[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 193 (Thursday, November 12, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6658-S6659]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                           EXECUTIVE CALENDAR

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the following 
nomination, which the clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read the nomination of Aileen Mercedes Cannon, 
of Florida, to be United States District Judge for the Southern 
District of Florida.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             2020 Elections

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, yesterday, we came together as a 
country--not as Republicans, not as Democrats or Independents, but as 
Americans--to recognize the service and sacrifice of our veterans, men 
and women who served in uniform to protect our country and to defend 
our democracy.
  The ongoing attacks that President Trump has launched on our 
democracy are an insult to those who have sacrificed so much to defend, 
and so too is the complicity of so many Republican Senators right here 
in this body, who through their silence or active incitement are 
spreading Donald Trump's absurd false narrative that he won the 
election.
  Each of us--each of us in this body--has sworn an oath to protect and 
defend the Constitution of the United States, to stand up for our 
democracy, and to support the peaceful transfer of power established 
there. My colleagues, it is time for every Senator to do your sworn 
duty and stand up for the Constitution and for our democracy.
  Make no mistake, on January 20, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 
next President of the United States and Kamala Harris will be sworn in 
as the next Vice President of the United States. But that does not mean 
that what Donald Trump is doing now is harmless. That does not mean 
that the silence or active complicity of so many Republican Senators is 
harmless. It is downright dangerous to the health of our democracy and 
to our national security interests.
  We have enough challenges protecting our democracy from foreign 
enemies and foreign adversaries who seek every day to undermine faith 
and confidence in democratic institutions here in the United States and 
in other democracies around the world. The last thing we need is for 
people to attack that confidence from within the United States. This is 
doing harm in the short term and the long term to our national 
security, putting us at risk.
  In the short term, we are seeing a very dangerous purge of top 
national security officials at the Defense Department and other places. 
These are officials with whom I have many policy differences, but they 
are competent managers and qualified individuals. And what you are 
seeing this President do in the death throes of his administration is 
purging those qualified individuals and replacing them with people 
whose only credential is loyalty to President Trump, and replacing 
competent, qualified individuals with political lackeys. That is 
dangerous at any time. It is especially dangerous to mess around with 
the top leadership of our national security agencies during a 
transition to power.
  That is what the 9/11 Commission told us. Yet what you are seeing 
President Trump do is play with matches when it comes to our national 
security

[[Page S6659]]

and to put personal political peeves above the national security 
interests of the United States.
  In addition to purging individuals from some of our top national 
security agencies, the President is prohibiting the government of the 
United States, which belongs to the people of the United States, from 
providing daily intelligence briefings and other intelligence briefings 
to the incoming President, President-Elect Joe Biden.
  Now, we all know that President Trump has been notorious for not 
being interested in those intelligence briefings, but I think that for 
all of us who know Joe Biden from the time he served as Senator and 
Vice President, we know he takes these things seriously and he takes 
threats that might be learned through those intelligence briefings 
seriously. To deny the next President of the United States access to 
those briefings, which is part of the tradition and part of the rules 
that we developed to ensure steady transfer and making sure the next 
President has the information needed on day one, that is outright 
grossly negligent when it comes to our national security. It is time 
for our Senate Republican colleagues to be speaking out loudly about 
that.
  That, of course, is part of the consequence of the fact that the 
General Services Administration has been unwilling to provide the 
traditional funds to support the peaceful transfer of power. This is 
another gross abuse of the government, which belongs to the people of 
the United States, not to Donald Trump.
  In addition, you have the Secretary of State, Secretary Pompeo, 
instructing the Department of State not to pass along messages from 
foreign leaders to the next President of the United States, President-
Elect Joe Biden. This is, again, another gross abuse of power. And, of 
course, Secretary Pompeo undermined this faith in our transition of 
democracy himself when he talked about the fact that we are 
transitioning to the second Trump term.
  This is the person--this is the individual--who is supposed to 
represent the United States of America overseas, the person who is 
supposed to stand up for our democracy, and yet, here, at home he is 
undermining faith in that democracy. And who does that give any comfort 
to? Our adversaries and enemies abroad, people who want our democracy 
to fail.
  I don't know if our Republican colleagues have noticed who has 
congratulated the President-Elect Joe Biden and who has not among 
foreign leaders. Well, our democratic allies around the world have 
congratulated the next President of the United States, Joe Biden. The 
United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada--the leaders of democratic 
governments and countries have all acknowledged that our democracy is 
working and that they are recognizing the next President of the United 
States.
  Who has refused, so far, to congratulate the next President of the 
United States, Joe Biden? Vladimir Putin, President Xi, and the leader 
of North Korea. What President Trump is doing and what our Republican 
colleagues are doing by their silence is aiding and abetting these 
authoritarian leaders. These guys are smiling. If you are an 
authoritarian leader, you want nothing more than to see democracy 
fail--to see that model fail. These are leaders who often have their 
own sort of election facades, where they pretend to have a free and 
fair election, and then it turns out to be 90 percent for them. They 
are smiling at what is happening here.
  So I hope our Republican Senate colleagues are looking at the company 
they are keeping among foreign leaders who are watching us, because the 
leaders of our democratic friends and allied countries have all 
recognized the outcome of this election, and it is the leaders of 
Russia, China, North Korea, and others who have not. That is the 
company that is being kept by so many Republican Senators today. And 
that is going to do ongoing damage to our ability around the world, as 
the world's oldest democracy, to stand up for the interests of liberty, 
freedom, and democracy.

