Another Blight on American History

Floor Speech

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Ms. BROWN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative McClellan for leading tonight's Special Order hour.

Mr. Speaker, I am honored to stand with my CBC colleagues in this fight as we stand up for the people we represent.

Mr. Speaker, for decades, the far right has sold this country a lie, a lie that racism ended in 1965, a lie that discrimination is ancient history. For years, that rhetoric lived in chat rooms in the ugliest corners of American life. Well, today it lives in the highest courts in the land, cloaked in robes.

This conservative Supreme Court has taken a wrecking ball to the Voting Rights Act, one of the greatest achievements of the civil rights movement. Now, after the Louisiana v. Callais ruling, there is barely any of the law left.

Before this ruling, Black voters in the South had at least some defense against intentional political extinction. Now that is gone. Mr. Speaker, what happens next tells you everything you need to know. The ink was barely dry before Republican States rushed to redraw maps and move election dates--Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, State after State after State.

Let's be honest about what this is. This is a coordinated effort to engineer electorates so that Trump has all the White majority districts he needs, and the tragedy, the disgrace is that this rush to redraw proves exactly why the Voting Rights Act was needed in the first place.

If they are successful, some of the States with the largest Black populations in the country will be represented by all-White delegations and majority White districts.

We cannot and will not take this sitting down. We will organize, mobilize, and use our voices. We will fight this in Congress. We don't have a voting rights majority in this body right now, but we soon will, and we will restore the Voting Rights Act.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, we must confront the center of this crisis: an unacceptable Supreme Court.

The Voting Rights Act was not some historical footnote. It was the law of the land for decades. It was one of the crowning achievements of American democracy, and this Court has systematically hollowed it out.

No institution in this country is above scrutiny, and no court should have the power to erase protections won through blood, sacrifice, and struggle without the American people demanding reform. Our constitutional system was never designed to crown nine people as permanent and untouchable rulers of our democracy.

Mr. Speaker, our brothers and sisters are being silenced across the South, but this Congress will make sure that those voices are heard loudly, clearly, and unapologetically.

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