The Battle Wages On: Securing Equal Voting Rights in the United States

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank my good friend, Representative Robin Kelly from
Illinois, for her leadership on this night, this first night back.

For Members back from Selma, I appreciate that our chair of the
Congressional Black Caucus has been here to give us very important
background and history. I particularly appreciate that we have just
heard from a Member from Alabama, itself, Representative Terri Sewell,
and all of that seems to me to be the appropriate prelude for what we
are doing here tonight.

Mr. Speaker, yes, this is the first day we are back from this
historic trip and are back from the 50th anniversary of the Voting
Rights Act. There is no place for the almost 100 Members who went to
Selma to be but on this floor this evening. I want to thank Attorney
General Holder for taking the crippled Voting Rights Act and continuing
to enforce it. The trip to Selma essentially set the stage for Members
to come back and to regard our trip as a call to action and get down to
work to revitalize the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

My thanks to Representative Jim Sensenbrenner and to Representative
John Conyers for cosponsoring a revised version of the act. My thanks
to John Lewis, who has kept Selma and the Voting Rights Act alive by
his annual trips with Members and others to Selma. I am appreciative of
the almost 100 Members from both parties who went to Selma on the 6th
and 7th.

What was the purpose of going?

It could not have been a celebration. You can celebrate the 1964
Civil Rights Act. It has not been dismembered. You can celebrate the
1968 fair housing law. It still is on the books. But you go to Selma to
try to bring back to its full glory the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
where setback with section 5 has rendered the act virtually obsolete
for most of its original purposes.

I stress that the Supreme Court did not invalidate the 1965 Voting
Rights Act. It invited the 100 Members who went to Selma and the others
in this body to modernize the act. We may differ on how to do that. I
do not think there can be any doubt that it has to be revised and that
we have to meet the challenge that the Supreme Court has given us.
After all, the Voting Rights Act has prevented, literally, hundreds of
discriminatory voting practices, and there were countless practices
that it simply deterred. I must say that I was disappointed that, early
on in this session, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
Representative Goodlatte, indicated that he did not believe that the
act was necessary, and he talked about the 11 Southern States that had
been under the act.

The fact is that the preclearance Voting Rights Act requirements went
far beyond those States. At the time of the Supreme Court decision in
2013, Arizona and Alaska were covered. Parts of California, New York,
South Dakota, and Michigan were covered. In the past, parts of Hawaii,
Colorado, New Hampshire, Idaho, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wyoming,
Maine, New Mexico, and Oklahoma have been covered. It is true that at
the heart of the coverage were the 11 Southern States, but that is
where the heart of the violations were, in fact, tracked. That is where
the poll taxes were. That is where the violations were.

There has been a compromise bill that has been put forward by Mr.
Sensenbrenner and Mr. Conyers. In the very act of going to Selma, there
was put upon us an obligation to come back and respond to that trip.
The bill before us has tried to meet some of the objections that were
raised. There is a rolling preclearance formula, for example, that does
not require congressional reauthorization. There is a bail-in section
of the act to reach those who had not been covered. There are a minimum
number of violations over a period of time that have to be recorded in
order for a state to come under the act.

As my good friend from Alabama, Terri Sewell, says, the act is not
what all of us wanted, but it does mean that in the spirit of
compromise and because of the necessity of this act, this act which
democratized the South and is necessary now--perhaps not as necessary
as it was 50 years ago--but no one can doubt, as a Supreme Court
Justice himself said when he said he didn't doubt that there was still
discrimination in voting practices, but he said it was up to the
Congress to modernize the bill.

I don't see how almost 100 Republican and Democratic Members can have
gone to Selma on the 50th anniversary without coming back to revise the
act. We went emptyhanded. We went without a bill. I hope that what we
got in Selma was the gumption to come back and to put forward a bill.
Yes, the act has been dismembered by the Supreme Court, but the Court
asked us to reshape it. It asked us to restore it. It was one thing to
go without a bill. It is quite another to come back and do nothing
about a bill.

The President did not hesitate to say where the responsibility, in
fact, lies, and I am quoting from his speech in Selma:

One hundred Members of Congress have come here today to
honor people who were willing to die for the right it
protects. If we want to honor this day, let these 100 go back
to Washington and gather 400 more and, together, pledge to
make it their mission to restore the law this year.

That is our mission. The trip to Selma, where we went in the name of
the entire Congress, demands that we act before the end of this
Congress.

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