[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 2 (Tuesday, January 4, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S20-S21]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 Voting

  Mr. President, on one final matter, when our colleagues' reckless 
taxing-and-spending spree began to falter, some Democrats started 
saying a totally different issue was actually really their top 
priority. If they don't get to blow $5 trillion on low-quality 
socialism, our colleagues are now demanding a consolation prize: 
breaking the Senate's rules in order to give themselves sweeping 
control over all 50 States' election laws.
  This is what some of our colleagues want so desperately. This is what 
they have sought for years. Even as their pretexts and justifications 
kept shifting, the goal stayed consistent. Most Washington Democrats 
want to appoint themselves a nationwide board of elections on steroids, 
and they want to shatter the Senate's rules and traditions to make it 
happen.
  After Democrats lost the White House in 2016, they said this takeover 
was necessary because our democracy was fundamentally broken. Now that 
they have won the White House, the story has totally flipped. Now our 
democracy is in perfect shape, beyond reproach--except when States that 
Democrats don't control dare to pass mainstream voting laws.
  The political left keeps pitching their big lie that mainstream State 
voting laws are somehow ``Jim Crow 2.0'' if the Governor who signs the 
bill happens to be a Republican. The left's big lie insults the 
intelligence of the American people. All the facts disprove it. In one 
of the States that triggered this meltdown, the new profiles mandated 
more days--more days--of early voting than many Democrat-run States 
provide today.
  Our democracy is not in crisis. Repeating this rhetoric doesn't make 
it factual. The 2020 elections saw the highest turnout in more than 100 
years. Only 33 percent of American adults think it is too hard for 
eligible voters to vote. A larger share actually think current rules 
aren't strict enough. This is fake--fake--hysteria ginned up by 
partisans, and our citizens actually know it. They figured it out. Last 
November, even in New York, the State's overwhelmingly Democratic 
voters rejected several left-wing ballot measures to change voting 
laws.
  This big lie that democracy is dying because Democrats sometimes lose 
elections is a completely astro-turfed sense of crisis. The emperor has 
no clothes.
  It is even more ironic that on this most sensitive subject--our 
democracy itself--some Senate Democrats want to drop a procedural 
nuclear bomb on the Senate itself to get their way. Our colleagues have 
no principled opposition to the filibuster--none at all. This is not 
about principle.
  In 2020 alone, Senate Democrats used the filibuster repeatedly to 
block the CARES Act, delaying help at the start of the pandemic. They 
used it to kill Senator Tim Scott's police reform bill.
  In 2017, 32 Senate Democrats, including then-Senator Harris, signed 
an open letter insisting the legislative filibuster should not change. 
A few years before that, the current Democratic leader said this about 
the prospect of nuking the filibuster. This is from the current 
Democratic leader:

       The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding 
     Fathers called the ``cooling saucer of democracy'' into the 
     rubberstamp of dictatorship.

  He went on:

       They believe if you get 51 percent of the vote, there 
     should be one party rule.

  He went on:

       They want to make this country into a banana republic where 
     if you don't get your way, you change the rules.

  He went on:

       It will be a doomsday for democracy if we do.

  That is the Senate Democratic leader on the possibility of nuking the 
Senate. Some people's tunes change when they happen to be in the 
majority versus the minority, but some Senators

[[Page S21]]

mean what they say. There are Senators on both sides of the aisle who 
have had the courage to stand up for these important rules when we have 
been in the minority and when we have been in the majority. I don't 
have to remind the Senate that the previous President frequently 
harangued me to nuke the Senate. On every occasion, I had a one-word 
answer: No. No.
  There are Senators on both sides who understand that any supposedly 
limited ``carve-out'' would bring the whole house crashing down. There 
are Senators on both sides who understand that the entirety of Federal 
law shouldn't go radically boomeranging back and forth every time the 
Senate narrowly changes hands.

  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior legislative assistant clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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