Senator Raphael Warnock Says the Supreme Court Has Done ‘Violence’ to Democracy

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1:14From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. Give Senator Raphael Warnock credit for timing. In his new book, The Crooked Places Made Straight, Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America, the Democrat from Georgia identifies voting rights as one of the country's most pressing political and moral issues. Following the Supreme Court's recent blow to the Voting Rights Act, and the resulting rush to redraw districts in the name of partisan gerrymandering, that issue has turned, for many, into a full-blown crisis. Warnock's emphasis on the moral underpinnings of politics comes naturally.

1:51In addition to being a senator, he's also the senior pastor at Atlanta's famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, a position previously held by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So as a man whose influence literally encompasses both the church and the state, Warnock is well-positioned to talk about another timely issue, Christianity's place in the public sphere. We spoke about that, as well as what's behind the attack on voting rights, what certain Republicans get wrong about religion, and his own family story. Here's my conversation with Senator Raphael Warnock.

2:36Senator Warnock, thank you for taking the time to be here with us today. Great to be with you. It's an interesting time to be talking to you. You have called the Supreme Court's recent ruling on voting rights Jim Crow in new clothes. And we're in a moment where voting rights, it's a very fraught issue, more fraught in a way than it's been in decades, I would say. And I want to know a little bit more about sort of your personal relationship with voting rights, because your parents and grandparents grew up in the Jim Crow South. So can you tell us a bit about what voting rights means to you from a family perspective?

3:14Yes. You know, I talk a lot about voting rights because, you know, for me, voting rights is not just one issue alongside all the other issues we fight and struggle and debate about in our democracy. It's the very house in which we live. It's the framework in which we get to fight for the things that matter. And so I'm a child of the South. My mother grew up in Waycross, Georgia, literally picking somebody else's cotton in the 1950s. And because of the arc of progress in this country over the last 60 years, I often say the hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton got to pick her son. to be a United States senator.

3:59And so this story of fighting for voting rights doesn't feel distant to me. We've only been a democracy in a real sense since 1965. And what it seems to me we are witnessing in real time is an assault on those basic voting rights. And it's been stepped up over the last few years. But let me be really clear. I don't separate this. Right now, black voters are at the center of the debate that we're hearing. I think that the Supreme Court has committed violence against our whole, the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system. The same Supreme Court that has gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, gutted Section 5 in 2013, it's also the same Supreme Court responsible for Citizens United.

4:57And so whether we're talking about black voters or white working class voters, ordinary people, the voices of the people are being squeezed out of their democracy. And as someone whose parents lived through that ugly history, I take deep offense and I'm very concerned about our country. I think there are those who would point to your being able to be elected as senator. And this is sort of underpinning the logic of some of the Supreme Court's decisions lately, but the fact that you are a senator is a kind of evidence that the Voting Rights Act as conceived is no longer as necessary or as important as it was.

5:44So what's your response to that kind of logic? Well, the folks who say that don't know how it got here. Even in my last runoff, state officials in Georgia looked at the anatomy of my victory in the runoff, which, by the way, is itself a vestige of the Jim Crow South. They cut the runoff in half in terms of the number of weeks. And then as we were going into the runoff that weekend, state officials in Georgia said, sorry, you can't vote first weekend of the runoff. And they were referencing an old law in Georgia that said you can't vote first weekend if it was a few days after a holiday. And so they said their hands were tied.

6:29So I decided to untie their hands and sue them. So it took a court decision and two appeals so that students who were home that weekend, so that young people, so that working class poor people who were disproportionately black and brown could turn out and vote. About 70 ,000 people voted. I won by 100 ,000 votes. This is how voter suppression works. It's the ways in which you begin to chip away at people's access, which again disproportionately impacts black people, brown people, poor people. That's how you swing an election. Roberts put forward this theory that we no longer need the protections of the voting rights.

7:18That's what he said in 2013. But what has happened in the years since that awful decision in 2013, Shelby versus Holder? Yes, I'm sitting here. But the fact is, the gap in voter turnout, the racial turnout gap, has actually grown wider since 2013 and has grown twice as fast in the states that used to have to pre-clear that were under Section 5, southern states primarily. entirely uh it's grown twice as fast in those states now that we have lost the protections of section five roberts has long felt that we didn't need voting rights at uh the voting rights act he despises the voting rights act well why do you think that's the case why do you think you'd have to ask him but he has felt this way since he was a young lawyer in the reagan justice department It was the Congress in the 1980s, the U.S.

