Dems: Expand voting rights in memory of civil rights icon
WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers said Sunday that they don’t want tweets or condolences to honor civil rights icon John Lewis. They want policymakers to get to work to honor the Georgia congressman’s legacy.
Rep. James Clyburn, DS.C., the House majority whip, urged President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to pass legislation that would expand voting rights in Lewis’s name.
“It should be the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020,” Clyburn said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s the way to do it. Words may be powerful, but deeds are lasting.”
Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., also echoed this sentiment in interviews on Sunday morning and called for swift passage of the legislation, called the Voting Rights Advancement Act. The House in 2019 passed the legislation, which would restore key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013.
Lewis lost his monthslong battle with pancreatic cancer on Friday night, at a pivotal moment for race relations in the United States. Protesters in cities from coast to coast are demanding widespread reforms in the wake of the May killing of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody. Meanwhile, coronavirus cases are surging in states nationwide, shedding fresh light on the inequities black Americans encounter in health care.
Clyburn also called for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to be renamed in honor of Lewis, a lifelong friend.
The bridge, named after a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, became a critical site during the civil rights movement. On Bloody Sunday in 1965, Alabama state troopers beat peaceful demonstrators there, including Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull.
“Edmund Pettus was a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,” Clyburn said during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “Take his name off that bridge and replace it with a good man, John Lewis, the personification of the goodness of America, rather than to honor someone who disrespected individual freedoms.”
Today’s protests have prompted cities nationwide to reconsider monuments and other honors granted to people with ties to the Confederacy or other racist legacies. An online petition to rename the bridge in Lewis’s honor was drafted last month and has gained more than 450,000 signatures.
Lewis’s death comes amid accusations that Trump has sought to foment racial divisions in the United States as Election Day approaches, rather than unite the country. Trump did tweet a message of sympathy and prayers on Saturday about the Georgia congressman, who was one of the most vocal critics of the president’s policies and rhetoric in Congress.
“If you really want to honor the life of John Lewis, you don’t do things like gut the fair-housing laws,” Pressley said on CNN. “You don’t sow the seeds of division.”
Pressley said she was a “beneficiary” of Lewis’s activism. “There would be no Ayanna Pressley and countless others were it not for John Lewis,” she said.
Many leaders on Sunday spoke of Lewis’s impact on Congress, where he was known as a moral compass for both parties in a divided political environment.
“There is a need for more John Lewises,” Colin Powell, a former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Not just one, but many. We got a lot of work to do.”