[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 40 (Wednesday, March 6, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1712-S1715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GOVERNMENT REFORM
Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, thank you for the recognition today.
I rise today for the people. I am glad to be joined by Senator
Merkley. We have worked a long time together on
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government reform issues, campaign finance reform, and rules reform--
some very, very important issues that face the country.
Today, in this country, there is a deep disconnect between what the
American people are demanding from their leaders and what the President
and the Congress have been giving them. Poll after poll shows that the
American people want affordable healthcare. Yet the Republican
leadership and this President have tried time and again to take away
healthcare rights and healthcare protections.
Poll after poll shows that the American people want good-paying jobs.
Yet the Republican leadership and this President gave a massive tax-cut
windfall to the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations.
Poll after poll shows that the American people want clean air and
clean water. They want Congress to tackle climate change. They want to
protect our public lands. Yet for years the Republican leadership has
done the opposite, and the Trump administration is dismantling
environmental protections and sabotaging our efforts to fight climate
change.
Poll after poll shows that the American people support commonsense
gun safety laws. Yet for decades the Republican leadership has refused
to take any action whatsoever on even the most basic safety laws, like
universal background checks.
Poll after poll shows that the American people want Dreamers to stay
in our country. They don't want children separated from their parents.
They want comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system.
Yet the Republican leadership has opposed these priorities for many
years, and now this President moves forward with his divisive and
hateful immigration policies.
It is no wonder that trust in government is so low. According to a
recent survey, just 19 percent overall trust the government to do what
is right. Famously, root canals have a higher approval rating than
Congress.
We are a representative democracy. Yet the people are not being
represented. Their will has been stymied.
The situation has gotten dramatically worse under this President.
There is no doubt about that. But these problems precede this
President, and they will live much longer than his time in office
unless we act.
To put it bluntly, some of our most basic, democratic institutions
are broken--our voting rights system, our campaign finance system, and
our ethics rules.
The American people know in their gut that this system is rigged.
That is why the drug companies get what they want, and people pay
through the nose. That is why the millionaires and billionaires get
more tax cuts, and the working people get left behind. That is why the
polluters get off scot-free, and the rest of us get dirty air and
contaminated water.
Unrigging this system requires reform--real reform--so that we bring
power back to the everyday Americans and out of the hands of the
special moneyed interests that rule Washington.
Let's talk about how we do that. For years, I have stood with others
in this Chamber to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn
Citizens United, for an independent, nonpartisan drawing of House
districts, and for closing the revolving door in Washington.
In the past, some Senate Republicans were independent of their
leadership and supported these ideas. The President had even promised
to ``drain the swamp.'' As we all know by now, unfortunately, that
promise was empty.
But with the change in leadership in the House of Representatives,
Congress is now making progress to enact the reforms that the American
people want.
The House will soon pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act--a major
reform package to fix our broken system. It will be up to the Senate to
follow suit.
Next week, my Senate colleagues and I will introduce our own ``For
the People Act''--a comprehensive set of reforms to move this effort
forward. I hope we will have bipartisan support, but I was disappointed
to hear the Republican leader deride this essential reform bill as
``the Democrat Politician Protection Act.''
This is not only a warped political comment, but it is also cynical
and totally misses the point, especially when you consider that the
American people overwhelmingly--across party lines--support these kinds
of reforms. It is the special interests who oppose them because they
are threatened by them.
If the Republican leader feels the same way about this bill as the
special interests do, perhaps the bill is not the problem.
Every Member of the Senate will have a choice. Do they support
reform, where our ideas and policies can compete on a level playing
field, or do they choose to side with the special interests to do their
bidding in return for their protection and money during election
season?
I have known plenty of Americans who oppose this system. John McCain
was one of them. Senator Alan Simpson is another. Senator Cochran was a
cosponsor of my constitutional amendment.
No party has to side with the big money and special interests. It is
a choice. It is a choice we must make together to return our democracy
to the people and to rid our system of corruption.
This bill will do just that. It will make it easier, not harder, to
vote. It will bring an end to the dominance of big money and politics,
and it will ensure that politicians actually serve the public
interests.
First, on voting rights, for 50 years the Voting Rights Act of 1965
has stood as a bulwark against voter suppression practices and
enfranchised millions of voters, but in 2013 the Supreme Court
eviscerated it in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, unleashing a
torrent of State laws designed to suppress the vote among minorities.