8:26Congress, that overwhelmingly said, look, the impact matters. And a young robber said, no, it shouldn't be impact. You should have to show intent. He was saying that as a young lawyer in the 1980s, just 15 years or so after the voting rights law was passed. He's never believed in it, in my view, and he's carrying it out decades later. But I want to ask a little bit more about the Calais decision in particular. So a lot of the discussion in the wake of the Calais decision has been about its partisan implications. It's provided an opportunity essentially for Republicans to carve out seats for themselves that they didn't have before.

9:10And that discussion, it's conflating race and partisanship, sort of like collapsing two things into one. And what does focusing on the intertwining of race and partisanship get right in terms of understanding the Kelly decision? And what does it get wrong? Look, the idea that you can just completely separate these things, I think, is on its head false. Basically, the decision said you can engage in partisan gerrymandering. Right. As long as it's not racial, it's just partisan. It's dishonest. The decision is dishonest. when lbj passed the voting rights bill into law he said i think i just gave the south to the republicans for a long time and those words were prophetic as a result of that decision the old dixiecrats and the old democratic party left the democratic party and where did it go They went to the Republican Party.

10:16So the irony of this moment is that the same partisans who were attacking voting rights in the 1960s are now attacking it again. You just brought up LBJ saying, you know, passing this is going to lose the South for the Democrats. And it ended up, like you said, to be true. That was a, I guess you could call it like an unintended negative consequence of the Voting Rights Act. Can you foresee any unintended negative consequences for the Republican Party in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decisions about voting rights? I think that they may get some outcomes that they don't expect. Yeah, there could be some surprises that come.

11:02I do see opportunities. And I think that they have unleashed something potentially that they did not anticipate. And that is the deep offense that people will feel, not just black voters, certainly black voters, but people of moral courage, people who just have a sense that everybody's voice needs to be heard. I think that we may witness the kind of turnout that could completely change the math of gerrymandering. I think we're seeing historic voter turnout in the early voting in Georgia right now. Given that sort of this gerrymandering battle, I do think race to the bottom is what it is in terms of fair representation for people.

11:49That is a fact that that's happening. Do Democrats have any choice other than to participate in that race to the bottom right now? If I had my druthers, we'd get rid of gerrymandering. And I've got bills to do so. So Republicans can join me anytime. I have a bill right now. If they join me in that effort, we could get rid of gerrymandering, right? But in the meantime, it was Donald Trump who called into the state of Texas and literally said, give me more seats. Again, politicians thinking about themselves rather than the people. And the Supreme Court poured fuel on that fire. It would be irresponsible in this moment for Democrats to unilaterally disarm.

12:35We cannot. In fact, I think blue state governors, given the reality that we're in, have a moral obligation to look and see where, you know, we can increase our opportunities to win. You would probably know these numbers better than I do, but I think when President Biden was elected in 2020, the voter turnout was huge, and the percentage of people who voted, eligible voters who voted was probably mid-60s, I would guess. So there is, like you're suggesting— Yeah, in America, yeah, and that's the irony of this moment, that even when we have so-called historic turnout in America, it's nowhere near what it ought to be.

13:17Well, that's my question. Aside from outrage or moral outrage about a given political event, what do you think is the key to getting those huge numbers of people who are either disengaged or alienated from the political process to show up and vote? Well, first of all, let's be clear that there are partisan actors. There are craven politicians in our country who don't want people to show up. They really don't want this diverse, multiracial, multigenerational coalition that sent me to the Senate showing up. And part of the reason why I know that there are craven politicians, again, who don't want them to show up, is we haven't even put the infrastructure in place to receive them.

14:10I mean, look, do you remember that there was a big debate about SB202 and folks were talking about the fact that you couldn't bring water? Yeah. Could you explain what SB202 is for people who don't know? Yeah. This is the voting law, in my view, is voter suppression law passed in Georgia right after I won. And John Ossoff won. It did things like said, you know, people couldn't bring water to folks while they were standing in line, couldn't bring refreshments. and there was a lot of outrage about that, I actually think we were asking the wrong question. The question we ought to be asking is, why are people in line so long that they want lunch?

14:51I don't want refreshments when I go to vote. I want to be able to vote. Now, we're all entitled to our own opinions, not our own facts. The data shows that black and brown voters have to stand in line a lot longer than their white counterparts. The experience around voting in some neighborhoods doesn't look the same way it does in others. If you're a working class person and you've got to take off from work to vote, that is a kind of poll tax in my view. We should have weekend voting. We shouldn't be fighting it. We should be able to, people should have mail-in voting. We shouldn't be fighting it.

