[cheers and applause] well, hello, everybody. Hello citizens for American Progress. It is great to be here. Thank you so very much. I am thrilled to be with you here today as you close out your ideas conference and celebrate 20 years of making what our friend and my parishioner john lewis called good trouble. Give yourselves a round of applause for being here for the work you do. My thanks to your fearless leader, the president , the ceo of the center for American Progress, patrick gaspard. Give him a great big round of applause. [cheers and applause] patrick, thank you so very much for your more than 30 years that you have been on the front lines for some of our toughest battles for working people. You and cap are doing fantastic work to move our nation forward, and we appreciate your dedication to the fight. Im especially proud to be here in this room full of friends as we not only celebrate the progress of the past but plot i like that word, plot toward a future that is worthy of our children and reflect the values of equality and freedom and prosperity that lie at the heart of our nation. Before i get into the heart of what i want to say this afternoon, i want to start my remarks by acknowledging that our hearts are rightfully with the defenseless israeli and palestinian citizens who are caught up in the current conflict. The heinous acts of violence visited on the people of israel but hamas, mothers, children, and seniors, including american citizens, were horrific and are rightly condemned by all who believe in Human Dignity and seek lasting peace. As a pastor who believes that every human being is sacred, i am praying for israeli families that lost cherished loved ones. I pray that more innocent palestinians are not caught up in the crossfire. As our key ally in the middle east, i will continue to bolster the partnership between israel and the u. S. And at the same time, i applaud President Bidens announcement that we are sending 100 million in aid to palestinian humanitarian efforts i made situation that is deteriorating in gaza amid a situation that is deteriorating in gaza. You cannot see those pictures and not be moved. I will continue to urge your government to play a productive role in minimizing civilian harm, to ensure that those currently in gaza receive the humanitarian services that they deserve, pushing secure quarters for safe passage away from the fighting, and to set the table for a twostate solution where palestinian and israeli children can sleep and be and arrive at a future that embraces all of our children. What these events make clear is that there are those who fear peace and seek to sabotage it at any cost, and we must not let them win. [applause] now, they got a clock out here in front of me. They must not ever have been to a baptist church. [laughter] all of these events, both abroad and here at home, underscore the importance, and i would argue the indispensability, of American Leadership. As i stand here, we are in a moral moment, a moment in which the values we hold as americans are being profoundly tested. We have all been watching the drama unfold in the house, right . In recent weeks. It was 22 days ago that the house of representatives ousted its elected leaders without having a plan in place for how to keep the institution going, and i guess thats appropriate for a party that doesnt seem to believe in government after all, so we have these extremist voices engaged in a political arson, grinding much of the business of congress to a halt. Then just a couple of hours ago, they literally just elected after three weeks a new speaker, and insurrectionist, and that was only after nominating and rejecting three other candidates, and after working on it for three weeks, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The chaos of the last three weeks was precipitated by partisan political brinksmanship that nearly pushed us into a Government Shutdown which we only temporarily avoided. That lastminute move to keep our government funded and open was preceded by weeks of political posturing by Washington Republicans moving to cut critical funding for programs supporting health care, veterans, and so much more. I must ask that this all happened in the shadow of the i must add that this all happened in the shadow of the embarrassing episode that took place this past january when it took the House Majority for teen tries to even elect a speaker in the first place because of an emboldened faction of the chambers fervent obstructionists. So this brinksmanship is being driven by a coterie of extremist voices, voices that echo the same Destructive Forces that are eroding our democracy, and while we rightly focus on that and i dont intend to let the House Majority off the hook for all the chaos that has been unleashed in washington, but i submit that it is too easy to just focus on the drama in the house and say, why dont those folks get their act together . It is too easy to single out and lay blame for our current state of disarray only on the bellicose narcissism of a handful of partisan actors. Is it easy to kind of watch the news cycle and look at this political personality and this one who is down and see the drama unfold. But the question we ought to be asking ourselves is how did we get here . How we got ourselves in this malaise in the first place. Part of that answer to the specific quandary is a topic that is not terribly sexy, not all that interesting to talk about, but it is deeply consequential partisan and racial gerrymandering. Just pointing to the drama in the house, laughing at mccarthy and moving on misses the point. I know the center for American Progress understands this. I know that one of todays conference topics was protecting democracy from minority rule. All of us ought to be concerned about the ways in which there are those who are trying to turn your democracy on his head so that rather than the people picking their representatives, the representatives get to pick their people. We are seeing that play out in the judiciary. We are seeing that play out in the dark money behind the current Supreme Court. As a man of faith, i believe that this is central to the work that we must do. I believe that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea, that every human being has dignity, and therefore, we ought to have a voice in the direction of our country and our destiny within it. In fact, i believe that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and our children and our prayers are stronger when we pray together. So one person if one persons right to vote is being threatened, that impacts us all because of voting is how we as a family solve and govern and live together in one house, but even if everybody shows up, their voices are still being diminished in this very moment and electoral outcomes are being distorted because partisan and racial gerrymandering driven by cynical politicians who