Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Concerted Effort To Roll Back Voting Rights By Republicans In State Legislatures Across The Country
Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the recent efforts by Republican state legislatures to move to restrict voting rights and further disenfranchise voters. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
In our American system, we talk a lot about “perfecting our union,” a reference to the preamble of the Constitution—a document which effectively gave only white male landowners the right to vote in our fledgling democracy. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of perfecting to do. As I think about my Democratic caucus, incidentally, it’s probably so that less than half of them could actually vote in the elections of 1789, because I believe in many states, you had to be a white, male, protestant, property owner.
So over the course of 230 years, we’ve passed scores of laws and amended the Constitution to rectify the flaws in our democracy and expand the franchise to all of our citizens: including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th amendments—just to name a few.
Despite all this progress, there is now—in the 21st Century—a concerted effort to roll back voting rights in state legislatures across the country.
Alarmingly, making it harder—harder—for Americans to vote, and particularly aimed at Americans of color: African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, is becoming a feature of one of America’s major political parties.
Yesterday, I detailed a number of laws pushed by Republicans in state legislatures to limit the amount of time that Americans have to vote; to frustrate election administration in urban areas and around college campuses, to impose overly burdensome ID requirements, and absurd witness and signature requirements for absentee ballots.
Maybe most pernicious of all, Republicans in Georgia have coalesced around a plan to end all early voting on Sundays, a day when Black churches organize voter drives, with no good reason given. None.
The threat to voting rights in America is now very real; it must be opposed in every state house and governor’s mansion in this country.
And the threat extends all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Eight years ago, a conservative 5-4 majority on the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by essentially rendering meaningless Section 5 of the statute, a provision which prevented the implementation of undue voting restrictions in states with a history of discrimination.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that the era of widespread discrimination which led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act was over, and there was no longer a need for the critical portions of the statute.
Well, within twenty four hours after the ruling had been handed down, Texas announced it would implement a strict Voter-ID law. Soon thereafter, Mississippi and Alabama followed with laws that had previously been barred by the Justice Department.
Republican leaders in the state of North Carolina passed a suite of voter suppression laws that a federal judge found “targeted African-American voters with almost surgical precision.”
Think about that. This was not a ruling from the Reconstruction Era or Jim Crow. It was only a few years ago.
At a time when an African-American man elected by the most diverse coalition in the history of American politics occupied the White House, Republicans in North Carolina passed voting laws so pernicious that even the Roberts Court—among the most conservative we’ve seen on this issue of voting rights—could not ignore the overwhelming stench of discrimination, that’s what it was, a stench, rooted in America’s sordid history of voter suppression and discrimination against Black voters.
Well today, the Supreme Court will hear another case concerning the Voting Rights Act, this time about Section 2 – a section which Chief Justice Roberts referred to in his Shelby County ruling as a necessary failsafe to police discriminatory voting procedures nationwide.
As one news outlet reported this morning: “there is every possibility that the high court could make it much more difficult, or practically impossible, to challenge voting restrictions in the future,” warning that another ruling against the law could render the Voting Rights Act a “dead letter.”
That’s what at stake in America right now. As state legislatures move to restrict voting rights from one end of the country to the other, the law we rely on to prevent outright discrimination at the ballot box is at risk of being “a dead letter.”
This is one of the most appalling things I’ve seen in this country after four years of an appalling administration. This is just incredible. It burns my blood and should burn the blood of every fair-minded American: Republican, Democrat, Independent, Liberal, Conservative, Moderate.
After centuries of expanding the right to vote—of struggling to get that right to vote—these pernicious, self-serving proposed laws could cut back on the right to vote. Will the Supreme Court let that happen? This is so against what America is all about.
So we cannot stand by and do nothing as these rights are diluted or stripped away. Congress must pursue a restoration of the Voting Rights Act, and by all accounts, should be working in a bipartisan way to make it easier, safer, and more convenient for all Americans to vote.
The judgment of History has never been kind to those who work against the full participation of their fellow citizens in our democratic experiment.
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