Blumenthal Holds Hearing on Restoring the Voting Rights Act

[WASHINGTON, DC] – Today, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, held a hearing on the detrimental effects of recent Supreme Court decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act, and the path forward for protecting the right to vote.

In his opening remarks at the hearing titled, “Restoring the Voting Rights Act after Brnovich and Shelby County,” Blumenthal stressed the need for Congress to fight back against widespread efforts to limit access to the ballot box, saying “Protecting the right to vote is a matter of living up to America’s founding ideals that our government ‘[derives its] just powers from the consent of the governed.’”

Blumenthal also highlighted the harmful impact recent Supreme Court decisions have had on voting rights, saying, “States have been free to pass voting restrictions without preclearance process to assess whether the changes are racially discriminatory, and they have. In 2021 alone, seventeen states already passed twenty-eight laws to restrict voting rights, approximately twenty-one thousand polling places nationwide that serve voters on Election Day have been eliminated since Shelby County, and millions of voters have been purged from the voter rolls.”

Blumenthal closed by calling for passage of legislation such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and argued, “The Supreme Court is at a low point of legitimacy when its decisions undermine the institutions of our democracy. And in Shelby County and in Brnovich, the Supreme Court has methodically undermined all the tools Congress crafted in the Voting Rights Act to fight against discrimination in voting.”

A transcript of Blumenthal's remarks is copied below.

The Subcommittee on the Constitution will come to order. And let me first apologize to my colleagues and to the witnesses for my delay caused by a number of circumstances including most recently a stopped Subway tram. So, if anything can go wrong it will go wrong. But I do want to thank all of you for being here today.

Yesterday President Biden issued in effect a call to action, an urgent plea to protect democracy amidst an onslaught of state laws restricting voting rights. He declared that, “We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” We must, President Biden said, have, “the will to save and strengthen our democracy.”

During the Civil Rights Movement, then President Johnson made a similar call to action. In the summer of 1965, state troopers mercilessly attacked John Lewis and six hundred others as they crossed the bridge in Selma, Alabama in peaceful protest of discriminatory voting laws. In the wake of the attack and as the nation came together to grieve, President Johnson called for an end to voting discrimination in America. Two days later, Congress announced it would take up that call in legislation and just five months after Bloody Sunday as it came to be known, the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress with broad bipartisan support.

The purpose of today’s hearing is to heed President Biden’s call. A call to action to protect our democracy just as Congress heeded President Johnson’s call in 1965. We’re going to explore the real world impact of two deeply flawed anti-democratic Supreme Court decisions undermining the Voting Rights Act - Shelby County in 2013 and Brnovich just two weeks ago.

This morning, I met with a number of deeply courageous members of the Texas House of Representatives. They shared their harrowing stories of the impact that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Texas, which has some of the most extreme voting restrictions in the country. Efforts to purge the voting rolls, including efforts to purge tens of thousands of newly naturalized citizens eager to exercise their constitutional right to vote as Americans. Efforts to criminalize the right to vote, putting people in prison for improperly filing a provisional ballot. Efforts to limit voting hours and mail-in balloting which are critical to opportunities to vote for communities like medical professionals, individuals serving in the military and veterans.

Sadly, there are similar stories from states across the country, and those stories include the threats of criminal prosecution and intimidate the exercise of fundamental rights and what so deeply impressed me about the stories I heard this morning from those members of the Texas Legislature, and a number of them are here in the audience today, is the effect on their exercise of rights, their exercise of rights as American citizens. We cannot let these attacks on democracy stand.

Before Shelby County and Brnovich, the Voting Rights Act was immensely successful. The Department of Justice and American voters were able to use the Voting Rights Act to halt well over one thousand discriminatory election rules. The Voting Rights Act became known as the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement and in subsequent decades, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized five times, five times with bipartisan support.

But beginning in the 1980s, the courts began to chip away at its protections. On July 1, the Supreme Court struck its latest blow, gutting Section 2 of that Voting Rights Act in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The 6-3 partisan decision was a stunning display of judicial overreach and activism. The text of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act plainly requires the members of every racial group have equal voting opportunities. And yet, the court’s decision in Brnovich is completely untethered from the text that Congress enacted. As Justice Kagan said in her powerful dissent, the majority did not like the statute Congress wrote, so it, “wrote its own set of rules limiting Section 2 from multiple directions.”

Brnovich follows the court’s equally devastating partisan 5-4 decision in Shelby County in 2013. Following Shelby County, states have been free to pass voting restrictions without preclearance process to assess whether the changes are racially discriminatory, and they have. In 2021 alone, seventeen states already passed twenty-eight laws to restrict voting rights, approximately twenty-one thousand polling places nationwide that serve voters on Election Day have been eliminated since Shelby County, and millions of voters have been purged from the voter rolls.

The Supreme Court is at a low point of legitimacy when its decisions undermine the institutions of our democracy. And in Shelby County and in Brnovich, the Supreme Court has methodically undermined all the tools Congress crafted in the Voting Rights Act to fight against discrimination in voting.

The right to vote is not and it should never be a partisan endeavor. Not in this great country, the United States of America. But if the Senate is unable to meet this moment and reauthorize the Voting Rights Act because of Republican opposition to voter protections that have been passed with overwhelming bipartisan support for over fifty years, we are forced to consider all of our options including eliminating the filibuster.

Indeed, I have long been in favor of eliminating the filibuster. It was one of my first votes as a member of the United States Senate. I was one of only twelve that voted to eliminate the filibuster, but I have seen over the past ten years, one by one, many, many of my colleagues reach the same conclusion that reform is necessary.

Because the truth is that voting rights are truly bipartisan. They are widely supported throughout American society on the left, right, center, in the private and public sectors. Polling shows the vast majority of voters support equal access to the ballot box. And just today, more than 160 companies have released a public letter of support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Protecting the right to vote is a matter of living up to America’s founding ideals that our government, “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.”

As a tsunami of voter suppression bills crashes on this nation, my deepest hope is that today, we can renew a bipartisan commitment to protecting voting rights in this country.

I turn to the ranking member.

-30-