are committed to winning elections at any cost, even if the cost is democracy itself. We are seeing this play out all over the country. Seeing it play out in tennessee. A highly gerrymandered state that created a super majority in their state legislature. It allowed them to overreach time and time and time again. Theres a reason why they made the moves that they made a few months ago. You remember there were these three brave legislators who were standing up trying to do the peoples business to keep our children safe. Rather than using their legislative power to protect the children, they decided to throw the legislators out. Ask yourself, why did they feel emboldened to do this . It was because they had been playing this game for so very long. I think they have been operating with the machinations of power so long that they felt the peoples house belonged to them. So they effectively said, we dont care. This is our house, not the peoples house. I submit that this is a crude expression of an antidemocratic impulse that has affected our entire body politic. We are seeing it in alabama, right . State leaders drew district maps that were so skewed even this Supreme Court said, that is too much. Think about how bad the maps have to be for this Supreme Court to say, you have gone too far. This is a Supreme Court that after all, 10 years ago said the fire in shelby versus holder, and then they said to alabama, you have got to redraw those maps, they were so dug in and so committed to keeping their lines and squeezing the people out of their democracy that they tried to do what the chief justice of the Supreme Court a few years ago said that southern legislators no longer do defy the Supreme Court. They did exactly that. That is because we have craven partisan actors in our country who are much more committed to power, much more committed to power than they are to democracy. In addition to other conniving methods of robbing the people of their voices, they are trying to block we can voting, block sunday voting, get rid of drop boxes, create unnecessary and onerous voter id laws, saying that folks might try to vote twice. Are you kidding . It is hard enough to get people to vote once, let alone twice. In my state and other states, mass voter challenges. Did you know that in georgia right now, single citizens, random citizens can challenge the legitimacy of other citizens votes . Literally, a handful of people are responsible for challenging the votes of thousands of georgia citizens. Partisan and racial gerrymandering is one of our most Serious Problems along with all of these tactics of voter suppression. And as we are seeing play out in the house with Kevin Mccarthy needing 15 votes and then being summarily thrown out, they are finding themselves sewn up in a bag of their own making, but i submit that this is a danger to our democracy, and when you think about the work that we need to do right now in order to exercise American Leadership on the global stage, this is a threat to our national security. And so you are the center for American Progress, and you know better than most that there is no progress without the voices of the people. So i know you all have in talking about a lot of things over the last couple of days, but the most important thing weve got to do is give the people their voices back. [cheers and applause] weve got to give the people their voices back because change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. When the people can get their voices back, i believe anything is possible. If the people can get their voices back, a black boy who grew up in public housing, the First College graduate in his family of 12 can find himself in the United States senate coming from the old jim crow south, anything is possible if the people can get their voices back. [applause] so that is the moral work that we had to do for the sake of our nation in a moment like this, but this diminishing and dismissal of the peoples voices and the political gridlock it creates are not just manifested in partisan and racial gerrymandering. I would argue that our nation, our house is in a constant struggle with itself. It is the american story and the american dilemma. At every moment in our history, we have had to ask ourselves, are we going to expand the promises of democracy to embrace everybody, to embrace every american, or are we going to restrict those promises . Our democracy has always gone through expansions and contractions, and it makes me think about mass incarceration and the car several state we have in our country. The United States the mass incarceration capital of the world. Land of the free. Mass incarceration capital of the world. No other nation even comes close. 4 of the worlds population with 4 of the worlds population, we wear house about 25 of the worlds prisons. No other nation has the number of people in prison or percentage of the population in prison. It is a scandal and scar on the soul of america. What i think about often as the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church where Martin Luther king served is that our criminal Justice System has managed to reinscribe in a new moment all of the various forms of discrimination against which dr. King and another generation fought. Channeling our children through the school to prison pipelines. And then when they get this mark on their record, job discrimination becomes legal because you have to check a box. Housing discrimination becomes legal. It is a means through which millions of americans are disenfranchised. If you are talking about civil rights, this is the terrain upon which we must fight in a moment like this, and i believe our children will rise up and ask those of us here in this moment, our grandchildren are going to ask us, where were you when this human rights catastrophe was unfolding in your very midst and in this moment . A few years ago, my church got involved in dealing with this issue of mass incarceration. I have seen it up close as a pastor. I have seen it in my own family. One of my proudest moments as a pastor was when Ebenezer Baptist church about 10 years ago convened the district attorneys office, the public defender, the court, the judges all in one place in the Fellowship Hall of our church in order to do on one day what would take people days and weeks to get done. That is to expunge their records. There were folks who had not even been convicted but had a record somewhere that prevented them from getting apartments, from getting a house, from getting a job. One of the proudest moments i have had as a pastor was the day i walked through my sanctuary and the sanctuary had hundreds of people and almost everybody in that sanctuary had a record. But the truth is thats true every sunday because all of us each of us has a record. Each of us has something that we are not proud of. Maybe not a criminal record, but everybody has got a record and none of us