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Georgia’s Democratic Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock on Sunday challenged Joe Biden to prioritize the fight against voter suppression, telling the US President: “We have to embrace the right to vote no matter what. . “
Controversial legislation introducing sweeping new restrictions on voting was enacted by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp last week, spearheading an apparent effort by Republicans in dozens of states to drastically curtail access to the electoral process for black voters and other minorities, who lean Democrat.
The president called Georgia’s decision “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” a reference to laws imposing racial segregation after the Civil War.
But some supporters fear his fledgling administration appears more concerned with passing a $ 3 billion infrastructure-focused economic package than tackling what Warnock calls “an attack on democracy.”
“We need to work on our country’s infrastructure, our roads and our bridges, and we need to work on the infrastructure of our democracy,” Warnock said of CNN’s State of the Union.
Two bills currently before Congress would counter the Republican voter suppression strategy.
John Lewis’s Voting Rights Act that Warnock addressed in his first Senate speech in January would allow courts to block new election legislation by states perceived to violate federal law and impose greater federal oversight on the electoral process.
The second, the People’s Law that has already been passed in the House, would require states to provide at least 15 days of early voting, allow universal access to postal voting, allow voter registration on the day poll and create a holiday to vote.
Both bills face an uncertain fate in the US Senate, which has created a furious debate over whether Democrats should remove the filibuster and eliminate the 60-vote requirement for passage.
On Sunday, Biden urged Congress to pass both bills, tweeting, “We must make it easier for all eligible Americans to vote and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote.”
I urge Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We must make it easier for all eligible Americans to vote and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote.
– President Biden (@POTUS) March 28, 2021
The reaction in Georgia was immediate to Kemp signing on Thursday afternoon legislation that places stricter voter identity requirements, limits the availability of ballot boxes and shortens the time voters have to apply for and return. ballots by mail.
Black Democratic state assembly member Park Cannon was arrested by Georgia state soldiers for knocking on Kemp’s locked door while the signing took place in private. Protesters took to the streets of Atlanta on Saturday to support Park.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s editorial board accused heads of state of “stepping back in history.”
“People… will see these voting restrictions for what they really are: a house hastily built on quicksand of lies. Verifiable facts or statistics are not part of the foundation for the unwarranted package of changes swiftly enacted behind closed doors Thursday, ”the editorial said, referring to Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud in the presidential election in Georgia.
Nikema Williams, a newly elected black U.S. MP for Georgia, told CNN on Sunday that she believed the victories of the new U.S. Democratic state senators, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, after Trump was defeated by Biden in November in a traditionally red state, had fueled a desire. to take revenge.
“The Republicans are pushing back and they are upset that we were able to win,” she said. “And so, they’re going to do everything in their power right now to restrict the access of people who primarily look like me to vote.”
Kemp incurred the former president’s wrath in December for not supporting his lies about a stolen election, but has since said he will back Trump for another White House run in 2024.
Kemp sparked outrage last week when he signed the state’s new legislation in front of a painting of a slavery-era plantation building, surrounded only by white men.
“It took my breath away,” Kimberley Wallace, whose family members have worked on the plantation for generations, dating back to sharecropping and slavery, told CNN. She said the timing was “very rude and very disrespectful to me, my family, black people in Georgia.”
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