Fighting Back Against Dismantling of Voting Rights

Floor Speech

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their presence.

Mr. Speaker, I ask the question: Which side of history are you standing on? Now, some of you are here because you want to be here. Some of you are here simply because you walked past this floor to get somewhere else.

Either way, God has a plan, and that plan today is that you are going to hear the truth because this is a Special Order hour, and the order I have been given not by the Speaker of this House but by God, who made us all equal in his eyes, through this Republic, has never fully agreed and understood by all Members of this body that we have the right to stand in this well on the floor of the people's House and ask every Member of this body a question that cannot be avoided. It cannot be postponed, and it cannot be answered with procedural language or partisan talking points.

The question is this: On the eve of America's 250th birthday, which side of history are you standing for?

Now, I want you to notice something. In a few weeks, this Nation is going to celebrate. There are going to be parades. There are going to be speeches. They are going to have fireworks that light up the skies from sea to shining sea. Politicians on both sides of this aisle are going to stand at podiums and invoke the Founding Fathers and speak about liberty and justice and the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

I want to ask you, gently, at first: What democracy are you talking about because I know my history, and I was born in this country, and I have read the documents.

The democracy that we are celebrating this summer, the democracy of 1776, did not include me or my ancestors, did not include my grandmother or my great-grandparents, did not include my great-great- grandmother who was somebody's property under the law of this land. It did not include the millions and millions of women and children who built this country's wealth with their bodies and their blood and their genius and were given in return not citizenship but chains.

In 1776, it was not a democracy. In 1787, it was not a democracy. They counted us as three-fifths of a human being to give slaveholders more power in this very Congress.

In 1865, it was not a democracy. We got the 13th Amendment and got the Black codes in the same season. In 1868, it was not a democracy. The 14th Amendment was ratified while African Americans and elected officials were being murdered across the South.

In 1870, it was not a democracy. The 15th Amendment was passed, and within 10 years, the Supreme Court had gutted its enforcement, and the Redeemers had taken back the South at the point of a rifle.

In 1920, our country was not a democracy. Women got the right to vote, but most Black women in the South could not exercise it. America did not overcome.

By any honest definition, it was not a democracy in this country until August 6, 1965, the day that President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the day that this Nation finally, after 189 years of claiming to believe in democracy, extended a meaningful, enforceable, protected right to vote to all of its citizens regardless of race, 189 years in the making.

Let that sink into your spirit: 189 years of fireworks, 189 years of founding myths. ``We the people,'' it was said, and not one day of actual democracy for the people who look like me.

I am 60 years of age. I was born in 1966. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed. I am the first generation of Americans ever born with equal rights under the law of this land. My generation is the first in 250 years. We are the first, 60 years of age.

If that doesn't disturb you, if that doesn't shake something in your soul, if you can hear that and feel nothing, then I want to suggest respectfully that something has gone wrong, something has gone morally numb.

Now, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, has gutted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, has taken the spine out of the only serious legal protection that Blacks, Mexicans, women, and others have had since 1965. It has done, with legal language and constitutional reasoning, what the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan used to do with economic pressure and shotguns. They have changed the method. They have not changed the mission.

Mr. Speaker, it is now my privilege and pleasure to yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Garcia), one of the leading outstanding voices for human rights and democracy in the United States of America and my colleague and friend.

Mr. Speaker, I am honored to be joined by the first Mexican American to serve in the United States House of Representatives from the entire Midwest. He has fought for the rights and well-being of his constituents and all Americans for decades. I am honored to yield to the gentleman, the first person of Mexican-American ancestry to serve in the House of Representatives from the State of Illinois, the Honorable Congressman Mr. Chuy Garcia.

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Chuy Garcia for his remarks. I must say it is a pleasure and the privilege of a lifetime to serve in Congress with a childhood hero and friend of mine, my colleague, Congressman Chuy Garcia.

I would like to also note for the Record, Congressman Garcia was the chair of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus when President Barack Obama was a former State senator from the State of Illinois. Congressman Garcia has always affiliated himself with the working class. He has never forgotten his roots. I thank him for his service and his kind words and his steadfastness.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and indeed my pleasure to introduce, to share with my colleague Congressman Takano.

