Blumenthal Statement on Republican Filibuster of Voting Rights Legislation

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) released the following statement tonight after Senate Republicans blocked an effort to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

“There is no democratic freedom more fundamental than the right to vote,” Blumenthal said. “For decades, the filibuster has been a weapon against the advancement of civil rights – and tonight was no different. I am disappointed – even devastated – but I am not disheartened. We must defend America. We must renew our nation’s commitment to protecting voting rights in this country. We simply cannot afford to give up this fight.”

Yesterday, Blumenthal spoke on the Senate Floor in support of expanded protections for voting rights. The video of Blumenthal’s remarks is available here and the full transcript is copied below.

Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, I've just come back from a trip to Ukraine with six of my colleagues, a bipartisan group, organized very ably by Senator Portman and Senator Shaheen to express our solidarity with the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom and democracy against Russian aggression.

They need us to stand with them as they stand strong for their country's independence against Vladimir Putin's effort to intimidate them, potentially to invade their country, but assuredly in a hybrid war consisting of misinformation, cyberattack, military action that is designed very simply to destabilize, demoralize, and degrade their country's government.

And as we stood with them, meeting with the president, Mr. Zelensky, and the top leadership, I couldn't help but think of this country and how grateful we should be for our strength, our freedom, our democracy. All of us when we return from travel abroad I think express our gratitude to be Americans, to live in a country where these freedoms and our Independence are assured.

But where we, too, need to be strong and ever vigilant and vigorous in protecting those freedoms. We are the greatest nation in the history of the world, the strongest and most freedom loving on the planet. We are still an imperfect nation, still struggling to do better and a work in progress, but we are proud to confront our imperfection and move forward in a way that demonstrates that we can broaden access to opportunity and to the right of people to determine their own destiny.

No freedom or right is more important than the right to vote. That is why we are here today and why I am so proud to have helped to lead the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and to support the Freedom to Vote Act, which are designed to safeguard Americans’ rights to vote and secure the sanctity of our election.

And today just as Ukraine faces a threat to its independence and freedom, we, too, in America face a threat. Not from Vladimir Putin directly, although he has sought to destabilize and degrade our democracy and continues to do so through cyberattacks and misinformation, certainly 2016's interference in our elections is a warning bell, an alarm that we need to be stronger against foreign interference. But, within the threat is equally if not more alarming because what we are seeing across this great country in state after state are efforts to suppress the vote and restrict the franchise.

Last year more than 440 restriction bills were introduced in 49 states, and 19 of those states successfully enacted 34 laws that made it harder for people to vote. These laws make mail-that voting and early voting more difficult. They manipulate the boundaries of districts to reduce minority representation. It led to a purge of 3.1 million voters from the rolls in areas that were once covered by the voting rights preclearance requirement. We are seeing a tidal wave of voter suppression that continues, even as we speak today on this floor.

The vote today comes in a week where we celebrate the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For the first time in my memory, I was out of the country on that day, but it was present in my mind and heart, and it should animate us today. That memory and legacy which were so powerfully expressed on August 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. He called it a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield. A triumph for freedom. And it followed a mere seven months after Dr. King launched a Southern Christian Leadership Conference campaign based in Selma, Alabama, with the aim of supporting voting rights legislation.

It was a great day for America. It is one that has rightly received a paramount place in our history. It's taught to our children. The Voting Rights Act represents the best of America. And its commitment to guaranteeing that members of every racial group would have equal voting opportunities stands as one of the best days in this country.

But it was no lay-up for the Civil Rights Movement. It culminated a hard-fought campaign and it was a hard-won victory of civil rights leaders by Dr. King and John Lewis who committed themselves, literally committed their bodies, their physical well-being to advance the rights of others in the face of violent opposition. They were beaten, sometimes near death.

