Obama calls for abolishing filibuster if it stands in way of stronger voting rights

Former President Barack Obama called on Americans to honor the late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis by working to expand voting rights — and if Congress has to abolish the filibuster to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, then so be it, Obama said.

“You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to do for,” Obama said as he delivered a eulogy for Lewis during services at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

As he delivered a passionate speech about Lewis’s impact on American society and politics, Obama reeled off a list of suggestions for improving civil rights, democracy and voter participation in the U.S.

“Naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — that is a fine tribute,” Obama said. “But John wouldn’t want us to stop there.”

The next steps, Obama said, should be “making sure every American is automatically registered to vote – including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance; by adding polling places and expanding early voting; and making Election Day a national holiday.”

Obama also called for full representation for millions of U.S. citizens who live in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. — a territory and district, respectively, whose residents lack voting representation in the federal government.

“They’re Americans,” Obama said.

The former president also called for an end to “some of the partisan gerrymandering, so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.”

“And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” Obama said.

Obama also urged Americans to value and exercise their right to vote, calling cynicism “the central strategy of voter suppression.”

Months of street protests against racial injustice in the U.S. have made him hopeful for the future, Obama said. But he added that people must vote to secure lasting change.

“We’re also going to have to remember what John said,” Obama said. “If you don’t do everything you can do to change things, then they will remain the same. You only pass this way once — you have to give it all you have.”

Citing another Civil Rights legend, the former president said:

“By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white, have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

“Dr. King said that in the 1960s,” Obama said, standing in King’s former church. “And it came true again this summer.”

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