The Court's 5-to-4 decision rendered the Voting rights Act's
preclearance provisions ineffective and cleared the way for States to
engage in voter suppression. Since Shelby, nearly 1,000 polling places
have been closed across the country, many in southern Black
communities. Voter ID laws have been tightened, and early voting has
been slashed. Voter rolls have been purged, and House districts have
been redrawn to dilute the minority vote.
One of the many egregious examples is North Carolina. Less than 2
months after Shelby, that State enacted far-reaching voter suppression
requirements. North Carolina's law was struck down by a Federal court
of appeals, finding that the law targeted African Americans ``with
almost surgical precision.''
Just this last midterm, we saw voter suppression tactics surge. For
instance, in North Dakota, the State legislature passed a law right
before the November election that took aim squarely at the Native vote.
The law required voter IDs to list physical addresses--an impossibility
for many Native American voters living on reservations. A Federal court
found that 5,000 Native American voters did not have the necessary
identification.
We have no choice but to respond and to restore the Voting Rights Act
so States are stopped from closing off the franchise. That must also
include the Native American Voting Rights Act to address voter
suppression tactics in Indian Country and to make sure the Native vote
is counted, not discounted.
Bills to restore lost voting rights protections have been introduced
in both Chambers. I hope the Senate majority will work in a bipartisan
way to restore this landmark legislation.
We should make it easier for voters to register, not harder. In a
healthy democracy, automatic voter registration, online voter
registration, and same-day voter registration for eligible voters would
be noncontroversial.
Voting should be easy. Too often, for too many, it is hard. It is our
duty to fix that, and this bill will do that.
Extreme political gerrymandering continues to skew State and
congressional elections. Results from legislative races don't reflect
the proportion of each party's voters. Voters should choose their
representatives, not the other way around.
Congress must direct nonpartisan, independent line drawing in each
State to draw congressional districts, and congressional districts must
fairly reflect States' racial compositions so our representative
government truly represents the electorate.
There is no other way to put it. Our campaign finance system is
broken. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens
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United decision opened the floodgates for unlimited contributions and
dark money, and this Congress's negligence has allowed the flood to
drown out regular people's voices.
Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on
candidates. The super wealthy can and do try to buy elections. Dark
money groups can receive unlimited amounts of money from big
corporations and wealthy individuals, spend their unlimited sums to
influence elections, and never disclose their dollars or what they
wanted in return for their investment.
There was $1.4 billion spent on the last Presidential race in 2016.
This midterm's outside expenditures topped a billion dollars. The
system is rigged right before our eyes.
How do we reverse course and return elections to the American people?
For starters, Congress needs to shine a light on the dark money and
require realtime disclosure, close loopholes that allow for foreign
money, and create a small donor, public matching fund system for
everyday contributions. Most critically, we must overturn Citizens
United and related decisions. A Supreme Court that equates big money
with speech puts campaigns for sale to the highest bidder.
Once again, I will offer an amendment to the Constitution to overturn
Citizens United, as I have since 2016. Congress has a long way to go to
push our popularity above a root canal and to restore the public's
confidence.
We also need comprehensive ethics reform. Elected officials and
public servants should not reap huge personal profit from their public
positions. We need to tighten the revolving door. We need to tighten
lobbying disclosure laws, and we must require Presidential and Vice
Presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.
Beyond that, Presidents and Vice Presidents must divest of any and
all assets that create a conflict of interest. Candidate Trump promised
to disclose his tax returns. He didn't. He then promised to disclose
them after an alleged audit. He hasn't. That is unacceptable.
We know the President has business and financial ties with Russia and
Saudi Arabia, and this may well explain his strange closeness with
Vladimir Putin and Muhammed bin Salman. Transparency and divestiture
are the only ways to avoid conflicts of interest and corruption. These
issues go to the heart of what it means to be an American.
Our democracy is supposed to exist by the will of the people and by
the consent of the governed. Congress has an amazing opportunity before
it. The House of Representatives is starting debate on its
comprehensive reform package. My colleagues and I will introduce our
legislation next week.
