[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 11 (Tuesday, January 18, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S262-S267]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               H.R. 5746

  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, voting rights are really at the heart 
of our ``We the People'' Constitution.
  I will tell you, every time I look at a printed copy of the 
Constitution and I see those three words in supersize font, ``We the 
People,'' I think, you know, it is a beautiful thing that our Founders, 
when they were writing the Constitution, reminded us of the heart of 
what it is all about: not power that flows down from Kings or dictators 
but power that flows up from the people of the United States.
  And how does that power flow? It flows through elections. So if you 
don't have integrity in the elections, then, you really don't have 
government of, by, and for the people.
  Now, over the course of our Nation, we know that we have worked to 
expand the vision the Nation was founded on, but it wasn't reached in 
the beginning. It was often the case that only White Protestant male 
landowners got to vote in the beginning.
  And we recognized that every person created equal needs to have an 
equal

[[Page S263]]

part of the franchise, and so we have, through battles over more than 
200 years, fixed those challenges. And there have been some dramatic 
debates over this, and it hasn't been easy.
  But I want to take us back specifically to the debate of 1890-1891. 
Now, this was during a period when, in the Southern States, more and 
more clever strategies were being developed to prevent people from 
voting, either through the registration process or through the polling 
process.
  Now, in the registration process, there would be things like: Explain 
what this letter of the Constitution means or how many beans are in 
this jar of jelly beans or other ridiculous questions, to which those 
at the registrar's office could say: We are sorry. You can't register.
  And if you got registered, then you would have actually the 
possibility of intimidation at the polling place. There was one case 
where men on horseback formed a circle around the ballot box so, 
essentially, a Black American couldn't get to the ballot box, but for a 
White American, the horses would part and let them vote--voter 
intimidation.
  Well, those crude barriers are part of history. They are in the 
dustbin. Great. But, unfortunately, there are many modern strategies 
designed to get to the same result, strategies to make it hard to 
register to vote. Sometimes it is very prejudicial ID requirements or 
multiple ID requirements designed to fit the profile that members of 
one party are more likely to have than members of another party to bias 
the outcome.
  Sometimes it is taking and saying: We are going to be able to have a 
private contractor purge the voting rolls of people who haven't voted 
in the last few elections--knowing that it is being done specifically 
because the members of one party are a little worse at turning out 
every single election than the members of the other party.
  Now, these strategies on registration are at one stage, and then 
there are the strategies at the polling place, all designed to 
undermine ``We the People.'' And they are mostly election-day 
strategies.
  What are those strategies? Well, take a--have a really large precinct 
with a single voting location in places you don't want people to vote 
because so many people have to get into that precinct voting place that 
there will be a long line or understaff it so the movement through the 
polling place is slow or put in machines that don't work really well or 
put it in a location where there is no parking, which makes it really 
hard for people to get to the polls.
  You might think that these strategies don't still exist, but I am 
sorry to report to you they absolutely do exist.
  A member of our caucus today, Cory Booker, was noting that, across 
America, the average wait time for Black Americans is twice as long as 
the average wait time for White Americans. But in Georgia--in Georgia--
in the last election, the average wait time was, by numbers that I 
have, 5 times as long or, excuse me, 10 times as long: about 5 minutes 
in a predominantly White precinct, 80 percent-plus White, and about 50 
minutes in a predominantly Black precinct--about 10 times as long.
  So along comes a couple strategies to really enable people to vote 
without that type of intimidation. One is vote-by-mail, and one is 
early voting.
  Now, my State of Oregon is quite proud of being the first vote-by-
mail State. So let's talk about that for a moment. Back in the 1990s, 
the Republican Party said: You know, we have noticed that people who 
have requested absentee ballots have a higher turnout rate than those 
who vote on election day.
  It makes sense because they receive the ballot in the mail and have 
plenty of opportunity to fill it out, mail it in; whereas, on election 
day, well, life happens: You were planning to vote, but you had to go 
pick up your child from daycare. You were planning to vote, but your 
boss asked you to work late. You were planning to vote, but you went by 
the polling place, and it had been moved from the previous 2 years--
another trick--and you didn't know where it was. You went by the 
polling place, but you saw a long line, and you knew you didn't have 3 
hours to stand in that line.
  So the Republicans in my State said: You know what, we will have an 
advantage if we get all the Republicans--or as many as we can--to ask 
for absentee ballots. And so they did. Then the Democrats said: That is 
pretty smart. We will do the same thing.
  So the first year I was running for the State house of 
representatives, 50 percent of the people in the State were voting by 
mail by getting on a list to ask for an absentee ballot.
  So everyone said: This is such a good idea; why don't we do this for 
everybody and not make people request absentee ballots. So in the next 
election, which was the 2020 election, essentially, it was all vote-by-
mail. And people loved it.
  I found out going door-to-door--I always kind of had a nostalgic 
point in my heart for election day when we all go to the polls 
together. And I would go door-to-door in my first campaign in 1988, and 
I would say: What do you like or what do you not like? And people would 
generally say: The thing that I am really frustrated about--and it 
would be some issue for transportation. It would be some problem, 
including just simply the potholes in the street.
  And I would say: Well, that is a city issue, but I am running for the 
State legislature. But maybe the State can help get more money to the 
municipality. But what do you like?
  Oh, we love voting by mail because we can sit at the kitchen table 
and talk over the issues. We are not trying to make decisions in the 
heat of the moment in a voting booth.
  We have complicated ballot measures in my State.
  We can read through the pros and cons. And--you know what--we can 
invite our children to the kitchen table and discuss it with them.
  They really loved vote-by-mail, and we went to that system. But it 
wasn't something driven by Ds or Rs. In fact, Republicans controlled 
the house and senate of the legislature in the State of Oregon at that 
time. They controlled both chambers.
  Utah went to vote-by-mail. Utah is a reliably Republican State. 
Again, it wasn't to advantage one party or the other; it was to ensure 
that the franchise is available for every single American and that 
there are no shenanigans on election day. And shouldn't that be what we 
are all about? Because if you really want to look at where voting is 
compromised, where essentially votes are stolen from our citizens, it 
is the shenanigans on election day, which means vote-by-mail and early 
voting are very important to address that.
  So what do we see now in some 19 States across our country? In those 
19 States, there are strategies being implemented to make it harder to 
register and easier to purge the registration lists. There are 
strategies to make it harder to vote by mail, including saying: There 
will be no permanent vote-by-mail list; you have to sign up every 
single time. There are strategies to limit and curtail early voting.
  Every State is a little different, but those 19 States that are 
passing laws, those laws are targeted with strategies specifically 
focused on things that they think will hurt the turnout of Democrats 
rather than Republicans, and it is just wrong. We need to be blind to 
party divisions when we are protecting the ballot box for all 
Americans. We need to be blind to race.
  Now, folks say: Surely, there is still not a racial component in this 
effort to keep people from voting. And I would like to affirm that that 
is the case, but these strategies often target predominantly precincts 
that are high minority populations: Hispanic or Black precincts.

