Luther King’s son demanded passage of legislation protecting voting in the U.S.

Activist Martin Luther King III, son of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), on Monday urged President Joe Biden and the Senate to act to pass legislation protecting the right to vote to shield it from attempts by Republicans to restrict it. I’m here to urge President Biden and the Senate to pass ‘the Freedom of Vote Act, John R Lewis’ and warn that our democracy is on the verge of serious trouble,” Luther King III said in a speech from Union Station, America’s premier train station, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day. day to be functioning, not to be idle: “Today we are not here to celebrate, but to be active.” He stressed that the Congresses of 19 states have passed 34 laws restricting citizens’ right to vote, such as in Georgia, where the King family resides, which “are designed to confuse voters.” In that sense, he explained that voters have been removed from the lists, so that when they go to vote they find out that they are not in the registers to vote, and that the number of voting centers and the time to do so has been limited. “These laws are passed with the precision of a knife to remove black and Latino voters from the process,” said Luther King III.The son of the Rev. Luther King Jr. did not mention Republicans at any point in his speech, although he criticized the measures they have taken, for being the ones who are passing legislation in the states they control to restrict the right to vote. To curb those restrictions, Democrats are trying to push through two bills, the so-called “Freedom to Vote Act” and the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” which has little prospect of getting ahead in the Upper House because of the tight majority available to progressives. The first initiative establishes federal minimum requirements for early and mail-in voting, while the second restores Justice Department oversight of any changes to election laws in states that have a history of discrimination. On Thursday, the Democratic-led House approved a bill that combines the two legislative initiatives and the text now goes to the Senate, which could begin debating it tomorrow. However, the legislative draft has little expectation of going ahead in the Upper House, due to a maneuver called filibusterism, which prevents the debate of any measure if a majority of 60 votes is not gathered in the Senate. But two Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have already expressed their disagreement with changing them, despite expressing support for the bills to protect the vote. For this reason, Luther King III mentioned in his speech the “filibuster” and Sinema and Manchin.In that sense, he regretted that the state Legislatures can approve norms that limit the right to vote, while the Senate of the country can not do anything for “a small technicality called filibusterism”. He recalled that this maneuver was used in the past to not pass laws that allowed the protection of civil rights for a hundred years after the Civil War (1861-1865).

Original source in Spanish