This is indeed LGBTQ month, Pride Month. Congressman Takano is the first person of the LGBTQ community and of color to openly serve in the House of Representatives. Congressman Garcia was the first Mexican American.

Mr. Takano is the first person of Japanese ancestry to serve in the United States House of Representatives. Many people of our community have just gotten to this great body that has contributed so much, but he is also the son and great-grandson of immigrants that were detained in U.S. concentration camps of Japanese ancestry. He bears the history and the lineage and the legacy of that tormented history, and he proudly serves. He has contributed so much for so many.

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Takano. I thank him for honoring his family's history and legacy. I am thankful for his service. I thank him for his voice during this critical hour when America's democracy is being challenged.

Mr. Speaker, it is now my honor and my privilege to share this podium with an outstanding young man of Indian ancestry and of the Hindu faith. He is the first person of Asian and Hindu faith to grace this esteemed body under this dome, on this floor, and in this well.

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Ro Khanna for his leadership and lending his voice. He is another first in the House of Representatives whom I am proud to call a Democrat, and I am proud to call a great American who is standing on the right side of history.

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to introduce the next speaker who is the first in her family to graduate from college and went on to become a critical care physician and steadfast public servant. She answered the call to public service. She understands the urgent need to help ensure and help provide care for all Americans.

Dexter).

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I am so appreciative of the Congresswoman Dexter's words and her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I am honored to introduce our next speaker whose district was effectively disenfranchised last year during the longest delay in inducting a Member to the House of Representatives. She is also the first Latina ever elected to Congress in the entire history in the State of Arizona.

She is a woman who comes from a proud, progressive, and staunchly American legacy in the ancestry of her father, Raul Grijalva, who stood with us, who led us, and who taught us. He stood by his values. He has instilled those, and he poured those into his outstanding daughter who is now, I am proud to say, the Congresswoman from the great State of Arizona.

Mr. Speaker, the arch-segregationists have changed their method. They have not changed their mission. The mission has always been the same: control who votes, control who counts, control who can challenge the powerful, control the map, control the district, control the outcome, and control the future.

Crack the Black community across three districts, pack it into one so overwhelmingly it elects one Congressman where it should elect two. Dilute the vote until it is so thin it cannot quench the thirst for justice. Then stand before the cameras and say: We believe in color blindness. We believe in equal protection. I don't see race. I don't see color. We believe every vote counts the same.

A lie dressed up in the Constitution is still a lie.

Let me make the history plain to my colleagues who might have missed it or who might have arrived late to this speech or to this subject.

After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was passed in 1870. It said the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race. Within a decade, follow me closely, the Supreme Court in Cruikshank, gone; the poll tax, gone; the literacy test, gone; the Grandfather Clause, gone; the White primary, gone. Gone meaning gone from the grasp of Black citizens. Gone meaning the right existed on paper and nowhere else.

It took Jimmie Lee Jackson being shot by a State trooper in February 1965; it took John Lewis and Hosea Williams and 600 people walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a Sunday morning in Selma, Alabama-- walking peacefully, walking prayerfully, walking legally toward a courthouse to register to vote--and getting beaten with clubs, trampled by horses, gassed in the open air on American soil--broadcast on American television for the world to see--that is what it cost to get the Voting Rights Act passed.

This was paid for in blood. It was not a speech, not a court brief, not a strongly worded letter, but blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, a White mother from Detroit, shot dead in her car, called a Negro lover on the Alabama highway because she came to help register people to vote. She believed in America. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, two Jews and a Black man, buried in the Mississippi River. The four little girls--Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole, and Denise--blown apart in their church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham. They all died so that America could vote and finally become a full democracy. They paid in full.

The question today is whether this Congress intends to honor their payment or to squander it.

I will talk to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, not at them but to them, because I believe we have something in common. Beneath the party, the discipline, and ideological positioning, there is a human being who understands that what is happening in this country now is fundamentally wrong.

