WASHINGTON (RNS) — Clergy from across the country have joined the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign in calling on Congress to vote on issues related to fair wages, voting rights and poverty reduction ahead of the midterm elections.
“Too many Americans are being negatively impacted by the lack of living wages, voting rights, and lack of policy support,” wrote the Rev. William Barber II and the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in letters to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the minority leaders of the U.S. House and Senate.
“When we asked poor and low-income people who did not vote in the 2018 midterms why they did not turn out, the number one reason we heard was because they did not hear politicians speaking to them and the issues that impact their lives,” they wrote in the letters sent Tuesday (Sept. 27).
The letters were the latest plea for policy change by the movement that has since 2018 modeled itself on the original Poor People’s Campaign started by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that brought together a wide range of activists to focus on what King called the “three evils” of racism, poverty and militarism.
Today’s Poor People’s Campaign, which also addresses environmental justice, focused on poverty in its letter to congressional leaders. While there was a decrease of millions of poor people after the American Rescue Plan was signed by President Joe Biden last year, “the failure of the Senate to extend those provisions and the pressure of inflation are together pushing more people to the edge,” it reads.
The co-leaders of the campaign and dozens of clergy from Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths gathered on Thursday in a Capitol Hill briefing room before half a dozen Democratic members of Congress for a discussion of how those issues are affecting their congregants and communities.
From left, Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill.; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C.; and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., attend the Poor People’s Campaign’s congressional briefing on Sept. 22, 2022, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks
Calling the current national situation a “moral emergency,” Barber said the three-point request aims to help voters know where members of Congress stand before they head to the polls for the Nov. 8 election.
Theoharis, likewise, urged action in the coming weeks.
“We’re not coasting into the midterm,” she said. “We’re asking Congress to put forward legislation that could lift the load of poverty, to do this before November,
and to show that if there are representatives, if there are senators who are willing to stand against lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty and economic precarity that it’s within the power of people, especially for low-income people, to vote those politicians out.”
Barber countered the notion that restricted voting rights — a concern since key provisions were removed by the Supreme Court in 2013 — affect only one group of people.
“Why do we keep framing voting rights as a Black issue only? Why?” he asked, saying tens of millions of people are facing voting restrictions “because for nine years we have not restored the Voting Rights Act.”
The Democratic representatives who attended the briefing seemed supportive of the campaign’s aims. They were addressed by speakers including Bishop Vashti McKenzie, interim president of the National Council of Churches; Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and Imam Saffet Catovic, leader of the Islamic Society of North America’s interfaith office.