  And other strategies target the young and college students. Why? 
Because they tend to vote a little bit more to the Democratic side of 
the ballot.
  And some of these are targeted specifically at Native American 
reservations to make it so those on reservations have to drive an hour 
to 2 hours to drop off their ballot, and they won't vote in the same 
numbers as if you have a voting location on the reservation or they can 
vote by mail.
  So we have struggled. Going back to the debate of 1890, down the hall 
in the House of Representatives, the conversation was initiated by 
Henry Cabot Lodge, and Lodge put forward a voting rights bill that 
said: You know what, things are going wrong in America, and we need to 
protect the right to register, the right to vote, and the right to

[[Page S264]]

have those ballots fairly counted. So he basically said that 
jurisdictions could appeal to the district courts to get Federal 
supervision on the three critical stages of registering citizens, of 
conducting the election, and of counting the ballots afterward--those 
three phases. And it passed in the House of Representatives.
  And at that time, it was the Republican Party that backed this 
fundamental right for all Americans. You know how many Democrats voted 
for Henry Cabot Lodge's bill? Zero. Zero. Every vote for it came from 
the Republican Party. That was the Republican Party in 1890.
  In 1891, the bill was here in the Senate. Well, what happened in the 
Senate? Well, a group of Senators said: We don't want the Senate to 
ever vote on this bill. So they spoke at length, refused to give 
unanimous consent to get to a final vote.
  Now, why do we call that a filibuster? So, at our founding, the whole 
vision that our Founders laid out was that you hear everyone speak, and 
then you vote and you take the path the majority favors over the 
minority.
  Now, they really emphasized--this is important--that you shouldn't 
have a supermajority because they wrote the Constitution while they 
were under the Confederation Congress. The Confederation Congress had a 
supermajority. And because of that supermajority, they couldn't get 
anything done. They couldn't raise the money to take on Shays' 
Rebellion. The Senate was paralyzed over policymaking.
  So the Founders said: Whatever you do, do not have a supermajority 
because it paralyzes the body, and the body ends up taking the path the 
minority prefers, who are obstructing a final vote, rather than the 
majority.
  Let's just look at some of the comments that our Founders made. James 
Madison:

       In cases where justice or the general good might require 
     new laws . . . or [new] measures . . . the . . . principle of 
     free government would be reversed.

  He is speaking to a supermajority because it would no longer be the 
majority that would decide; it would be transferred to the minority. 
And he went on to say the damage that would be done if that happened: 
The basic principle of free government would be assaulted if the 
minority makes the decision instead of the majority.
  What possible logic could there be to say the path that most people 
think is the wrong path is the path we will take? That is what happens 
when the supermajority blocks a final simple majority vote.
  And we have Hamilton. Of course, Hamilton gets a lot of attention 
with the play done on Hamilton and his general supersized role in the 
early stage of our Republic.
  Again, Hamilton was very aware of how the Confederation Congress was 
polarized before we got our Constitution in 1787. He, again, refers to 
the supermajority: It would be, in practice, as if you need everybody; 
and the history of any establishment that takes this principle is the 
result of impotence, perplexity, and disorder. He is referring to the 
supermajority requirement of the Confederation Congress.
  What else did he say? Well, Hamilton said--and he uses some language 
we don't really use today: ``If a pertinacious minority can control the 
majority . . . tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; 
contemptible compromises of the public good.''
  I sometimes think that sounds like a description of the Senate 
today--tedious delays, intrigue, contemptible compromises of the public 
good. The public good is compromised when the Senate is not able to 
debate issues that face the United States of America.
  He went on to say: ``The supermajority's real operation is to 
embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the 
government.''
  ``Destroy the energy of the government''? Doesn't that ring somewhat 
true of what we have gone through in trying to get to a vote on Build 
