Civil Rights
America is founded on the fundamental belief that all men and women are created equally.
Our fight to live up to this founding ideal remains ongoing. African Americans and other minorities continue to battle racism and discrimination in schools, the workplace, and our legal system.
Systemic racism often endangers the people our criminal justice system is tasked with protecting. This painful and unfortunate truth was recently demonstrated by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Keith Briscoe, Jerame Reid, and far too many others.
A national call to action for an institutional and transformational paradigm shift in our criminal justice system must be a priority for our nation.
Throughout my career, I have fought to protect the rights of every American. I was proud to vote for the passage of H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. This bill increases accountability for law enforcement misconduct, restricts certain policing practices, enhances transparency in data collection and establishes national best practices and training requirements. I will continue to do everything I can to ban practices that have unjustly taken the lives of Americans.
To protect our democracy, we must fight discriminatory and anti-democratic efforts that seek to limit voting rights. To ensure every American has the right to vote, I was an original cosponsor of the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act of 2021. This bill would restore voting protections from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was abolished in the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. It would also establish a national standard for voting, end partisan gerrymandering of Congressional Districts, make Election Day a national holiday, and protect popular voting practices, such as same-day voter registration and early voting options.
I was also proud to vote for the Equality Act, which addresses systemic discrimination in our schools, jobs, and communities. This legislation would, for the first time in history, ban discrimination based on actual or perceived sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury selection process.
To empower communities of color, I voted for the passage of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans. This bill will increase transparency, unity, healing, and research to address our nation's historically unequal treatment of African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Latino Americans, and minority groups, as well as the effects of systemic racism.