How Congress and the Biden Administration Can Advance Civil and Human Rights During the 118th Congress

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights recently wrote to members of Congress, President Biden, and Vice President Harris to present our coalition’s topline civil and human rights priorities for the 118th Congress and the Biden administration. For 73 years, we’ve led efforts to achieve our coalition’s shared vision of an America as good in practice as it is in promise — leading and coordinating the national lobbying efforts on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.

This work continues today. Together with our 11 task forces, we have identified and developed legislative and executive priorities for this Congress and the administration that represent a path forward for our country in advancing social and economic justice. Our task forces are largely composed of coalition members with expertise in each issue area featured in our priority letters. These issues include census, education, employment, fair courts, fair housing and lending, hate and bias, health care, immigration, justice reform, media and telecommunications, and voting rights.

In the coming weeks, each of these task forces will be developing more comprehensive documents laying out our administrative and legislative priorities for the next two years.

These priorities do not reflect the views of any one person or organization, or the full agenda for all of our organizations, but rather reflect our coalition’s shared interests developed over the past several months. There is, of course, much more that can and must be done to advance civil and human rights.

We believe these priorities should be met by the administration and 118th Congress, and we are eager to engage with lawmakers and members of the administration to achieve them.