Georgia’s new Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in his first Senate floor speech last week wasted little time with hellos or introductions. Instead he got right to the point: Voting is a sacred right, one that is key to all other rights and one that should not be obstructed.
“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said Wednesday. “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” and on “democracy itself.
“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 basic rights,” he said. “It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights [with a filibuster] in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in our society.”
With that, Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator not so gently threw down the gauntlet: The filibuster should not get in the way of passing a federal overhaul of elections, campaign finance and redistricting laws.
The overhaul bill Sen. Warnock was talking about is known as the “For the People Act.” It was easily approved in House earlier this month, but it seems unlikely to garner the necessary support of at least 10 GOP senators to send it to the Senate floor for a full vote. Warnock, who also is the senior pastor of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, is the Senate’s lead sponsor of the bill.