wants to be judged permanently by our worst mistakes. [applause] and so we began a process through which we began to expunge peoples records in order to change their lives, give them a second chance, and after we did that first expungement clinic, a few weeks or a few months after that, i was sitting in the chair in the barbershop i know you think im making that up, but i really was. [laughter] in the barbershop. And i was on my way, trying to get out of the barbers chair, and i was getting out of the barbers chair, mn said, that was a great event you had at your church a little while ago. And i said, thank you. He said im talking about the expungement event. I said, yeah, i remember that. Thank you for that. He said, wait just a minute. You dont understand. You expunged my record. He said that this had changed his whole life. So part of what we have got to do is we have got to give people their voices back. We have got to deal with the problems in our democracy. Weve got to make sure that we can hear the voices of all of our people. So we are at this moral moment, my friends, and the great thing is that we are the latest generation of americans who get to decide which way our country is going to go, so im proud that the people of georgia elected me to serve in the United States senate. I won a hardfought runoff election. The next day, i was feeling really good. All of the morning shows wanted to talk to me. Good morning america. Morning joe. I knew i had arrived when i was on the view talking to whoopi goldberg. [laughter] i was feeling good that morning. It was the morning of january 6, and you know what happened the next day. Vicious attack on our democracy, on the capitol. You see me standing here today having won again, but dont forget that in order to win, i had to stand up for the voices of the people in georgia. Secretary of state and others saw that we had won, and you know what they did . They said you would not be able to vote in the first hour of the runoff, that they were sorry and that their hands were tied. I decided to untie their hands. I sued them. [applause] i sued them and we won. And then those who said their hands were tied showed that hands because they then appealed the decision and we won again. And then they appealed again a few days before the runoff, ask for emergency relief, and i thought to myself, relief from what . The voices of the people . We won again, and thats why the people of georgia were able to vote in the runoff. About 100,000 people voted, and that was the margin roughly of my victory. Voter suppression matters. Standing up for the voices of ordinary people matters. Thank you, centre for American Progress for your work. Thank you for standing up on behalf of the best of our values time and time again, and no matter how difficult it seems, dont let anybody discourage you. Dont let anybody turn you around. There are moments when i feel discouraged, but i remember my parishioner john lewis, whose funeral i officiated. I asked myself the night before i officiated his funeral, what was john lewis thinking when he crossed that Edmund Pettus bridge . Was he thinking that one day at the end of his life at his funeral there would be three american president s on both sides of the aisle there to pay him tribute . He could not have imagined that. Thats not what he did it. Did he do it thinking he would be the recipient of the president ial medal of freedom . Certainly thats not why he did it. What was John Williams thinking when he and Jose Williams were crossing that Edmund Pettus bridge . I think he was trying to stay alive that day so he could stay alive the next day. Somehow by some stroke of grace, mingled with human resilience, he moved to Memorial Park toward justice a little bit closer. He crossed the bridge and build a bridge to the future. Center for American Progress, thank you for 20 years of building that bridge to the future. Dont stop building that bridge. Keep doing the work. Stand up. We stand because when we stand together, we win. God bless you. [cheers and applause] dont stop clapping. Dont stop clapping. Theres a little thing we are going to do together, right . I used to fancy myself a Union Organizer and at the end of every one of our meetings, we ended with a clap, song going to ask you to do the collective organizers clap with me. Were going to start off big and slow and building, building, building, building. [applause] senator rev. Warnock, we thank you for those inspiring words. Want to thank all of you for joining us in Community Today to celebrate 20 years of cap and to commence around the ideas conference. Remember when buddy maxwell was on stage today and said that community was like a fire . You are that fire, warming or your hands to the fire, singing our songs to the fire, telling one unified story, and that fire will be on our backside as we try to make more progress in america with a tremendous sense of urgency. We are going to take up John Podestas call that we are not just going to change the conversation, we are going to change what . The country. Tomorrow starts today. Weve heard so much today. All these inspiring words from people like leader jeffries to senator warnock. In between all of it, they told us what the northstar is, what the promise is, what the work ahead is, but they also gave us a sense of the profound challenges we have. We heard from workers who told us about the degradation in their lives in the way of rights, in the way of wages, in the way of their collective voice. Senator warnock just told us, give the people back their what . Their voice. We are going to give them back their voice. We did that on the idea stage. We are going to take that into michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, all about the country as we win the big wins from the bite and legislative victories. We are going to let people know exactly how it impacts their lives, what these investments mean, and to bet on growing out the middle class of this country, but we are going to do it in a way that is not about us but about them, that centers their stories, that centers them in the kinds of democratic outcomes that we are looking for because this is not just a moment when folks are going to walk up next year to cast a vote here and there, where we are going to tell a story about some measure of economic progress. We are making it clear that we are on the edge of a cliff. Yes, sometimes a fiscal cliff, but President Biden signed his legislation addressing that. We are on a democracy cliff that we dont want to lunch over. We want to pull back from and build a bridge to collectivity, to community, and lift up the flame and the fire that you all represent, so thank you all. Love you all. When we fight, we win [cheers and applause] now Minnesota Governor Tim Walz addressing the center for American Progresss ideas conference. He is interviewed by washington post, columnist e. J. Dionne