Mr. Speaker, I am Representative D. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus for the 119th Session of Congress, proudly representing New York's Ninth Congressional District in central and southwest Brooklyn. I thank my dear…
Mr. Speaker, I am Representative D. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus for the 119th Session of Congress, proudly representing New York's Ninth Congressional District in central and southwest Brooklyn.
I thank my dear colleague Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan for anchoring this Congressional Black Caucus Special Order hour and really setting the table for a conversation that we are having this evening.
I rise tonight with my colleagues of the Congressional Black Caucus to honor the life and legacy of our dear friend and former colleague, the conscience of this Congress, Congressman John Lewis.
For more than 30 years in the United States House of Representatives and over the course of his life, Congressman John Lewis never stopped fighting for justice, equality, and the right to vote.
Today, the very ideals that Congressman Lewis spent his life fighting to protect are under sustained and unprecedented attack. As we speak, extremist Republicans at the local, State, and national levels are using every tactic in their arsenal to disenfranchise Black and minority communities.
To date, hundreds of bills to restrict voting access have been introduced in States around the country with the aim of closing polling locations, curbing early voting and mail-in ballots, and imposing stricter national voter ID requirements.
Right now Republicans in the Congress are fighting to jam through voter suppression legislation, like the so-called SAVE America Act and the Voter ID Act, ushering in a national ID program.
In the wake of the Callais decision, Black political power and representation has come under direct assault, with Republican-led legislatures and Governors moving to redraw congressional maps across the south ahead of the November election in a brazen effort to dilute Black voting strength and reverse decades of hard-fought civil rights progress secured through the Voting Rights Act.
With these unprecedented assaults on our voting rights and the slow erosion of our constitutional and Democratic norms, each of us has a moral responsibility to speak out and act out as Congressman John Lewis did. Voting
rights are and have always been the CBC's North Star.
For generations, our communities have marched, fought, and even died for the right to vote. Congressman Lewis certainly knew this.
At a time when our democracy is under constant siege by the Trump administration, we must do all that we can to protect those most fundamental and foundational rights.
It is a shame that partisan politics has brought us to a point that we cannot agree that access to the ballot box should be a right afforded to every American. Congressman John Lewis devoted every day of his life to fighting to make our country live up to its highest ideals--to promise that we are all created equal.
From the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the Halls of Congress, the boy from Troy never stopped making good trouble. As he would say: necessary trouble.
It is in that spirit that the CBC and House Democrats will always fight back against the voter suppression that plagues our country and impedes access to the ballot box, particularly in Black communities. It is in light of that spirit that we will not stop until we pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore and modernize the protections of the Voting Rights Act to prevent States from erecting new barriers to the ballot box.
Mr. Speaker, I will just say that we miss John Lewis. In this moment, it is up to all of us to pick up the mantle of his legacy and press forward, making good trouble, necessary trouble.
