NC’s Lt. Gov. Robinson and Rev. Barber questioned on voting rights in Congress
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson dominated a congressional hearing Thursday morning as he testified that he is tired of his race being used as a means to push a liberal agenda when it comes to voting rights.
The speech by North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant governor came just days after he announced he wouldn’t be a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022. Robinson, first elected to his current role last year, had previously announced he was considering a Senate run.
Civil rights leader Rev. William Barber II also spoke during the hearing and testified in favor of the legislation that The New York Times reported would be the “most significant enhancement of federal voting protections since the 1960s.” Barber is the pastor of a church in Goldsboro who gained fame protesting Republican legislative actions in North Carolina.
In the 2020 election, more than 159 million Americans voted. Afterwards, lawmakers in states across the country, including North Carolina, began filing various election bills that would make restrictions to things like preregistration, early voting and absentee ballots.
In response, Democrats filed the Voting Rights Act amendment trying to strip states of the ability to make those decisions.
Robinson received the majority of questions during the more than two-hour hearing Thursday before the judiciary committee.
“It’s time that we modernize our election system in this country and stop playing all these silly games based on race, and please stop using me as a Black man as your pawn, and yes, I said it,” Robinson said. Push your agenda. I’m sick of it.”
Robinson’s comment set off an argument between Democratic committee Chairman Steve Cohen of Tennessee and the top Republican, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, about what would be included in the record.
Robinson said the idea that requiring voters to show a “free ID” would disenfranchise Black voters was insulting.
“Am I to believe that Black Americans who have overcome the atrocities of slavery, who were victorious in the civil rights movement, and who now sit in the highest levels of government cannot figure out how to get a free ID to vote?” Robinson said. “That we need to be coddled by politicians because they don’t think we can figure out how to make our voices heard?
“Are you kidding me?”
Robinson told Johnson that states should remain in charge of their election laws and called the bill a “partisan, unconstitutional power grab.”
“We need to stop it at the insinuation that somehow the people in Washington, D.C., know better than the people in North Carolina. You. Do. Not. And we will not tolerate it,” Robinson said.
Johnson said everyone around him was saying, ‘Amen’ to Robinson’s comment.
“This is some refreshing common sense, isn’t it?” Johnson asked with a chuckle.
U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat representing North Carolina’s 2nd district, replied that Robinson is a prime example that expanding voting rights benefits both political parties.
“We have to look no farther than our lieutenant governor here, who won with expanded voting rights in North Carolina, to see that North Carolina, a very purple state, elects people of both parties with expanded voting rights.”
She added that Republicans including former President Donald Trump, Robinson, several members of the Council of State and judges won in North Carolina.
“North Carolina proves that Republicans can and do win with an expanded electorate if they focus on enthusiasm and not blocking access to the ballot box,” Ross said.
She turned her attention to Barber and asked him a series of questions.
Unlike Robinson, Barber chastised North Carolina lawmakers for what he said was suppression of minority votes through gerrymandering, trying to eliminate same-day registration and pre-registration of 16-and 17-year-olds and demanding residents show ID to vote.
Barber repeatedly told the committee that a court said North Carolina lawmakers gerrymandered the state with intentional and surgical racism.
Calling for Congress to pass the bill, Barber said that in the wake of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans are “calling for us to fight for the soul of our democracy and enact full protections of our sacred right to vote.”
While testifying, Robinson also took a shot at Vice President Kamala Harris, who visited Greensboro on Monday and sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter that was the site of the sit-in by Black students in 1960 that helped spark the civil rights movement. He complained that Harris didn’t invite one of the students, conservative Republican Clarence Henderson, to join her.
“The goal of some individuals in government is not to hear the voices of all Black Americans,” Robinson said, “it is to hear the voices of those that fit their narrative, and ultimately that help keep one group in power.”
The committee also heard testimony from Julián Castro, former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Jacqueline De León, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund.
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