House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn remembered his friend Rep. John Lewis on Sunday and said President Trump should take up legislation in honor of the Georgia Democrat, who died Friday.
Mr. Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat, said the president could sign the House Democrats’ legislation to reauthorize the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court partly struck down in Shelby v. Holder in 2013.
The House bill would require states and localities with a history of racial discrimination to get Justice Department approval before enacting voting laws and imposing standards. Republicans say the bill is unconstitutional and takes away states’ rights.
“Let’s go to work and pass that bill,” Mr. Clyburn told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “If the president were to sign that, then I think that’s what we would do to honor John.
“Words may be powerful, but deeds are lasting,” he said.
Mr. Lewis died from pancreatic cancer at age 80. He represented Georgia’s 5th Congressional District in the House for more than three decades.
The son of sharecroppers became a civil rights legend by championing change through peace alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
His death marks a milestone in American history. Mr. Lewis was the last living Black speaker at the March on Washington in 1963. At 23, he was also the youngest.
Mr. Lewis was head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a King acolyte.
Mr. Lewis left his stamp as a civil rights fighter beyond the National Mall and across his native Deep South. He was assaulted in 1961 as one of the original Freedom Riders. He was jailed numerous times for nonviolent offenses and was bloodied on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, in the 1965 clash between protesters and state and local law enforcement.
That “Bloody Sunday” provided a kind of trademark for Mr. Lewis during his political career. He would frequently note that there are “still many bridges to cross.”
“We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal,” Mr. Lewis told Smithsonian magazine on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. “We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back.”
He drew on the bridge crossing metaphor again in December when he startled friends by announcing his diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer. He vowed to fight the disease with all the tools of modern medicine and his own proven tenacity.
Freshman Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts Democrat and the first Black woman elected to represent her district, told CNN on Sunday that she wouldn’t be where she is today if not for the movement Mr. Lewis began.
She also used the occasion to criticize the president. She suggested Mr. Trump’s policies are racist and his rhetoric divisive.
“There would be no Ayanna Pressley and countless others were it not for John Lewis, the conscience and the compass of our Congress, but, I could argue, for our nation. And it is especially painful to lose a justice seeker and a man with the moral clarity of John Lewis against the backdrop at a new moment of racial reckoning in this country, when you see police states like what’s happening in Portland, unrest all around us, voter intimidation and suppression tactics. It is especially acute and painful to be losing him,” she said.
She added that the Trump administration shouldn’t gut Obama-era fair housing rules.
In his own political career, Mr. Lewis frequently displayed the same combative spirit and staunch partisanship.
He boycotted the inaugurations of Republican presidents in the 21st century and publicly denounced George W. Bush and Donald Trump as illegitimate chief executives. He was the first notable Democrat in the House to advocate impeaching Mr. Bush. In 2008, he compared Republican presidential candidate John McCain to George Wallace and accused Mr. McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.”
Despite such hard-core partisanship, Mr. Lewis maintained friendships with some Republicans. In fact, he was close with recently retired Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia.
The two men were born a few years apart. After Mr. Lewis‘ family moved from his native Alabama to Atlanta when he was a boy, the two went through school integration in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.
“Those were very intense times,” Mr. Isakson said. “John and I would say that we came at it from different races but not different sides. We had one heart.”
Mr. Trump posted a brief message Saturday on Twitter after hearing the news of Mr. Lewis‘ death.
“Saddened to hear the news of civil rights hero John Lewis passing. Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family,” the president said.
Ms. Pressley said that tweet wasn’t what America needs.
“At this point, we don’t need anybody’s sympathies or tweets. What we need is action,” she said.
“If you really want to honor the life of John Lewis, you don’t do things like gut the fair housing laws. You don’t sow the seeds of division. And you don’t delay bringing the Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after John Lewis, to the floor. And that should be brought to the floor immediately,” Ms. Pressley said.
Georgia Democrats will meet Monday to decide what to do with the November election for Mr. Lewis‘ House seat, which will remain empty unless Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, schedules a special election. With just four months until the general election and the required notice to run a special election campaign, Mr. Kemp is unlikely to do so.
State law lets a party replace a deceased officeholder on the ballot. A seven-member panel will submit several names from an applicant pool to the state party’s executive committee, which will submit one name to the Georgia secretary of state by 4 p.m. Monday.
That nominee will face Republican Angela Stanton-King in November in the overwhelmingly Democratic 5th District, which covers much of Atlanta.
Funeral plans have not been announced. Mr. Kemp ordered flags in Georgia to be held at half-staff until sunset of the funeral day.
Mr. Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama. As a boy, he would practice his preaching and oratory on the family’s chickens before the family moved to Atlanta. He went on to earn degrees from American Baptist College in Alexandria, Virginia, and historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
His political career began in 1981 with a successful run for an Atlanta City Council seat. In 1986, he defeated state Rep. Julian Bond in a nasty Democratic primary and was elected to the House that November. He held Georgia’s 5th District seat ever since. He often took more than 70% of the vote and ran without opposition six times.
During his decades in the House, Mr. Lewis emerged as one of the most reliable Democratic votes in Washington. He consistently opposed trade deals and voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement and President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. He was also a vehement opponent of welfare reform, although his predictions of catastrophe did not come to pass.
Mr. Lewis‘ formidable lawmaking over the years and the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed on him in 2011 represent achievements no one in his youth would have dreamed possible, said Charles Steele Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
To Black youths in Jim Crow-era Alabama, the concept of a Black man being a powerful figure in Washington, chairing committees, receiving honorary degrees from Ivy League schools, having a U.S. Navy ship named in his honor, and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from a Black president all seemed improbable.
“Oh, my, no,” Mr. Steele said when asked whether anyone envisioned such a career arc. “We didn’t know we were making history as young men, either.”
