Fighting Voter Suppression

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me, and I thank her so much for leading this Special Order hour.

Mr. Speaker, I join with my colleague from Virginia to express my disagreement with the misplaced priorities of the Republican majority. The American people have made clear that they want their elected leaders to be focused on improving the economy and lowering costs.

In this area, by any measure, the Trump administration and the Republican majorities here in Congress are off to a very poor start. Projected economic growth is down along with Americans' 401(k)'s. Inflation and expectations for inflation in the coming months are up. Last week, discussing the release of higher-than-expected inflation data, one economic analyst observed ``the preliminary signs of stagflation pressures.''

Now, I am old enough to remember the stagflation of the 1970s: low growth combined with high inflation. It was devastating then, and it would be devastating now. Unsurprisingly, consumer sentiment is down substantially.

Much of this economic weakness is the result of the Trump administration's reckless, indiscriminate, and nonstrategic tariffs, which are expected to raise costs for Americans trying to make ends meet.

To take one example, The Washington Post reported that the recently announced tariffs on automobiles are likely to raise prices most significantly for the most affordable cars.

The President, however, when asked over the weekend about automobile price increases replied: ``I couldn't care less.''

The Secretary of the Treasury from my home State of South Carolina was doing quite well financially as a hedge fund manager doesn't think the American people care either. To quote him: ``Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.''

Clearly, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bessent have never struggled to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck and appear to view those who do with disdain.

With our Nation's economy in such a precarious state and 2 weeks of session left before a 2-week recess, is the Republican majority taking urgent action to bolster Americans' finances, boost growth, and restore confidence? Regrettably, they are not.

Instead, among other ill-advised items, they are tackling the so- called problem of noncitizens voting, which is already illegal. I say so-called problem because the Bipartisan Policy Center's analysis of The Heritage Foundation database--I repeat, a Heritage Foundation database--found just 77 instances of noncitizen voting between 1999 and 2023. That is 77 instances out of hundreds of millions of votes cast over a 25-year period.

The Bipartisan Policy Center goes on to say: ``Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election's outcome.'' That is from The Heritage Foundation.

If my Republican colleagues are truly concerned about the illegal overturning of election outcomes, they should work to prevent a repeat of the current President's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the deadly attack on this building on January 6, 2021. They shouldn't waste the House's time on this legislation.

Worse than a waste of time, the bill being brought to the floor this week would disenfranchise eligible citizens by imposing onerous requirements that many could not meet.

For example, as you just heard, married women who have changed their last names could not use their birth certificates with their maiden names as proof of citizenship. Neither could those born to military parents stationed abroad.

While many of my Republican colleagues may be globetrotting jet- setters, many of my constituents in South Carolina don't have passports. A $100 passport fee is a lot of money for many people in my district--in this case, an exorbitant poll tax.

This bill is only the latest Republican attempt to erect barriers to the ballot box, following recent attempts to make it more difficult to vote by mail or by ballot drop boxes. Just last week, the President signed a sweeping executive order with several onerous provisions that would risk disenfranchising millions of Americans.

Democratic bills, like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, would stop these attacks on our democracy and ensure every American is able to cast a meaningful vote.

Mr. Speaker, when the American economy is on the precipice, why are my Republican colleagues focused on making it more difficult to vote?

While I possess no special insight into their motivations, I would argue that the two are connected. Republicans don't want to face democratic accountability for their governing failures, so they are trying to curb the electoral power of the struggling Americans who their destructive economic agenda is harming the most.

I am a little bit of a student of history. What we are seeing right now evokes the dark periods of the late 1800s.

During the gilded age, low-income Black and White Americans across the South came together in pursuit of economic justice. The economic power structure responded not by expanding economic opportunities but by restricting the right to vote. The result was Jim Crow 1.0, which deprived generations of African Americans of the right to vote, the right to choose leaders who could ease their economic burdens and expand opportunities for their families.

Mr. Speaker, after these Supreme Court interpretations and these actions by these southern legislatures, let me tell you what happened in South Carolina. When more than 50 percent of the population was African American, they had zero representation here in the Congress. In fact, the last African American left Congress in 1897, and there was not another African American in this body until I took the oath of office 95 years later. That is what happened with Jim Crow 1.0, and what we are seeing happening now is Jim Crow 2.0.

I am very fond of quoting George Santayana's admonition: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I worry that we are dangerously close to repeating this democratic decline amidst economic disruption. However, heeding the lessons of history, I believe there is still time to prevent it.

As we fight against Republican attempts to diminish our democracy, like the bill on the floor this week, we must deploy this democracy to demand that they address the issues people actually care about. We must make our voices heard on this floor, at townhalls, over the phone, at peaceful protests, and at the ballot box.

We must make clear that Republicans must stop the Trump agenda of economic destruction. They must take action to lower costs. They must abandon their efforts to take healthcare away from millions to fund tax cuts for billionaires.

It is early in this fight, but our initial efforts are starting to yield results. Republicans fear for their majority, and they should. It is my hope that this fear will prompt my Republican colleagues to rethink their agenda for purposes of electoral self-preservation. If they fail to do so, the American people, as has happened before, will rightfully rethink who they elect so that we can preserve our economy and our democracy.

I will close, Mr. Speaker, with a little story from the 1950s. I graduated high school in 1957. As I was about to graduate, one of my teachers assigned me an essay to write. The essay was simply to share what I wanted to do after graduation, which was 3 months away.

When I wrote the essay, she came to me several days later and told me that she had read my essay and was very disappointed in what I wrote. I thought she had problems with the style, or maybe I didn't get the subjects and verbs to agree.

When I went into her office, she said to me she was disappointed because I said in my essay that, upon graduating high school, I would be leaving my native South Carolina, and I wrote why. It was because I was a college student, and when my parents got the right to cast an effective vote--both of them college graduates--the Democratic primary in South Carolina was a private club, a White-only private club.

These were the kinds of laws that came out of the Slaughter-House Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson, the same kind of laws that are being signaled now in the Supreme Court in the Shelby v. Holder decision. Just read it and you will see that what Justice Roberts wrote in that decision could have been lifted from those decisions of the 1870s. Jim Crow 2.0 is upon us.

Mr. Speaker, that bill is coming to this floor. If that bill is passed by this body, we will be taking another step toward disenfranchising people going forward.

It is a sin and a shame that this body in this year will initiate the opportunity to turn the clock back to revisit those years that we thought were gone by.

As we face this great threat to our economy and our democracy, I would hope that we will get a spine, that we will exert the authority of this body, and that we will say to anybody, in low places or high places, that we will not turn the clock back.

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