Power Up: John Lewis makes his final journey to U.S. Capitol

Lewis was an original Freedom Rider and co-founder and later chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who went on to represent Georgia’s 5th district and become known as the conscience of the Congress. He was a driving force behind the civil rights movement since he was 21-years-old. He died on July 17 at the age of 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Lewis will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol starting today.

Special accommodations have been made due to the coronavirus pandemic.  An invitation-only group of congresspeople will be allowed inside the Rotunda to view the late congressman before the general public can pay their respects at the East Front. Lewis’s family has made plans for a motorcade procession to visit notable landmarks throughout Washington on Monday, including the Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street N.W. 

• The cloth has been replaced many times since Lincoln’s death in 1865, but those lying in state under the Rotunda are supported by the same structure that lifted up the coffin of the 16th president as well as John F. Kennedy, Thurgood Marshall and, most recently, Lewis’s friend and fellow Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.).

“In an announcement, the Lewis family requested that people not travel to Washington from across the country to pay respects during the pandemic and that they instead post virtual tributes ‘using the hashtags #BelovedCommunity or #HumanDignity,’” our colleague Colby Itkowitz reports. 

• “The viewing will be open to the public from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday. Those waiting in line will be required to wear masks and social distancing will be enforced,” per Colby.
• “Due to the covid-19 pandemic and upon the recommendation of the Attending Physician, Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Leader [Mitch] McConnell decided that this ceremony would be a legislative branch-only event given the size of the Rotunda and social distancing requirements,” a Capitol official told Power Up. “Approximately, 80 Senators, Members/delegates of 535 plus will be in the Rotunda.”
• The White House declined to say whether Trump will attend the viewing nor does it appear on his schedule. Lewis and the president have had a tense relationship since Trump’s inauguration, which Lewis declined to attend. “You cannot stop the call of history,” Lewis said last month in response to Trump’s use of military force to quash protests against racism and police brutality. “You may use troopers, you may use fire hoses and water, but it cannot be stopped. There cannot be any turning back. We’ve come too far, made too much progress, to stop now or to go back. The world is seeing what is happening, and we are ready to continue to move forward.”

On “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, a turning point in the civil rights movement, Lewis helped lead over 600 activists marching for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The 25-year-old Lewis was the first to be beaten by Alabama troopers, who fractured his skull.

• “The televised images of the bravery shown by Lewis and other protesters in the face of state violence inspired the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act just two months later,” according to our colleague Sydney Trent. 

On Sunday, Lewis’s body was met on the other side of the bridge under extraordinarily different circumstances: 

• “This time, the Alabama state troopers saluted,” the Montgomery Advertiser’s Adam Tamburin writes of the Lewis’ final journey crossing the bridge over the Alabama River. “Then, his funeral procession headed to Selma before retracing the route of his marches to Montgomery, where he lay in state at the Alabama State House.” 

• “At 11:53 a.m., Lewis’ body crossed the bridge, which was sprinkled with red rose petals to represent the blood previously spilled there, in a horse-drawn caisson. He was met on the other side by family members and Alabama state troopers, a poignant reminder of just how much America has changed since ‘Bloody Sunday,’” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman, Helena Oliviero, Tyler Estep, and Tia Mitchell report. 
• “Our nation is better off because of John Robert Lewis. My life is better. Selma is better. This nation and this world are better because of John Robert Lewis,” said Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), Alabama’s first black congresswoman. 
• Sewell gave the opening remarks outside the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church  in Selma.  She thanked Lewis’ family for “sharing him over and over again” with America. 
• Lewis’s final crossing over the bridge “speaks to the legacy that he leaves behind and the lives he has changed,” she added. “It’s poetic justice that this time Alabama state troopers will see John to his safety.” 

In recent weeks, there have been growing calls to rename the bridge in honor of Lewis. The bridge is now named after a “a white supremacist who fought for the Confederacy and was a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader,” according to Hallerman, Oliviero, Estep, and Mitchell. 

• “More than a half-million people have signed an online petition backing the idea, including Congressman James Clyburn, D-S.C., and ‘Selma’ movie director Ava DuVernay.”
• There’s already a school district that will be renamed in his honor: “A Virginia school district announced on Thursday that it would rename Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield for John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights giant who died last week,” the New York Times’s Sandra Garcia reports. 

One of Lewis’s mantras that perhaps resonates most with the new generation of activists for racial justice? His belief in good, necessary trouble: 

• “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” he tweeted in 2018.

• In an op-ed for The Washington Post, former attorney general Eric Holder Jr. urged Republicans to pass a December 2019 bill that restores and strengthens the VRA: “We’ve heard enough platitudes from people who quote Bible verses on Sunday and remain mute about the caging of children on Monday; who wrap themselves in the Constitution while gutting its protections; who praise my friend while dismantling his sacred work. You simply cannot honor the man or his life’s work if you’re an opponent of voting rights for all.” 
• McConnell has thus far refused to take up the legislation. But on Monday,  Clyburn will propose renaming the bill “The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act,” CNN’s Devan Cole reports.
• “I think that Trump and the Senate leadership, [McConnell], by their deeds if they so celebrate the heroism of this man, then let’s go to work and pass that bill because it’s laid out the way the Supreme Court asked us to lay it out,” Clyburn told CNN.

President George W. Bush “drew a direct line from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Lyndon B. Johnson signing the first Voting Rights Act in 1965 — a connection he highlighted when he signed a rewrite of the historic law in 2006,” our colleague Paul Kane writes.

• “In a little more than a year after Selma, a newly enfranchised black community used their power at the ballot box to help defeat the sheriff who had sent men with whips and clubs to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that bloody Sunday,” Bush said at the time. 

