SEN.

 RAPHAEL WARNOCK: Mr President, before I begin my formal remarks, I want

to pause to condemn the hatred and violence that took eight precious lives las night in

metropolitan Atlanta. I grieve with Georgians, with Americans, with people of love all

across the world. This unspeakable violence, visited largely upon the Asian community,

is one that causes all of us to recommit ourselves to the way of peace, an active peace

that prevents these kinds of tragedies from happening in the frs place. We pray for

these families.

Mr President, I rise here today as a proud American and as one of the newes

members of the Senate, in awe of the journey that has brought me to these hallowed

halls, and with an abiding sense of reverence and gratitude for the faith and sacrifces

of ancesors who paved the way.

I am a proud son of the great sate of Georgia, born and raised in Savannah, a coasal

city known for its cobblesone sreets and verdant town squares. Towering oak trees,

centuries old and covered in gray Spanish moss, sretched from one side of the sreet

to the other, bend and beckon the lover of hisory and horticulture to this city by the

sea. I was educated at Morehouse College, and I sill serve in the pulpit of the

Ebenezer Baptis Church, both in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement. And

so, like those oak trees in Savannah, my roots go down deep, and they sretch wide, in

the soil of Waycross, Georgia, and Burke County and Screven County. In a word, I am

Georgia, a living example and embodiment of its hisory and its hope, of its pain and

promise, the brutality and possibility.

Mr President, at the time of my birth, Georgia’s two senators were Richard B. Russell

and Herman E. Talmadge, both arch-segregationiss and unabashed adversaries of the

outlawing school segregation, Talmadge warned that blood will run in the sreets of

Atlanta. Senator Talmadge’s father, Eugene Talmadge, former governor of our sate,

had famously declared, “The South loves the Negro in his place, but his place is at the

back door.” When once asked how he and his supporters might keep Black people

away from the polls, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word on it:

“pisols.”

Yet, there is something in the American covenant — in its charter documents and its

Jefersonian ideals — that bends toward freedom. And led by a preacher and a patriot

named King, Americans of all races sood up. Hisory vindicated the movement that

sought to bring us closer to our ideals, to lengthen and srengthen the cords of our

democracy. And I now hold the seat, the Senate seat, where Herman E. Talmadge sat.

And that’s why I love America. I love America because we always have a path to make

it better, to build a more perfect union. It is a place where a kid like me who grew up in

public housing, the frs college graduate in my family, can now sand as a United

States senator. I had an older father. He was born in 1917. Serving in the Army during

World War II, he was once asked to give up his seat to a young teenager while wearing

his soldier’s uniform, they said, “making the world safe for democracy.” But he was

never bitter. And by the time I came along, he had already seen the arc of change in

our country. And he maintained his faith in God and in his family and in the American

promise, and he passed that faith on to his children.

My mother grew up in Waycross, Georgia. You know where that is? It’s way ‘cross

Georgia. And like a lot of Black teenagers in the 1950s, she spent her summers picking
somebody else’s tobacco and somebody else’s cotton. But because this is America,

the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls in

January and picked her younges son to be a United States senator.

Ours is a land where possibility is born of democracy — a vote, a voice, a chance to

help determine the direction of the country and one’s own desiny within it, possibility

born of democracy. That’s why this pas November and January, my mom and other

citizens of Georgia grabbed hold of that possibility and turned out in record numbers: 5

million in November, 4.4 million in January — far more than ever in our sate’s hisory.

Turnout for a typical runof doubled. And the people of Georgia sent their frs African

American senator and frs Jewish senator, my brother Jon Ossof, to these hallowed

halls.

But then, what happened? Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by the

majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each side got the chance to make

its case to the voters. And rather than adjusing their agenda, rather than changing

their message, they are busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a

massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve ever seen since

the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.

Since the January election, some 250 voter suppression bills have been introduced by

sate legislatures all across the country, from Georgia to Arizona, from New Hampshire

to Florida, using the big lie of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression, the same

big lie that led to a violent insurrection on this very Capitol — the day after my election.

Within 24 hours, we elected Georgia’s frs African American and Jewish senator, and,

hours later, the Capitol was assaulted. We see in jus a few precious hours the tension
very much alive in the soul of America. And the quesion before all of us at every

moment is: What will we do to push us in the right direction?

And so, politicians, driven by that big lie, aim to severely limit — and, in some cases,

eliminate — automatic and same-day voter regisration, mail-in and absentee voting,

and early voting and weekend voting. They want to make it easier to purge voters from

the voting roll altogether. And as a voting rights activis, I have seen up close jus how

draconian these measures can be. I hail from a sate that purged 200,000 voters from

the roll one Saturday night, in the middle of the night. We know what’s happening here:

Some people don’t want some people to vote.

I was honored on a few occasions to sand with our hero and my parishioner, John

Lewis. I was his pasor, but I’m clear he was my mentor. On more than one occasion,

we boarded buses together after Sunday church services as part of our Souls to the

Polls program, encouraging the Ebenezer church family and communities of faith to

participate in the democratic process. Now, jus a few months after Congressman

Lewis’s death, there are those in the Georgia Legislature, some who even dare to

praise his name, that are now trying to get rid of Sunday Souls to the Polls, making it a

crime for people who pray together to get on a bus together in order to vote together. I

think that’s wrong. Matter of fact, I think that a vote is a kind of prayer for the kind of

world we desire for ourselves and for our children. And our prayers are sronger when

we pray together.