Back Better over this last year, any components of it, and trying to 
get a vote to protect our fundamental right and freedom to vote? And it 
has gone on all year. We are a year into the administration now.
  So in modern times, we now are facing, again, what was faced in 1890. 
And I didn't really tell you the outcome of that 1890 debate. The House 
passed it. All Republicans came over here, and a number of Senators 
said: We are not going to give consent to get to a final vote.
  They broke the contract--the social contract that you listen to 
everybody, and then, having heard all the ideas, having had a debate 
that maybe stretched many, many days or maybe weeks, you vote.
  So the newspapers started to call this tactic, way back in the mid-
1800s--they called this tactic--``piracy,'' because the core principle 
was being violated by people taking over the Senate--pirates taking 
over the Senate. And the common term for pirates, ``freebooters''--
freebooters, that is where ``filibuster'' comes from. It is a 
corruption of the term ``freebooter.''
  The pirates are taking over. They are breaking the deal of America. 
They are breaking the design of the Senate. It is supposed to be that 
after you listen to everyone--everyone has made their points--you vote 
by simple majority.
  Now, we have had a particular development over the last three decades 
in which the Senate has become more and more dysfunctional. I had the 
chance to see this evolve because I first came here as an intern in 
1976. And up in the staff Gallery, I would go up and watch each 
amendment being debated.
  And there was no television. So Senators couldn't see what was going 
on. Staff back in the offices couldn't see what was going on. There was 
no cell phone. There was no fax machine. And so each Senator had a 
staff member watching the debate. And then when the vote came, you 
would rush down to those elevators that are outside that door. And when 
the Senators came up from the subway train that comes over from the 
office buildings, you would meet your Senator, and you would describe 
the debate that had happened. And if it was your particular topic area, 
you would describe what people back home were saying or what you had 
understood was the key question. And then the Senator would come in and 
vote.
  And then, when the vote was tallied, there would be 6 or 12 Senators, 
generally clustered here, and they would all say ``Mr. President,'' 
because whomever got called on first got the next amendment. There was 
no set of amendments lined up on the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which is 
what I was staffing for Senator Hatfield.
  I was very intrigued by the functioning of our government. So I went 
back to college and then dropped out 3 months later to come back here 
for the start of the Carter administration to watch what was going on 
in our government with a new Presidency. I waited tables. I volunteered 
for nonprofits. I went door to door for the Virginia Consumer Congress, 
working on issues related to renewable energy or energy efficiency. But 
I watched the Senate, and what I saw was a Senate that could debate 
issues in that year of 1977.
  Then I came back here after graduate school, and I was planning to go 
overseas to work on issues of economic development in very poor 
countries--fundamental issues of healthcare, fundamental issues of 
education. But I was offered an opportunity to work on something here 
in DC as a Presidential fellow, to work on the issue of ``How do you 
decrease the threat of blowing up the world with nuclear weapons?''
  So I went to work for the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, 
under President Reagan. Then I went to work for the Congressional 
Budget Office, after 2 years of working for President Reagan and Caspar 
Weinberger. The Congressional Budget Office works for Congress, and I 
did studies and did briefings here on the Hill, watching the Senate. 
And the Senate started to have troubles, but it was still pretty 
functional.
  Nothing prepared me for arriving here as a U.S. Senator in 2009, 
January, and seeing the utter decay and dysfunction of my beloved 
Senate--your beloved Senate, the Senate once called the greatest 
deliberative body in the world.
  So I started to have conversations with colleagues about what had 
happened, and I saw that we had cloture motions--that is a motion to 
close debate--one after the other after the other and very few 
amendments.
  Now, on the amendment side, this is a chart that shows the decline in 
amendments from the 109th Congress to the 116th. The 116th Congress is 
the

