Politics & Power Quote by Elijah Cummings

Cummings frames the Voting Rights Act not as a relic of Selma-era heroism but as active infrastructure: guidance, not nostalgia. That word matters. Guidance implies a road that still bends, hazards that still exist, a country still prone to getting lost without guardrails. It also smuggles in a quiet rebuke to the familiar American temptation to declare the job finished the moment progress becomes emotionally satisfying.

The pairing of “minority and majority Americans alike” is doing heavy political work. It rejects the conservative caricature that voting protections are a special-interest perk for Black voters, Latinos, or other targeted groups. Cummings recasts the VRA as a democracy-wide stabilizer, suggesting that the health of the majority is bound up in whether the minority can vote freely. Subtext: when any group’s access is restricted, the whole system becomes easier to manipulate.

Contextually, Cummings is speaking in the long shadow of contemporary fights over voter ID laws, purges of voter rolls, polling-place closures, and the gutting of federal oversight after Shelby County v. Holder (2013). “Continued” is a tell: he’s arguing against the Supreme Court’s logic that America has “changed,” and therefore the VRA’s strongest tools are no longer necessary. His “We have come a long way” concedes progress without surrendering the case for enforcement; it’s an appeal to national self-image deployed as a warning. Pride, in Cummings’s hands, becomes pressure: if you believe the story of American improvement, prove it by protecting the vote.