HuffPost: John Lewis’s Final Fight For Voting Rights

As Congress debates the passage of a sweeping reform bill targeting voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting and ethics, Democrats in the House and Senate have the name of a colleague who is no longer with them on their lips.

Rep. John Lewis, who died last year, dedicated his life to expanding and protecting the right to vote. He was attacked for it. And he was elected, in part, to help preserve it. He ultimately helped write part of the bill that Democrats are now pushing to enact. …

“It’s absolutely the case that his legacy lives on here,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit backing the For the People Act. …

To begin, Lewis convened regular roundtable discussions involving voting rights and civil rights groups and other congressional offices to collect and debate all potential ideas to make voting easier and to reduce the threat of voter suppression tactics. Groups included the Brennan Center, Common Cause, the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, NALEO, The Advancement Project, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Asians Advancing Justice, and organizations representing Native American and disabled communities.

“I just remember it being a very iterative process by which they worked very closely with outside groups to craft the most robust bill,” Spaulding, who was involved in the roundtable discussions, said. “Mr. Lewis was very involved in the details, as was his staff.”