[[Page S265]]

one that just ended. There is a tenfold reduction in the number of 
amendments over those 14 years--a tenfold reduction in amendments, a 
steady line downwards.
  Well, that is one symptom of the problem, but then there was another 
piece of this problem, which was more and more motions to close debate. 
And those motions are designed to be rare. So they take--after you make 
the motion--a day plus. You have to have an intervening day, and then 
the second day after you make the motion, you can hold a vote on 
closing debate, because it is supposed to be such a rare moment, once 
or twice a year.
  Then, if you succeed in getting the votes to close debate, it is 30 
hours of debate. Well, that takes 2 or 3 days to get 30 hours of debate 
in and then an extra hour for any Senator who didn't have the chance to 
speak. So there is that factor. And then, finally, you can get to the 
final vote.
  Those cloture motions eat up entire weeks. So you come in, and, on 
Monday, you file a motion to close debate. On Wednesday, you vote on 
actually closing debate because you have to have that intervening day 
of Tuesday. Then you have 30 hours, which takes the time up of the 
normal day of Wednesday and Thursday, and maybe on Friday you get to 
vote.
  That is what I am saying: Every cloture motion takes up a week. Well, 
the Senate is normally only here 30 to 40 weeks a year. So if you have 
30 or 40 cloture motions, you have essentially taken up all the 
Senate's time. But the Senate has an incredibly complex, extensive 
agenda. It needs to address so many issues in healthcare and housing 
and education, good-paying jobs, the environment. How do you take on 
climate? How do you take on international trade? How do you take on 
human rights in foreign countries like China, which are conducting 
genocide? So many issues around the world, plus it has so many 
nominations that have to be addressed.
  I am told--I haven't double-checked this yet--that there were four 
Cabinet positions that required confirmation in the first Congress--
four. Then you had Ambassadors, and you had judges. But you had a 
pretty small number of nominations in those positions. Now, we have 
well over a thousand positions--well over a thousand--and we have a 
nomination process in which people are nominated to have a higher rank 
in the military or advancement to certain ranks in the civil service. 
And so you have extensive lists that need to go through as well.
  So let's take a look at what happened with the growth of cloture 
motions. This is the history going back to 1910. We actually only had 
cloture starting in 1917. And, in 1917, you see that there were very 
few cloture motions in a decade--3 in a decade, 10 in a decade, 5 in a 
decade, 8 in a decade, 3 in a decade--less than 1 per year.