15:26We should be making it easy to vote. But do you have any sense of, you know, when we talk about the legions of people who are not voting, do you have a sense of how that breaks down between people who find that there are obstacles to their ability to go vote as opposed to people who are disengaged? Is one a bigger problem than the other? There's no question that disengagement is a real issue in our country. I mean, I think that we've made our politics too much about the politicians. If you listen to the way we talk about politics in America, in the public square, and with respect in the media, too often it's about the politicians.

16:18It's like sports and talking about the quarterback. Talk about it like it's sports. Which politician is up? Who's down? Who's in? Who's out? And I think workaday people, ordinary people, are saying to themselves, who cares? And so this is why I got involved in something as messy as politics. I mean, there's a degree of peril for a pastor to get involved in this. It's messy. but I have a faith that, you know, requires me to be engaged. You know, when I think about my own journey, you know, I grew up in public housing, first college graduate of my family, and here I sit with four degrees, including a PhD, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, a U.S.

17:06senator. Who gets to do these things, right? What keeps me up at night is that it would be harder for me to do those things now than it was for that kid growing up in the 1980s. Because of attacks on? Because of growing inequality, because of attacks on things like the Pell Grant, because of our refusal to invest in the next generation, because of our obsession with the culture wars, rather than focusing on American competitiveness. And now we're dealing with AI and all of these things. There's a whole range of issues we really need to be focused on. But right now we've got demagogues who are distracting us with the politics of division.

17:51And I think people are turned off. I want to switch gears just for a second. I was, uh, just because I saw it kept showing up on the bestseller lists. Uh, your colleague in the Senate, uh, John Kennedy's book, how to test negative for stupid has been a big bestseller. He's a Republican Senator from, from Louisiana. And so I was, I was reading it and towards the end, he does kind of just like a rapid fire assessment of various hot button issues in America. And he, when he writes about race and he says that America is not a racist country and the country's history is proof that it's not a racist country.

18:29I think it's pretty easy to imagine someone else saying, actually, the country's history is proof that racism is pretty deeply embedded. But I don't think Senator Kennedy's view is wildly out of line with the view of a lot of conservatives and how they see race in the country. And it made me wonder about, for you, Where do you find common ground there when there's such a fundamental disagreement about the country's history when it comes to race? He is oversimplifying a complicated issue. I've always said that America has a complicated story. All families, I know this as a pastor, all families have a complicated story.

19:16and I embody the complexity of the American story in my own story. I had an older father, you know, World War II era veteran. And as a kid, I remember him telling me the story about how when he came home, he had to give up his bus seat to a teenager while wearing his soldier's uniform. and that wasn't that long before I was born, but he had to give up his seat. But now his son sits in a Senate seat. I love this country, flaws and all, but part of how you love somebody is you tell it the truth, and I'd be irresponsible to sit in this seat while ignoring the fact the land of the free is the mass incarceration capital of the world.

20:15I got a brother who went through that system. He made a terrible mistake. What he did cannot be justified. But he was a first-time offender, nonviolent, drug-related offense, went to prison, was sentenced to life without parole. Nobody died.

20:33Nobody got—no one was hurt, violent, you know, physically. Nobody even got high. Long story. it. And yet I sit here. That's the complexity of the story that perhaps I know in a way that's different from my colleague and friend, John Kennedy. In your new book, you write about how Christians in the United States have in the past stood on the wrong side of justice, Slavery being the prime example. And you also write about how, for example, House Speaker Mike Johnson spent a lot of time praying in the Capitol's chapel in advance of the passing of the one big beautiful bill, which is a bill that you describe as Robin Hood in reverse, robbing the poor to give to the wealthy.

21:29And I was reading those things sort of in the same context of people of faith and people of sincere faith, which I believe Speaker Johnson is, taking political actions that you see as ungodly or immoral. And it was interesting to me that I didn't really feel like in the book you directly grappled with the question of how you understand when fellow believers take positions that you can't morally abide. From like a theological perspective, how do you understand that? For me, the acid test of one's faith is the depth of your commitment to the people who are on the margins. And I'm a Matthew 25 Christian.

22:34It's what you do unto the least of us, you do unto me. You do unto me. And so I don't understand how you read that. Say a long prayer. Hold hands with your fellow legislators. and then cut a trillion dollars, one trillion dollars out of Medicaid, calling it waste, fraud, and abuse. What are you saying about those people? And so in light of that, for me, I have to ask whether the religion is more performative than substantive. and I don't like to use these fancy words, but I'm a trained systematic theologian or something called the hermeneutics of suspicion. Tell me what that is. When you look at a text or you look at the world with a critical view, where you ask the hard questions.

