Another Blight on American History

Floor Speech

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Mr. MENEFEE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because the right to vote is under grave attack. The Supreme Court opened the door, and Republican officials throughout the South are running straight through it.

Republican State legislatures are racing to redraw congressional maps across the South, and they have one clear goal: to make sure that Black communities cannot elect a candidate of their choice.

Look at Tennessee. Memphis is a majority-Black city, and instead of keeping it whole in one district, Republicans sliced it into three separate districts and imported White voters from hundreds of miles away. That is not an accident. That is a blueprint.

In Texas, a Trump-appointed Federal judge found that Republicans used race to dismantle minority districts, like in my hometown of Houston.

I have seen so many Republican officials argue that this is not about race. But look at North Carolina where Republican legislators requested data on voting patterns broken down by race. They then changed the voting rules based on that data, and a Federal court said that they targeted African Americans with ``almost surgical precision.''

This is about race. These maps are a pattern, and after Callais, it is spreading like wildfire.

Cracking Black communities apart district by district is not politics. It is a declaration that Black voices do not belong in this democracy.

Our Nation is better than this. Racist cheating has no place in the greatest democracy on Earth.

This Congress must fight back.

The right to choose our own Representatives is sacred and something our ancestors have fought and bled for, and we will not let it be stripped from us community by community or ZIP code by ZIP code.

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