To Republicans around the country: Don't fall for the majority
leader's cynical name-calling. I know you love your democracy as much
as I do. This is not about protecting Democrats or Republicans; it is
about protecting Americans from a rigged system. Let us commit to work
together to pass reforms the American people hunger for.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here on the floor with
my colleague from New Mexico, who has been a champion for restoring our
democracy, working year after year over the last decade toward that
vision, and presenting tonight superb comments on the history of where
we have been and where we should go.
This last weekend, I went to Alabama. I went with Congressman John
Lewis to be there to look into the history of discrimination in our
Nation, the history in which we had separate entries to buildings for
Whites and for Blacks and separate water fountains. We had front doors
for White America and back doors for Black America.
We were standing on the spot where Rosa Parks stood before she
stepped onto the bus and said: I will not sit at the back of the bus. I
will be treated like every other American. She asked for equality, and
she started a big movement to break down discrimination.
Last weekend, we also gathered together in Selma, AL, at the foot of
the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This spot is where John Lewis and a whole
set of individuals took a stand. They were planning a march. They were
going to march for voting rights--for voting rights in America, voting
rights that had been taken away as a strategy of suppressing the voice
of the people, particularly the voice of African Americans.
We have struggled in the history of our country toward full equality
of opportunity--full equality to participate in this beautiful
democratic Republic we call America. We started with a Constitution
that was flawed by not recognizing the full equality of every American.
We fought a war over slavery, and after that war, a strategy was
devised to continue to strip the right to vote from African Americans
by taking African-American men, arresting them as felons, and then
saying that felons can't vote--a determined strategy both to reenslave,
because the constitutional amendment said that you could put people to
work if they were a felon, and to strip voting rights from them.
That is a history we should be putting behind us--a history of voter
intimidation and a history of voter suppression. Have we not come to
the point where we can recognize that the real vision in our ``we the
people'' democracy is that every person gets a full chance to
participate, that we should be looking for voter empowerment, not voter
suppression?
This beautiful document we have worked to perfect and fulfill over
time. It was President Lincoln who said: ``America will never be
destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will
be because we destroyed ourselves.''
Aren't we at that point now, where the vision of government of, by,
and for the people has been corrupted by voter suppression, by voter
intimidation, by gerrymandering, and by dark money flooding our
campaigns? Aren't we at that point now that our very essence of our
constitutional vision of government by and for the people is being
destroyed by these corrupting forces?
Here is what we have in America right now. We have a circle of power
of those of great wealth and those of great privilege, and they want to
run this government and write our laws to benefit those inside that
circle.
That circle isn't that large. It is a small percent of our
population, but they use their great wealth and their great leverage to
continue to corrupt the vision of our Constitution because the last
thing they want is a government that serves the people.
What they are invested in, what they fight for is government by the
powerful few and for the powerful few. If anyone has any doubt that we
have reached this point of huge corruption in this country, look simply
at what happened in this Chamber in 2017 when the majority party said
that we have two missions: Mission one, take down healthcare for 20 to
30 million Americans; mission two, raid the national Treasury for $1\1/
2\ trillion and give it to the very richest Americans and largest
corporations.
That is what happens in a corrupted government by and for the
powerful rather than by and for the people. That is what happens in
dictatorships around the world where the elite raid the National
Treasury and steal the money for themselves.
I will tell you what else happens. They don't invest in ``we the
people.'' They don't invest in the foundations for families to thrive.
We know what those foundations are: good public education, debt-free
college, employment programs that include apprenticeships and career
technical education, a healthcare system that is simple and seamless
and is there when your loved one is sick or injured, and it doesn't
send you into bankruptcy, a system where drug companies can't gouge you
and raise their prices dozens or even a hundredfold because the laws
were written to let them do it, a system that invests in affordable
housing so every family can have a decent home in a decent community,
investment in infrastructure, rural broadband, repaired highways,
expanded transit systems, all kinds of infrastructure that enable our
economy to thrive and our people to do well.
Did we see what this corrupted system now in place of government by
and for the powerful, did we see an investment in healthcare or housing
or education or infrastructure or living-wage
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jobs? We did not because this Chamber is now run by and for the
powerful of the United States of America, not the people.
So along comes the other Chamber at the end of this hall, and this
other Chamber says: We want to restore the vision of our Constitution,
and they put together H. Res. 1. They said: Let's take this on. Let's
take on the gerrymandering. Let's take on the voter suppression. Let's
take on the dark money. They put together this bill for the people--for
the people, not for the powerful.
