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Posted: 2020-07-30T19:23:16Z | Updated: 2020-07-30T22:43:45Z

Former President Barack Obama issued a sweeping call to action on voting rights in his eulogy for civil rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis , calling for an end to the filibuster, automatic voter registration, allowing formerly incarcerated people to vote, expanding early voting and making Election Day a national holiday.

If you want to honor John, lets honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for, Obama said, calling out the hypocrisy of politicians who posted tributes to Lewis while dedicating their careers to enacting voting restrictions and trying to dismantle and gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

And, by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldnt want us to stop there, just trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.

Obamas eulogy was an implicit rebuke of President Donald Trump as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Supreme Court opinion that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and whose defining achievement on the bench has been the erosion of voting rights.

It was only fitting for the first Black president to take center stage at Thursdays memorial service for Lewis. The civil rights titan died of cancer on July 17.

Ive come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom, Obama began.

The former president traced the entire arc of Lewis long and storied career, which began when Lewis was on the front lines of the civil rights movement as a college student.

Sometimes we act as if this was inevitable. Imagine two people, Malias age, younger than my oldest daughter, on their own, to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression, Obama said. John was only 20 years old, but he pushed all 20 of those years to the center of the table, betting everything, all of it, that his example could challenge centuries of convention and generations of brutal violence and countless daily indignities suffered by African Americans.

He went on to describe Lewis long congressional career and his work until the very end of his life.

As an old man, he didnt sit out any fight, Obama said. He knew that the march is not over, that the race is not yet won.