Audio: Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04) Talks About GOP War on Voting Rights, Immigrants; Right-Wing “Backlash” Involving “propaganda,violence and voter suppression”

Another day, another excellent interview by “Mornings with Zerlina of Rep. Jennifer McCellan (D-VA04) – see video and highlights/transcript of Rep. McClellan’s remark, below – who in this episode discussed the 60th Anniversary of Voting Rights Act, and more to the point the sustained/vicious assault by the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans on the Voting Rights Act. Rep. McClellan explains what’s going on really well, so definitely check out the full interview. Highlights include:

• “So, as you know, voting rights are sacred. I mean, in a government by, of and for the people, only the perspective of and therefore the needs will be met of people who participate. And the history of our country has been expanding the right to vote beyond the white, land-owning men who first had that right when the country was founded. And this is personal to me and my family as my great-grandfather had to take a literacy test and find, you know, three white men to vouch for his character just to be able to register. My grandfather and my father paid poll taxes. I actually took my oath of office on the Bible that my dad kept his poll tax receipt in.”
• “So, this is personal and we made a lot of progress getting rid of the voter suppression tactics that I just talked about with the Voting Rights Act 60 years ago. Unfortunately, that was gutted with the Shelby case in 2013. And rather than reauthorizing and strengthening and modernizing the Voting Rights Act on a bipartisan basis, House Republicans have tried to take us back with the SAVE Act, requiring every American to prove their citizenship through documents that cost money, a modern-day poll tax.”
• “As [Republicans] try to rig the rules for midterms through mid-session redistricting, mid-decade redistricting, and as we see, more and more voter suppression intimidation tactics as part of a broader backlash to progress. And while I am disheartened and discouraged that we’ve seen this backlash, I am more determined than ever to fight it and expand the right to vote…so that’s why this morning, I’m announcing legislation that I filed…to address deceptive voting practices and voter intimidation that we’ve seen on the rise recently.”
• “I alluded to it, but the history of this country from the beginning has been how do we reconcile the ideals upon which we were founded by the reality upon which we were founded. And when we make progress to expand those ideals to communities of color, to marginalized groups, to women, anyone beyond the original white landowning English men who founded Jamestown, there is that backlash and it always involves three things: propaganda,violence and voter suppression. Because they believe  – the people perpetrating the backlash  – believe that that is the only way they can maintain power. That’s what we’re seeing exactly. As you said, this backlash includes all three. And a lot of the propaganda is intended to deceive voters, or to intimidate voters who won’t vote for the ideas and and I think the Republican Party knows they can’t win on the merits of their ideas. So, they want to suppress the vote. And they want to manipulate information in order to to frankly lie to people to either keep them from voting or have them vote for them. And so, this backlash, this tactic is as old as democracy.”
• “…what should have been easy in reauthorizing the parts of the Voting Rights Act that were struck down that had been passed on a bipartisan basis for nearly 50 years, all of a sudden Republicans say, ‘No, we can’t we can’t do that.‘ And it’s really unfortunate because our democracy, our republic is being stressed to the breaking point. And going after voter suppression and voter intimidation is the tool that autocracies use to gain and maintain power. And we could have stopped all of this by passing HR1 or in 2013 just reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act at a minimum.”
• “…The other check on voter suppression has always been a free press. And so at the same time you have this attack on voting rights, you also see an attack on on freedom of speech and freedom of the press as a way to further allow dis and misinformation to be used to even further suppress the vote. So, it’s all connected.”
• “Remember why the Voting Rights Act was passed to begin with. I mean, the the 15th amendment in, I think it was 1870, outlawed voter discrimination. And yet after Reconstruction, states all across the South came up with very creative ways to disenfranchise Black men. That’s you know my the the literacy test my great-grandfather had to take on its face did not appear discriminatory, but the registrar that gave the questions chose what questions to give and when he got the questions all right the registrar said I need more questions, because this n-word got them all right. They were intentionally used to disenfranchise on the basis of race. And that’s why the Voting Rights Act was put in place. By gutting it, the Supreme Court, you know, John Roberts in particular, assumed, well, racism doesn’t exist anymore. Well, we’ve seen that’s fiction. That’s fantasy, frankly. And so now going after section two – section two was designed to ensure minority communities had the ability to elect the candidate of their choice, because they were often packed into districts so that their voting power was diluted in other districts. Or they were cracked and spread out so thinly that they could not gain any meaningful political power to elect the candidate of their choice. And section two was designed to prevent that by preventing racial gerrymandering. If that falls – the pre-clearance provision has already [fallen] – we already see a justice department that refuses to enforce…the voting rights act and the civil rights act. We see a Supreme Court that is increasingly making it more difficult for people to sue on their own behalf to protect their rights, in the birthright citizenship case by saying you basically have to be part of a class action. It is all designed to not only undo, using the Voting Rights Act to undo the very protections that it put in place. But it is doing so in a way that makes it very difficult for people to exercise or protect their individual right to vote. Which again, I go back to how I started in a government by, of and for the people, your vote is your power. If power is derived from the people in this country, which was a revolutionary idea at the time and still is, and yet you are preventing people from exercising that power to choose their representatives by instead having representatives choose their voters, then that’s just one more hit that our republic takes as it’s being stress tested to the breaking point.”
• “We’ve got to, as you say, connect the dots and make sure people understand we are in the backlash. Because I’ll connect another dot: why is there a war on teaching a complete and accurate history even if it’s uncomfortable? Because when you know that history, you recognize the pattern. And part of the pattern of the backlash is well, when you have propaganda, you need a scapegoat, you need a villain that you can attack. And in response to Reconstruction, that villain was Black men who were gaining social, political, and economic power. Now, it’s immigrants who are gaining social, political, and economic power. And despite what the administration says, they’re not just going after violent criminals who are here illegally, they’re also picking up US citizens or trying to redefine birthright citizenship because they made their villain immigrants – and by the way, trans children. And so they have to go after that villain, but they also need to take take away their political, social, and economic power because they’re afraid…there’s not enough to share.”