I will ask them directly: What side of history do they want to be recorded on when they stood up at their town hall and talked about freedom? Were they telling the truth?

When they invoked the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, were they telling the truth? What side of history will they be on when they put their hand on their heart and they put their hand on the Bible and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, were they telling the truth?

What side of history do they want to be recorded on? Because the Constitution includes the 14th Amendment. The Constitution includes the 15th Amendment. The Constitution includes the mandate that Congress shall have the power to enforce these amendments by appropriate legislation. That legislation is the Voting Rights Act. To let it die, to stand here and do nothing while it is dismantled from across the street, is not constitutional conservatism. It is constitutional abandonment.

Let me say something about this word that keeps being propped up: ``color blindness.'' They say the Constitution requires color blindness. They say that we must treat all citizens the same regardless of race. They say the Equal Protection Clause demands it, and I want to say yes, I agree. I have always agreed. Every sensible person agrees, but here is what they are leaving out.

Color blindness applied to the remedy while the disease is still active is not justice. It is called ``malpractice.''

You cannot break a man's legs for 200 years and then hand him a pair of crutches and say now we treat you equally before the law, no special treatment. The legs are still broken. Our democracy is still in its infancy. The crutches are the remedy and the remedy is not the problem. It is the solution.

That is why we need the Voting Rights Act and section 2 for protection.

Notice how the legislator in Tennessee right after this law was passed inaccurately went to the gravesite, went to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated and attacked that one district, that African-American district.

When Louisiana drew two majority Black congressional districts to have equal representation, it was not creating racial inequality. The racial inequality was already there. This was the cure, written into 200 years of American history in slavery, a century of Jim Crow, separate but equal unequal laws, decades of deliberate under funding and exclusion and redlining and deliberate disenfranchisement.

The district was the answer to the inequality, not the cause of it. To call the remedy unconstitutional while the disease runs free, that is not law, Mr. Speaker. That is protection of power by people who benefit from this power and this disaster of a decision.

I will recognize my colleagues who have spoken up, but the silence is deafening. For 250 years, as we celebrate our great country, a country, indeed, in progress of equal justice for all, where just 60 years ago was the starting line of democracy, 60 years ago was my birth and my timeline, and already the forces of regression and those great- grandchildren and grandchildren of the segregationists are now tearing down the guardrails that got us to a more pluralistic America.

The question has not been completed, and it is not complicated. The question is not subtle. The question is not one reasonable people can be on different sides of.

You are either for voting rights or you are against them. You are either for democracy or you are against it. You are either standing on the side of Selma, or you are standing on the side of the men who swung the clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

There is no middle ground. There is no procedural abstention. History does not grade on a curve.

Choose your side, colleagues. History will be watching. The future is listening. The people are watching. History will not forget.

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, as we discuss the dismantling of voting rights and how many of my colleagues and I will continue to stand up to defend our most sacred right, I am proud to be joined by my colleagues who have stood up for the right side of history.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say something about what I have heard and what I have not heard from the other side. My colleagues on the other side have had a great deal to say about constitutional principles, but I have not heard a plan to protect the votes for all Americans. I have not heard them say how these congressional maps will be fair for all people. I have heard a great deal about legal frameworks, but I have not heard a single proposal to replace the protection that Callais has taken away.

I have heard about process and procedure through the proper channels, but I have not heard anyone on the other side of the aisle stand up and say in plain language that Black voters deserve full and equal representation and that this Congress will make sure that they get it. Why not? It should not be a complicated sentence.

Let me talk about the history for a moment because one of the things I have heard today is the suggestion that we are living in the past. That is not true. We are relitigating things that have already been solved. It is time to move forward. We want to go forward to make America better and to keep America strong.

Unfortunately, there is an eerie silence. There is a duplicity and a complacency, and trying to rest upon the laurels. There is something to be said by God himself about trying to turn a blind eye toward injustice. It should haunt your conscience.

Your children are watching. The future will be taking note. History shall record us all. What side of history will you stand on? Will you say anything to stand up for justice?

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