Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic congresswoman from the Virgin Islands, is sent to Congress as a territorial representative — but she has no right to vote in the election for speaker of the House, a fact she stood up and reminded the nation of during the roll call to confirm Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Friday.
Speaking to MSNBC's Joy Reid on Friday evening, Plaskett more starkly laid out the crisis of disenfranchisement facing citizens of the U.S. territories.
"The fact that I could not vote for speaker, and my children were there with me, Virgin Islanders were watching me and not hearing my name ... and to know that we are people who represent some, the largest Black and per capita of veterans, and still cannot vote for our commander-in-chief and do not have a vote for speaker. I just couldn't sit silent," Plaskett told Reid.
Many states used to be territories but were eventually given statehood, she noted.
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"But, in the cases that are called the Insular Cases at the turn of the 20th century, by the same justice that wrote Plessy v. Ferguson, he stated the people who live in the territories are savage aliens who cannot understand Anglo-Saxon principles of law, and therefore should not be given the full rights of American citizenship. Now, mind you, we have signed ourselves up to be part of the draft, and in fact, the people of the island that I live on, that my family is from, St. Criox, sent to this nation, one of the children that we reared, Alexander Hamilton, to actually write the Constitution. And then to turn around and say we can not understand principles of rule of law? It is just absolutely racism, and it's got to stop."
"Yeah, I mean we learned, I think, a lot of people did not understand," replied Reid. "People from Puerto Rico get asked for their passports by TSA agents sometimes ... they cannot vote for the president unless they come physically to the mainland. It is treating the territories as colonies."
"You can move to Brussels, you can move to Paris, you can move to the Congo, and just get an absentee ballot and vote for president," agreed Plaskett. "But if you, Joy Reid, or anyone in your family or anyone else, move to a U.S. territory or resides there, then you give up your right to vote for president. It's got to end."
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