[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 9 (Thursday, January 13, 2022)]
[House]
[Page H182]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        FIGHT FOR VOTING RIGHTS

  (Ms. JACKSON LEE asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Sometimes it is extremely difficult, Madam Speaker, 
to really convey in this form both the pain and the emotion of one's 
journey in life.
  I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the 
conference that Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy 
organized and gathered foot soldiers for from around America. They 
were, in fact, the beloved community, and included the likes of John 
Robert Lewis and many others that sit in this House today.
  I walked on plantations and tried to register sharecroppers. And so, 
I come today to recount for us the words of Dr. King: ``We shall 
overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends 
toward justice.''
  We need to enact democracy reform now more than ever because State 
lawmakers introduced over 440 suppression bills in 49 States.
  We cannot allow the other body to stand on some sort of pro forma 
dignity that they cannot overturn the filibuster, when people died for 
the vote.
  We honor Dr. King on Monday. I want that vote to be in his honor that 
we have voting rights.

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