  I fear that that is not even the most damaging thing that has 
happened as a result of this fraud that is being perpetrated on the 
American people. The biggest danger is undermining the confidence of 
the American people themselves, or large numbers of the American 
people, in the outcome of this election, seeding this false narrative 
that somehow Donald Trump was actually the winner and that Joe Biden 
was somehow an illegitimate President-to-be.
  If you look at the recent polling in the last 48 hours, what you find 
is that 70 percent of Republicans believe this was not a clear and fair 
election. That is two times as many as before the election, and that is 
when Donald Trump was telling everybody that, if he lost, it meant the 
election was rigged.
  Are we really, through our silence or sometimes encouragement, going 
to seed the idea that because Donald Trump lost the election it was 
rigged? All you have to look at is the frivolous claims being made in 
courts around the United States and the reaction to those claims by 
judges, appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike, to realize what a 
charade this is.
  Joe Biden, as a candidate, has said he wants to bring the country 
together. He and Kamala Harris want to find a way to bring us together 
to find common ground. And he is looking for the opportunity to work on 
both sides of the aisle here in the U.S. Senate and in the House of 
Representatives to address urgent matters before our country.
  So I ask my Republican Senate colleagues: How are you going to take 
the extended hand of Joe Biden when you are telling so many of your 
constituents back at home that this is an illegitimate election? How 
are you going to do that?
  What we have seen in the aftermath of this election is scary because 
we saw so many times over the last 4 years that our Republican Senate 
colleagues refused to stand up to the abuse of power of this 
administration, things that if the Obama administration ever thought of 
doing, they would be out there every day crying foul and abuse of 
power. But everybody enabled that conduct. And now, after the election, 
when Joe Biden was already 5 million votes ahead in the national vote 
and winning the electoral college, you would think this is a moment for 
everybody to come together to give the next President of the United 
States a chance.
  I think the scary thing of what this shows is that the Republican 
Party has become the party of Donald Trump. I just urge my colleagues 
to think about the consequences of feeding into this fraud that Donald 
Trump was actually the one who was elected, because what you will be 
saying there to the 72 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump is 
that he is, in fact, the rightful President, and he will therefore also 
continue to call the shots within the Republican Party. He is doing 
that now, even after he has lost an election. So I just urge my 
colleagues to think about what they are doing each day that goes by 
that reinforces this false and fraudulent claim--how it is harming our 
democracy, how it is harming our national security, how it is going to 
impede Joe Biden's ability to reach out to our Republican colleagues. 
It is not because he doesn't want to--he does--but because you will 
have undermined your ability to do it by telling tens and millions of 
Americans that somehow this was an illegitimate election.
  I ask, I implore my colleagues to think more about this as every hour 
goes by, because every hour that this lie continues and persists is 
another hour that you are harming the health of our democracy and our 
country.
  Thank you.
  I yield back.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to 
conclude my remarks and that the Senator from Minnesota be able to 
conclude her remarks prior to the vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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