[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10593]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT

  (Mr. AL GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, we live in a world where it's not 
enough for things to be right. They must also look right. And while it 
may be right for the Supreme Court to strike down section 4 of the 
Voting Rights Act, it doesn't look right, given that just last year we 
had a multiplicity of cases wherein it was found that insidious 
discrimination existed such that those cases accorded voters rights 
that they would not have but for the Voting Rights Act.
  Much is said about section 4 in the coverage. Little is said about 
section 4 and the opt-out, bail-out provision that has allowed many 
jurisdictions that were under the purview of the Voting Rights Act to 
extricate themselves.
  The Voting Rights Act has functioned efficaciously. I'm so glad that 
medicine is very much unlike politics. Because in medicine, when a drug 
functions efficaciously, we market it, we extol the virtues of it, and 
we keep it. In politics, when a law succeeds, we demean it and we 
eliminate it.
  I am here today because of the Voting Rights Act. I never thought I'd 
sit next to the Honorable Charlie Rangel in the House of the United 
States Congress. Thank God for the Voting Rights Act. We must revise 
it. We must extend it. We've got to renew it.

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