To be sure, we have seen these kinds of voter suppression tactics before. They are a

part of a long and shameful hisory in Georgia and throughout our nation. But, refusing

to be denied, Georgia citizens and citizens across our country braved the heat and the
cold and the rain, some sanding in line for fve hours, six hours, 10 hours, jus to

exercise their consitutional right to vote — young people, old people, sick people,

working people, already underpaid, forced to lose wages, to pay a kind of poll tax while

sanding in line to vote.

And how did some politicians respond? Well, they are trying to make it a crime to give

people water and a snack as they wait in lines that are obviously being made longer by

their draconian actions. Think about that. Think about that. They are the ones making

the lines longer, through these draconian actions. And then they want to make it a

crime to bring grandma some water while she’s waiting in a line that they’re making

longer. Make no misake: This is democracy in reverse. Rather than voters being able

to pick the politicians, the politicians are trying to cherry-pick their voters. I say this

cannot sand.

And so I rise, Mr President, because that sacred and noble idea — one person, one

vote — is being threatened right now. Politicians in my home sate and all across

America, in their craven lus for power, have launched a full-fedged assault on voting

rights. They are focused on winning at any cos, even the cos of the democracy itself.

And I submit that it is the job of each citizen to sand up for the voting rights of every

citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our

democracy.

That’s why I am a proud co-sponsor of the For the People Act, which we introduced

today. The For the People Act is a major sep in the march toward our democratic

ideals, making it easier, not harder, for eligible Americans to vote by insituting

commonsense, pro-democracy reforms, like esablishing national automatic voter

and on Election Day; requiring sates to ofer at leas two weeks of early voting,

including weekends, in federal elections, keeping Souls to the Polls programs alive;

prohibiting sates from resricting a person’s ability to vote absentee or by mail; and

preventing sates from purging the voter rolls based solely on unreliable evidence, like

someone’s voting hisory — something we’ve seen in Georgia and other sates in

recent years. And it would end the dominance of big money in our politics and ensure

our public servants are there serving the public.

Amids these voter suppression laws and tactics, including partisan and racial

gerrymandering, and in a sysem awash in dark money and the dominance of

corporatis interess and politicians who do their bidding, the voices of the American

people have been increasingly drowned out and crowded out and squeezed out of their

own democracy. We mus pass For the People so that people might have a voice. Your

vote is your voice, and your voice is your human dignity.

But not only that, we mus pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You

know, voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue. The las time the voting rights bill was

reauthorized was 2006. George W. Bush was president, and it passed this chamber 98

to 0. But then, in 2013, the Supreme Court rejected the successful formula for

supervision and preclearance contained in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They asked

Congress to fx it. That was nearly eight years ago, and the American people are sill

waiting. Stripped of protections, voters in sates with a long hisory of voter

discrimination and voters in many other sates have been thrown to the winds.

We Americans have noisy and spirited debates about many things — and we should.
That’s what it means to live in a free country. But access to the ballot ought to be

nonpartisan. I submit that there should be 100 votes in this chamber for policies that

will make it easier for Americans to make their voices heard in our democracy. Surely,

there ought to be at leas 60 in this chamber who believe, as I do, that the four mos

powerful words uttered in a democracy are “the people have spoken,” therefore we

mus ensure that all of the people can speak.

But if not, we mus sill pass voting rights. The right to vote is preservative of all other

rights. It is not jus another issue alongside other issues. It is foundational. It is the

reason why any of us has the privilege of sanding here in the frs place. It is about the

covenant we have with one another as an American people: E pluribus unum, “Out of

many, one.” It, above all else, mus be protected.

And so, let’s be clear. I’m not here today to spiral into the procedural argument

regarding whether the flibuser, in general, has merits or has outlived its usefulness.

I’m here to say that this issue is bigger than the flibuser. I sand before you saying that

this issue — access to voting and preempting politicians’ eforts to resrict voting — is

so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hosage by a

Senate rule, especially one hisorically used to resrict the expansion of voting rights. It

is a contradiction to say we mus protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to

protect minority rights in the society. Colleagues, no Senate rule should overrule the

integrity of our democracy, and we mus fnd a way to pass voting rights, whether we

get rid of the flibuser or not.

And so, as I close — and nobody believes a preacher when he says, “As I close” — let

me say that I — as a man of faith, I believe that democracy is the political enactment of
a spiritual idea: the sacred worth of all human beings, the notion that we all have within

us a spark of the divine and a right to participate in the shaping of our desiny. Reinhold

Niebuhr was right: “[Humanity’s] capacity for jusice makes democracy possible, but

[humanity’s] inclination to injusice makes democracy necessary.”

John Lewis undersood that and was beaten on a bridge defending it. Amelia Boynton,

like so many women not mentioned nearly enough, was gassed on that same bridge. A

white woman named Viola Liuzzo was killed. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own

driveway. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, two Jews and an African American

sanding up for that sacred idea of democracy, also paid the ultimate price. And we, in

this body, would be sopped and symied by partisan politics, short-term political gain,

Senate procedure?

I say let’s get this done no matter what. I urge my colleagues to pass these two bills,

srengthen and lengthen the cords of our democracy, secure our credibility as the

premier voice for freedom-loving people and democratic movements all over the world,

and win the future for all of our children. Mr. President, I yield the foor.

https://truthout.org/video/raphael-warnock-slams-gop-assault-on-voting-rights-in-first-senate-speech/