![]() ![]() ![]() Holder effectively eliminated requirements for certain states and counties with a history of racial discrimination to get "preclearance" approval from the Justice Department or a federal court of three judges before changing any election rules. How the bill would restore the Voting Rights ActĪs in its previous version, key provisions in Sewell's latest bill respond to two Supreme Court decisions that have made it more difficult to protect voters of color from discrimination. "We have to continue to let the folks know that we're fighting for access to the ballot box for everybody." "As long as I have breath in me and as long as the folks of Alabama keep sending me back to Congress, I will continue to keep introducing this bill in every successive Congress," says Sewell, who is the first Black woman to serve in Alabama's congressional delegation and is now in her seventh term. But in the Senate, where Democrats have held a slim majority, the legislation ultimately could not overcome Republican opposition, as well as a failed attempt to end the Senate's legislative filibuster in order to pass the bill with a simple majority. In 2021, the Democratic-controlled House passed Sewell's bill in a vote along party lines. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act - was part of a pair of voting rights bills in the last Congress that President Biden tried to rally lawmakers around in "a moral and Constitutional obligation to act." representative from Georgia, Sewell's bill - the John R. Named in honor of the late civil rights icon who was bludgeoned by a state trooper with a billy club on that "Bloody Sunday" and later served as a longtime U.S. "The whole movement for voting rights, we know that we can't give up, that old battles have become new again, even though we thought that this battle for voting rights was won on a bridge in my hometown," Sewell tells NPR, referring to the confrontation in Selma, Ala., between police and peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that spurred on the passage of the Voting Rights Act months later. Supreme Court dismantled key parts of the landmark law. Terri Sewell of Alabama is unrelenting.ĭespite a divided Congress heading into a presidential election year, Sewell is leading a group of House Democrats to reintroduce a bill Tuesday that would shore up and expand the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after the U.S. In the fight to restore what's been called the most effective civil rights legislation in U.S.
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