It was a Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, who sent federal troops to the Deep South in 1870 and 1871 to guarantee the voting rights of blacks and to break up the Ku Klux Klan.
It was a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sent federal troops to Arkansas to integrate public schools in 1957.
It was a Republican Congress that helped pass the historic extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed into law by a Republican president just two years ago.
My Republican friends in Congress, you've sent members of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force from this capital city to Baghdad and Kabul to expand democracy in those capitals. Now you need to ask yourselves the question of which side of history you want to be on when it comes to democracy for this capital city?
You can't escape history. You have to decide on whose side you stand: Lincoln; Frederick Douglass; Presidents Grant and Eisenhower; Daddy King, the father of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and George H.W. Bush - or those who used the Constitution to declare African-Americans as three-fifths of a human being and who used the Constitution to declare blacks private property to be bought and sold.
Some political leaders used the Constitution to deny the vote to women, to segregate the races in schooling, housing, sports and public accommodations. If you have a question as to its constitutionality, let it be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.
Sixty years ago Jackie Robinson broke down the color barrier in major league baseball. Robinson was a Republican because of the great Republican history of civil, human and equal rights for all.
Now you have an opportunity to break down an even greater barrier to equality by voting to extend democracy to our nation's capital city.