And for decades the Voting Rights Act remained a crucial bulwark. It was retained and defended against insidious efforts to roll back the clock until, until the United States Supreme Court did that work for opponents. In 2013 in Shelby County, United States Supreme Court gutted the highly effective preclearance regime thereby jeopardizing the progress that the Voting Rights Act made over the course of half a century in protecting against those voter suppression efforts throughout the country.

Justice Ginsburg said it best in her powerful dissent in Shelby County when she wrote that Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act preclearance requirement to cope with the vile infection of racial discrimination which, “resembled battling the hydra – whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.”

And the time to protect those voting rights is before they are restricted and that's why preclearance was so important and why the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act now must be enacted into law.

We come here after a year that has seen the most destructive legislative session for voting rights in generations with states and localities returning to the conniving methods as Dr. King called them, conniving methods of voter suppression that block people from getting to the polls and making their votes count and undermines our democracy because as the founders sought to do, representative government means representing the people who are affected by these policies enacted by the federal government. And that means representation that enables every person to vote and have that vote count.

There are no guarantees that rights will be protected in this country. The fight for voting equality has faced continuous, often violent resistance and enormous opposition, including from within this Congress and now by a filibuster that will prevent the majority from protecting those rights.

The effort to change the filibuster is very simply an effort to convert it from a secret to a public debate mechanism. A secret to public. We will vote tomorrow on a rules change that provides for a means to make majority rule count, not to abolish the filibuster but to make it public instead of secret.

As my distinguished colleague Senator Warnock posed the question in this chamber last month, we want it to be bipartisan, but as he said, “Bipartisanship at whose expense?” And as he also said, “Clearly in this country, some people don't want some people to vote,” and the filibuster is a handy means of preventing reforms secure the right to vote.

Historic denials of individual basic liberties and freedoms have long garnered bipartisan support and have required courage and conviction to overcome and that's why we must change the rules tomorrow. Dr. King never quit. He never stopped fighting. As he said, I think I'm quoting him correctly, “Disappointment is finite, but hope is infinite.”

So even if we're defeated tomorrow, we will continue this effort to eliminate dark money, to provide for disclosure, to stop state legislatures from eliminating districts in a way that knocks representatives out of their seats and results in gerrymandering that is anti-democratic.

For decades, members of this chamber have deployed the filibuster to delay and block legislation that would have prevented voting rights by ending poll taxes and literacy tests, safeguard against workplace discrimination and advance civil rights in this country. The filibuster has been used to block those kinds of efforts to promote voting rights.

The longest filibusters in this chamber's history were deployed to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1964, a testament to this tool's history as a weapon against the advancement of civil rights. And Dr. King himself lamented that, “Tragedy of a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from voting.”

We cannot continue to allow these kinds of procedural tactics to stand in the way of defending against a new era of hostility toward voting rights of people in this country. We must protect the right to vote. It should not be a partisan issue. In fact, voting rights are widely supported throughout American society. Those civil rights measures were supported by bipartisan majorities in those years of 1957 and 1964 and in the renewal since then. Photographs showing members of both parties at bill signings, a test powerfully to the bipartisan support this cause has enjoyed throughout its history.

Since the original inception of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, overwhelming bipartisan majorities of both houses of Congress have reauthorized the Voting Rights Act five times. And for nearly a century after the Civil War. And before the Voting Rights Act, the scourge of racial discrimination in voting challenged our nation's core commitment, our basic values as a country.

From that century of sacrificing and suffering, so embodied by Dr. King, came the Voting Rights Act and its extraordinary commitment to realizing our nation's highest ideals, the best in America. For decades, it worked in one decision and its progeny. The United States Supreme Court undercut and undermined those rights, and now we face this tsunami of voter suppression bills crashing against America.

We must defend America. We must secure those rights and liberties, just as we come to the aid of countries like Ukraine that resist attack on their independence. We must renew our nation's commitment to protecting voting rights in this country, and tomorrow we will do it. Tomorrow we will vote, members will be held accountable, we will be on record, and I hope my colleagues will do the right thing for America.

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

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