In response to the Supreme Court’s decision striking Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, Senator Coons participated today in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to examine options for restoring critical voting rights protections. The hearing, titled “From Selma to Shelby County: Working Together to Restore the Protections of the Voting Rights Act,” featured testimony from Rep. John Lewis (D-GA-5) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI-5) about the legacy of the Voting Rights Act and the path forward to reinstate provisions invalidated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder.
“The day of the Supreme Court decision broke my heart. It made me want to cry,” said Lewis, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a civil rights icon. “I felt like saying come, come and walk in the shoes of people who tried to register, tried to vote, but did not live to see the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”
“In a democracy such as ours, the vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have,” Lewis said.
Sensenbrenner, former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a leader of the 1982 and 2006 reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act, said that his committee had examined thousands of pages of record on the Voting Rights Act and concluded that “discrimination in the electoral process continues to exist and threatens to undermine the progress that has been made over the past 50 years.”
In addition to Lewis and Sensenbrenner, the committee heard testimony from a panel including Luz Urbaez Weinberg, Commissioner of Aventura, Florida; Michael Carvin, partner at the law firm Jones Day and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and Justin Levitt, associate professor of law at Loyola Law School.
Chris is committed to enacting bipartisan legislation rewriting the Section 4 coverage formula the Court ruled unconstitutional in order to ensure that every American is protected from discriminatory voting rights practices.
A dedicated and ardent advocate for civil rights, Chris cosponsored the End Racial Profiling Act of 2011 and is a member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights. In March, Chris visited Montgomery and Selma, Alabama for the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage and recorded two videos for Delaware students chronicling and reflecting on his trip.