[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 50 (Wednesday, March 17, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1583-S1584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Maiden Speech

  Mr. WARNOCK. Mr. President, before I begin my formal remarks, I want 
to pause to condemn the hatred and violence that took eight precious 
lives last night in Metropolitan Atlanta.
  I agree 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 first place.
  We pray for these families.
  Mr. President, I rise here today, as a proud American and as one of 
the newest 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 sacrifices of ancestors who 
paved the way.
  I am a proud son of the great State of Georgia, born and raised in 
Savannah, a coastal city known for its cobblestone streets and verdant 
town squares. Towering oak trees, centuries old and covered in gray 
Spanish moss, stretched from one side of the street to the other, bend 
and beckon the lover of history and horticulture to this city by the 
sea.
  I was educated at Morehouse College, and I still serve in the pulpit 
of the Ebenezer Baptist 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 stretch wide in the soil of Waycross, GA, 
and Burke County, and Screven County. In a word, I am Georgia, a living 
example and embodiment of its history and its hope, of its pain and 
promise, the brutality and possibility.
  At the time of my birth, Georgia's two Senators were Richard B. 
Russell and Herman E. Talmadge, both arch segregationists and unabashed 
adversaries of the civil rights movement.
  After the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board ruling outlawing 
school segregation, Talmadge warned that ``blood will run in the 
streets of Atlanta.''
  Senator Talmadge's father, Eugene Talmadge, former Governor of our 
State, 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: ``Pistols.''
  Yet there is something in the American covenant, in its charter 
documents and its Jeffersonian ideals, that bends toward freedom. And 
led by a preacher and a patriot named King, Americans of all races 
stood up. History vindicated the movement that sought to bring us 
closer to our ideals, to lengthen and strengthen the cords of our 
democracy, and I now hold the seat--the Senate seat--where Herman E. 
Talmadge sat.
  That is 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 the place 
where a kid like me, who grew up in public housing, the first college 
graduate in my family, can now stand 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, as they said, ``making 
the world safe for democracy.'' But he was never bitter. By the time I 
came along, he had already seen the arc of change in our country. 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, GA. Do you know where that is? It is 
way 'cross Georgia. 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 
youngest 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 destiny within 
it--possibility born of democracy.
  That is why this past 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, 4.5 million in January--far more than 
ever in our State's history. Turnout for a typical runoff doubled, and 
the people of Georgia sent their first African-American Senator and 
first Jewish Senator, my brother Jon Ossoff, 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 adjusting 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 have 
ever seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow with new clothes.
  Since the January election, some 250 voter suppression bills have 
been introduced by State 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 first African-American 
and Jewish Senators, and hours later the Capitol was assaulted. You see 
in just a few precious hours the tension very much alive in the soul of 
America. The question before all of us at every moment is, What will we 
do to push us in the right direction?
  So politicians, driven by that big lie, aim to severely limit and in 
some cases eliminate automatic and same-day voter registration, 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. As a 
voting rights activist, I have seen up close just how draconian these 
measures can be. I hail from a State that purged 200,000 voters from 
the rolls one Saturday night in the middle of the night. We know what 
is happening here. Some people don't want some people to vote.
  I was honored on a few occasions to stand with our hero and my 
parishioner, John Lewis. I was his pastor, but I am 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 other communities of faith 
to participate in the democratic process. Now, just a few months after 
Congressman Lewis's death, there are those in the Georgia legislature--
some who even dared 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 is wrong. As a 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 stronger when we pray together.
  To be sure, we have seen these kinds of voter suppression tactics 
before. They are part of a long and shameful history 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 standing in line for 5 hours, 6 hours, 10 hours just to exercise 
their constitutional right to vote--young people, old people, sick 
people, working people already underpaid and forced to lose wages to 
pay a kind of

[[Page S1584]]

poll tax while standing in line to vote. And how do 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 is waiting in a 
line that they are making longer. Make no mistake, 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 
stand.
  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 
State and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have 
launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights. They are focused on 
winning at any cost, even the cost of democracy itself. I submit that 
it is the job of each citizen to stand 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 is why I am a proud cosponsor of the For the People Act, which 
we introduced today. The For the People Act is a major step in the 
march toward our Democratic ideals, making it easier, not harder, for 
eligible Americans to vote by instituting commonsense, pro-democracy 
reforms, like establishing national automatic voter registration for 
every eligible citizen and allowing all Americans to register to vote 
online and on election day; requiring States to offer at least 2 weeks 
of early voting, including weekends, in Federal elections, keeping 
Souls to the Polls programs alive; prohibiting States from restricting 
a person's ability to vote absentee or by mail; and preventing States 
from purging the voting rolls based solely on unreliable evidence like 
someone's voting history, something we have seen in Georgia and other 
States 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.
  Amidst these voter suppression laws and tactics, including partisan 
and racial gerrymandering, and in a system awash in dark money and the 
dominance of corporate interests 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 must pass 
For the People so that the people might have a voice. Your vote is your 
voice, and your voice is your human dignity. But not only that, we must 
pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
  You know, voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue. The last 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 its 2013 
decision, the Supreme Court rejected the successful formula for 
supervision and preclearance contained in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 
They asked Congress to fix it. That was nearly 8 years ago, and the 
American people are still waiting. Stripped of protections, voters in 
States with a long history of voter discrimination and voters in many 
other States have been thrown to the winds.
  We Americans have noisy and spirited debates about many things, and 
we should. That is 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 least 60 in this Chamber who believe, as I do, that the 
four most powerful words uttered in a democracy are ``the people have 
spoken''; therefore, we must ensure that all of the people can speak.
  But if not, we must still pass voting rights. The right to vote is 
preservative of all other rights. It is not just another issue 
alongside other issues. It is foundational. It is the reason why any of 
us have the privilege of standing here in the first 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, must be 
protected.
  So let's be clear. I am not here today to spiral into the procedural 
argument regarding whether the filibuster in general has merits or has 
outlived its usefulness. I am here to say that this issue is bigger 
than the filibuster. I stand before you saying that this issue--access 
to voting and preempting politicians' efforts to restrict voting--is so 
fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held 
hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict 
the expansion of voting rights. It is a contradiction to say we must 
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 must find a way to pass 
voting rights, whether we get rid of the filibuster or not.

  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, 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 destiny. 
Reinhold Niebuhr was right:

       [Humanity's] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; 
     but [humanity's] inclination to injustice makes democracy 
     necessary.

  John Lewis understood 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, standing up for 
that sacred idea of democracy, also paid the ultimate price. And we in 
this body would be stopped and stymied by bipartisan 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, strengthen and lengthen 
the course 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.
  I yield the floor.
  (Applause.)
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.