GOOD TROUBLE: Lewis’s influence on today’s activists was crystallized in the months leading up to his passing. In the wake of civil unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, he served a role model for Black Lives Matter activists. 

Lewis “had long served as a kind of connective tissue, linking the lions of the civil rights movement to the new generation of activists in the city who stood on their shoulders,” the New York Times’s Rick Rojas reports. “He was one of the few remaining leaders from that era, and his death has left many in Atlanta wrestling with what feels like a gaping void even as they try and push forward his ideals.” 

• “I told him that all those young people — of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it,” President Barack Obama wrote of his final private talk with Lewis in early June.
• “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more,” Lewis told our colleague Jonathan Capehart of his advice to today’s protesters. “We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”
• “I think that’s what people misunderstand,” Andrew Aydin, who worked as a policy adviser and digital director for Lewis, told Rojas. “They see the icon, but they didn’t just love him. They knew him. This wasn’t a guy hanging out at the Commerce Club. He was out in the streets. He was eating in the same place as everyone else.”

WHITE HOUSE WANTS TO RUSH NARROW RELIEF BILL: “Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that Congress might have to pass a narrow piece of legislation this week to ensure enhanced unemployment benefits don’t expire for millions of Americans,” my colleagues Erica Werner and Jeff Stein report.

• After weeks of inaction, there’s a sense of urgency: “White House officials are also planning to push for an eviction moratorium through the end of the year … The Department of Housing and Urban Development is expected to be involved in this effort. A previous four-month eviction moratorium expires at the end of this month,” our colleagues write.
• If lawmakers can’t agree by July 30, just three days from now, temporary unemployment benefits are set to expire, potentially plunging millions into financial peril.

But bipartisan talks have barely begun: “ …  McConnell intends to roll out a $1 trillion package [today] covering a range of issues, including a new round of checks to individual Americans. But Democrats are demanding a bill three times that size, and McConnell has said it could take ‘a few weeks’ to reach a deal,” our colleagues write.

• McConnell hasn’t voiced public support for a piecemeal approach: “The consideration of scaling back efforts before Republicans even put an offer on the table underscores just how difficult the coming bipartisan negotiations are expected to be. One of the primary reasons administration officials are considering a less ambitious effort is due to the initial meeting between Meadows and Mnuchin and [Pelosi] and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer last week, according to multiple officials,” CNN’s Phil Mattingly and Manu Raju report.
• Pelosi said Republicans are in “disarray”: “We’ve been anxious to negotiate for two months and 10 days when we put forward our proposal,” she said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They’re in disarray and that delay is causing suffering for America’s families.”

One of the key sticking points remains the extra $600 in unemployment benefits: Republicans have discussed a formula to reduce the payments by replacing 70 percent of a worker’s salary before they were laid off. Some economists estimate that could slash the payments to $200 a week, but Mnuchin stressed the exact figure would vary from person to person.

• What Democrats are saying: “You don’t go into a negotiation with a red line,” Pelosi said on whether Democrats would accept lower unemployment payments. “But you do go in with your values.” 
• Even in a scaled-down plan, the GOP continues to seek liability protections for businesses to fend off covid-19 risks, another past sticking point for Democrats.

WHY COVID STILL DOGS TRUMP: “Both [Trump’s] advisers and operatives laboring to defeat him increasingly agree on one thing: The best way for him to regain his political footing is to wrest control of the coronavirus,” our colleagues Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker report this morning.

• Why the president hasn’t changed course: “People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.”

One telling anecdote: “After appointing [Vice President] Pence head of the coronavirus task force, the president gradually stopped attending task force briefings, and was lulled into a false sense of complacency that the group had the virus under control …,” our colleagues write.

• What’s changed?: “In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in cases among ‘our people’ in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.”

• What went wrong?: “As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives,” Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Isaac Stanley-Becker, Lori Rozsa and Josh Dawsey report.

The (bad) records are piling up: “The country reported 59,737 new infections and 566 additional deaths as of Sunday evening, resulting in a seven-day average of infections that was slightly lower than Saturday’s and an average of deaths that was a little bit higher,” Meryl Kornfield and Marisa Iati report.

• The states to look out for: “As of Sunday evening, the seven-day averages for new cases hit fresh highs in several states, including Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming.”

PROTESTS EXPLODE ACROSS THE COUNTRY: “Protests in several major cities across the country turned violent [over the] weekend, as weeks of civil unrest and clashes between activists and authorities boiled over, sending thousands of people teeming into public squares demanding racial justice,” Christian Davenport and Gregory Scruggs report.

• “In Austin, a man was shot and killed in the midst of a downtown rally. In Richmond, a truck was set ablaze outside police headquarters. Outside of Denver, a Jeep sped through a phalanx of people marching down an interstate when a shot was fired, injuring a protester, police said.”

The focus continues to be on Portland: “Authorities declared a riot after protesters breached a fence surrounding the city’s federal courthouse building. The ‘violent conduct of people downtown’ created a ‘grave risk of public alarm,’ the Portland police wrote on Twitter. Early Sunday morning, federal agents and local police demanded that protesters leave the area and used tear gas. But the activists stood their ground, blocking intersections. Several people were arrested.”

• What happened last night: “A crowd of about 1,000 gathered … for the city’s 60th night of consecutive protests against racism and police brutality after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd sparked a widespread movement two months ago,” the Oregonian’s K. Rambo, Jamie Hale and Mark Graves report. “Shortly before midnight, some in the crowd began setting off fireworks toward the courthouse, ratcheting up tensions on what had been an otherwise calm night.”