They proceeded to say: Let's start with that challenge of
gerrymandering. Let's make sure the people pick their leaders instead
of their leaders picking their electors. Then they proceed to take on
voter suppression and voter intimidation.
It was President Lyndon Johnson who said ``the vote is the most
powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.''
That powerful instrument is at the heart of our Constitution. It is
the instrument that the powerful and privileged want to diminish,
destroy, and take away so they can continue to run this country by and
for themselves.
So this bill says: Let's proceed to do voter empowerment. Let's
extend early voting to all States. Let's ensure that there is an
opportunity for people to register to vote, sign up to vote on the
internet, and have same-day registration. Let's encourage vote by mail,
which gives a full opportunity for everyone to participate without
having to get to a poll on a day that it is difficult to get there, and
let's make sure changes designed to suppress voting are not
automatically approved, that we will restore the Voting Rights Act,
which said we will protect the voting system, its sacred heart, the
Constitution, and we will not let people's rights be stripped away.
If you look back at November 6, and you look at what happened across
the country, you see the plot--the plot to prevent the poor from
voting; the plot to prevent minorities from voting; the plot to prevent
college students from voting. One State went so far as to say you can't
vote if your ID doesn't have an expiration date because the college IDs
in that State didn't have an expiration date--strategy after strategy,
purging people off the voting rolls without their permission right
before the election.
So this bill, the For the People Act that the House is working on
right now and that we will introduce right here in this Chamber says:
We believe in the Constitution of America; we believe in the power of
the people, and we will protect the right to vote. The For the People
Act takes on campaign finance. It proceeds to say: We will have
disclosure of contributions. There is sunlight on the system that
disinfects it--a phrase that so many of my colleagues used to say when
they were opposing the McCain-Feingold limits. They said: We oppose
caps on donations, but we support disclosure. It is the sunshine that
disinfects the system. Suddenly, when the bill that provides disclosure
was up before this body, the individuals who said that said: ``Oh, I
was wrong, I don't want sunlight in the system,'' and voted against
disclosure. So the House is saying: Let's do it. Let's create
transparency.
There is an honest ads component that says people need to be able to
know who is funding the ads they are seeing. I know I have seen in my
campaigns, attack ad, after attack ad, after attack ad funded by front
groups.
Wouldn't it be better for America if the folks behind those ads
actually have to disclose that they are behind those ads?
We have in this bill a small-dollar match so individuals who seek to
run for the House or the Senate with small-dollar donations, donations
up to $200, get a 6-to-1 match, encouraging breaking the grip of the
vast dark money and the money that comes from the most affluent in
large chunks, leveling the playing field for participation by regular
Americans, freeing our elections from the grip of dark money.
This bill, the For the People Act, says let's improve the ethics.
Let's reduce or try to eliminate the conflicts of interest that haunt
this Chamber and haunt the House Chamber down the hall.
John Lewis stood on that bridge on Bloody Sunday. Congressman
John Lewis, long before he was a Congressman, in 1965, stood on that
bridge. He stood, and he was the very first person in line as the
troops approached to beat up the protesters. They shoved him, they
pushed him down, they struck him in the head, and then they proceeded
to beat up and terrify the other protesters on that bridge.
Those protesters were standing for the vision of our Constitution,
were standing for voting rights, the most powerful instrument, as
Lyndon Johnson said.
They went back to that bridge the following Tuesday, and they marched
up and were stopped, and they agreed to turn back--``Turn Back
Tuesday.'' Then they reorganized again and more people joined. They
came back a third time and they marched over that bridge and they
marched all the way to Montgomery, AL, to fight for voting rights
because it is the heart and soul of an individual's ability to
participate in our democracy. John Lewis has said this:
There is still work to be done. Get out there, push and
pull, until we redeem the soul of America.
The For the People Act that the House will pass and that we will
introduce here in this Chamber is the fight to redeem the soul of
America. Let's stand together--old-timers and new Members of the
Senate, those who sit on the left of the aisle and those who sit on the
right of the aisle, those who come from blue-collar communities and
those who come from circles of power--to stand behind the vision of our
Constitution, the ``we the people'' vision, so this Chamber will do the
work of the people. Let's restore the soul of America together.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
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