OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

The Voting Rights Act

Floor Speech

By: Al Green
By: Al Green
Date: June 27, 2013
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Legal

Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, we live in a world where it's not enough for things to be right. They must also look right. And while it may be right for the Supreme Court to strike down section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, it doesn't look right, given that just last year we had a multiplicity of cases wherein it was found that insidious discrimination existed such that those cases accorded voters rights that they would not have but for the Voting Rights Act.

Much is said about section 4 in the coverage. Little is said about section 4 and the opt-out, bail-out provision that has allowed many jurisdictions that were under the purview of the Voting Rights Act to extricate themselves.

The Voting Rights Act has functioned efficaciously. I'm so glad that medicine is very much unlike politics. Because in medicine, when a drug functions efficaciously, we market it, we extol the virtues of it, and we keep it. In politics, when a law succeeds, we demean it and we eliminate it.

I am here today because of the Voting Rights Act. I never thought I'd sit next to the Honorable Charlie Rangel in the House of the United States Congress. Thank God for the Voting Rights Act. We must revise it. We must extend it. We've got to renew it.


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