be given the opportunity to become a State, as well.

We have got to keep the trajectory of democracy moving forward so we don't lapse into some other form of government. This has been a tough time with challenges to the basic constitutional structure when you have Presidential candidates saying, just set the Constitution aside. We saw a violent insurrection supporting a political coup in this very Chamber. That is the alternative to moving forward with everything that we are going to be talking about tonight in terms of improving representation through ranked choice voting, in terms of campaign finance reform so we don't have money drowning out the voice of the people, filibuster reform, ethics reform at the Supreme Court, all of those things are essential and we need the momentum of a prodemocracy movement to keep us from becoming like Vladimir Putin's country or Viktor Orban's country, the close buddies of Donald Trump that he invoked in the Presidential debate last night that he conscripted as character witnesses for him in this election.

We have got a very clear choice for America moving forward. I thank the Progressive Caucus for offering so much leadership. We know that it is tough, and it is a struggle.

Frederick Douglas from my State said that if there is no struggle, there is no progress. The struggle may be moral, it may be physical, it may be more unphysical, but there must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.

John Dewey said that there are no ills to democracy that cannot be solved without more democracy. Democracy is the corrective to the impediments to democracies.

What we are suffering from today is the obstacles and the impediments to democracy, but we have got the means, and we have got the will in the country to move forward.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. Ramirez for giving me this opportunity.

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