Nancy Pelosi throws support behind new version of John Lewis Voting Rights Act

One of the issues that the Democratic Party looks to be able to solve is one of voting rights, following Republican-led legislatures that have passed laws deemed restrictive. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed new legislation that may reverse several rulings of the mostly conservative Supreme Court regarding voting.

This week, Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell introduced the “John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021” that has received the endorsement of House Leadership, Pelosi included. This latest version poses to be more ambitious compared to the version that the Democrats supported back in 2019 when the party reclaimed the majority in the House.

One of the provisions in the bill would undo the recent ruling made by the Supreme Court in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case in 2021, that imposed new, and supposedly non-existent limits on the safeguards of the Voting Rights Act against racism in elections. The bill would also reverse the ruling the Supreme Court made in the Purcell v. Gonzales case in 2006 that would limit the court’s ability to protect voting rights as an election approaches.

The bill will create a new process that will block some restrictions in all 50 states and prevents the Supreme Court from changing the rules over who may cast a ballot while an election is ongoing while disenfranchising voters that did not comply with the new rules.

The Republican-led states enacted bills that would either restrict access to voting or keep any Democrat from winning elections in the state ever again. The recent law in Georgia allows the Republican majority to take over local election boards that would disenfranchise voters in typically Democratic areas like Atlanta.

Previously, Pelosi also weighed in on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the Taliban taking over the Afghan government unopposed almost immediately. Pelosi praised US President Joe Biden for pulling through with the withdrawal of the country, however, she noted that the exit from Afghanistan left the country “in disarray” and that the US should never have gone to war in the first place.

“We should have been out of Afghanistan a while back, but now, we are -- unfortunately one of the possibilities was that it would be in disarray as it is. But that has to be corrected,” Pelosi told KPIX in an interview.