23:29So I want you to know that I apply that same hermeneutics of suspicion to my own faith. I examine myself and I ask and I invite other people to ask, what's really driving this? Why are you taking that view? Why did you vote this way actually on that? What's really driving it? I know you say that you're focused on this issue, and I've seen this with my colleagues. Usually if you ask politicians enough questions about why they're voting, what they're voting, it's somewhere connected to their politics. And so the question I always ask myself, you know, am I so committed to self-preservation that I can't be effective?

24:05And so I think that the speaker has a certain agenda and a certain view. and it is what that you know i think i think that that's that that that obviously plays a huge role and there's a there's a long history of that i mean you know the there were many christians on the wrong side of slavery they were on the wrong side of jim crow segregation And so part of the obligation, I think, of a person of faith is to ask yourself, what are you actually worshiping? What are you actually committed to? Are you committed to the poor? Are you committed to the despised and the rejected? Would Jesus agree with the actions of ICE in this moment in which we're seeing organized cruelty on our streets, masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, separating families, terrorizing whole communities of people, whether they're documented or not, whether they're citizens or not.

25:19What is it in the gospel, I would ask my colleagues, what is it in the gospel that says that this is right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There's some variation of that in all of the great faith traditions, in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam, in the Baha 'i faith, all the great traditions. And, you know, that's the question I think that people aren't asking themselves deeply enough because if you do, you might actually have to make some decisions that make you a little bit uncomfortable. What's a decision you've made that's made you uncomfortable? I don't know. That's an interesting question.

26:07I mean, look, as someone who votes all the time in the Senate, you know, there are always these different interests and people speaking into your ear about what needs to be done. And on the one hand, there is the desire to fight, to work for the people that sent you there. There's also the recognition that if you can't stay in that seat, you can't do those things. So if we're honest, all of us who are in elected office live in that tension. You know, and I'm in a purple state. The same state that sent me to the Senate voted for Donald Trump. So those are the politics that I navigate every single day.

27:05What helps me in that regard is that while I do love this job, and it's a dream job because when I get a victory, the scale of the victory is something that'd be hard to do almost anywhere else. So I do feel a moral obligation to try to stay in the seat to do the work. But what does help me in that regard, and I hope puts me above being just another transactional politician, is that I don't need this job. I really don't. I mean, in terms of my own sense of personal fulfillment and my own sense of somebody-ness, if you will, I don't need this job. Because you have Ebenezer. Well, because I have a project, and that project is changed.

27:56That project is human fulfillment. That project is justice, and I don't need any particular job to do that. You know Mark 12, 17, right? You tell me. I love this. Tell the Christian preacher the scripture. Believe it or not, I haven't memorized a whole Bible. It's a famous line. It's render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. And to God the things that are God's. Yes. How do you understand that line? Pay your taxes. Show up as a good citizen. But don't bow down to Caesar. That's what it means to me. Yeah. Like, you know. I didn't mean to test you on that one. I figured you'd. Sorry. Yeah. But it is a piece of scripture that's about church and state.

28:53And I really want to understand for you, a man who is driven by his faith, who is a pastor. What I'm driven— How do you—where are the lines that you draw if you draw them? And this isn't a leading question. This is a question from—it comes out of sincere curiosity. Sure. But how do you delineate between when you're driven by faith and when you're driven by the public good? Because it can't, I don't know that it can be a perfect overlap of those two circles. Maybe it can. You're in a better position to tell me. I'm driven by the values in my faith. Yeah. And it's the values and not the creeds that I try to take in a responsible way to my work.

29:47But those values, in my view, are resonant in all of the great faith traditions and in people who claim no faith tradition at all, but are people of moral courage. love, truth-telling, justice-making, compassion, empathy, looking into the eyes of your neighbor and seeing a glimpse of your own humanity. That's what drives my work and not the creeds of the faith. And you didn't ask me, but I'll venture out a little bit into the waters and And say that this is what drives my view, for example, on the whole issue around reproductive choice. I get a lot of attacks from folks on the right who try to challenge my pastoral identity, my Christian identity.

30:45I'm unbothered by that. On the LGBTQ question, for me, we live in a diverse democratic republic. And on the issue around choice, you know, I have a deep, deep reverence for life. And I have a profound respect for choice. The question there is, whose decision is it?

31:15And I think that a woman ought to have autonomy, the ability to decide. I'm about to call you reverend instead of senator, but this is a question. I answer to both. A question for the different. What you just described, how you get attacks on the right from people who are against your positions on women's choice or LGBTQ. I have to believe that certainly many of the people who are attacking you are authentic in their belief that your positions are ungodly. Now, I apologize if this is like a religion 101 question, but how do you know you're right? Why do you have confidence that your position is the moral one?