  Well, that intervening day kind of made sense because they were less 
than one time per year. It was supposed to be a rare moment in which 
you would address the fact that some Senators were not going to let the 
Senate proceed as our Founders envisioned, which was, after hearing 
everybody, to conduct a vote.
  Then you start to see in the 1970s a big change. I think we have a 
chart that shows it year by year. We don't. Well, this will give you 
some sense of it. So we have--divided by 10, since these are by 
decade--we had growth in the 1980s to more than 20 per year; a growth 
in the 1990s to more than--well, an average of 35 to 36 a year. In the 
2000s, an average of 45 per year. In the 2010 decade, an average of 
over 100 per year, taking up an entire week of the Senate's time.
  So how did this unfold? Well, let's think a little bit about the fact 
that that filibuster that occurred in 1891 was about blocking Black 
Americans from having power--the power to vote--because if you have the 
power to vote, you have the power to weigh in. That means you have a 
lot of power in our society. So there was a deep determination to keep 
Black Americans from voting.
  That was the filibuster of 1891. And its failure in the Senate--
remember, it passed by a majority in the House, and it had majority 
support in the Senate, but the filibuster was used to crush this.
  Now, that process meant that, from 1891 through 1965, when we passed 
voting rights in this Chamber, the filibuster was used for one thing: 
crushing the political rights of Black Americans.
  Now, someone will say: Well, that is not quite right. There was an 
episode in 1917 in which the issue wasn't civil rights or voting 
rights. The issue was whether to arm our commercial ships against 
potential attacks by the Germans.
  And that is partly true.
  In March of that year, 1917, we weren't yet in the war, World War I. 
And there was a group of Senators who said: If we arm these ships and 
they deployed depth charges against German submarines or so forth, we 
are going to be in the war, and we will not have had a declaration of 
war. We will be pulled into the war by essentially this process of 
arming ships.
  So they spoke at length during the last week of Congress, and time 
ran out, and the bill died. And the next week, the new Congress 
started. This is back when the transition happened in March. And the 
new Congress immediately said: We can close debate with 67 votes or 
two-thirds of the Senate. Actually, it was two-thirds; we didn't have 
100 Senators here--two-thirds of the Senate, showing up to vote and 
close debate. So that was the first time that we had a motion to close 
debate since 1805.
  And the reason I say it is since 1805, is that our original rules had 
a motion called the previous question. And on the previous question, 
there is a little bit of uncertainty of exactly how it was used. It 
sometimes said that, basically, you got to speed things up so we can 
get to the final vote. Other times, it has been interpreted as ``No, 
the previous question means we vote; we vote on the question before 
us.'' But it was never actually used, and it wasn't used because there 
was a social contract.
  The Senate said: We can listen to everybody, and, then, having heard 
everybody, we can vote.
  Fair enough. Fair deal. Square deal.
  So in 1805, when Aaron Burr was in charge of rewriting the rule book, 
he said: We don't use this rule. We don't need this rule. We have a 
social contract. We listen to everybody and then have a simple majority 
vote, as our Founders designed the Senate. No need.
  So we hadn't had a rule that essentially enabled this body to come to 
a vote in that period from 1805 through 1917. So it is true that the 
bill was delayed for 1 week. But the new Congress immediately came in, 
created a new rule to close debate, closed debate on that bill, and 
passed a bill to arm ships. So the only real thing that was crushed in 
those years from 1891 through 1965 was voting rights for Black 
Americans because the idea that you would prevent a simple majority 
vote, as our Founders intended, was piracy.

  Well, in 1965, we passed voting rights, and the national consensus 
was we are putting that behind us; we are putting the discrimination 
behind us; we are putting the manipulation on election day behind us. 
We are going to have a fair opportunity for everybody to vote in this 
country. So the filibuster lost some of its taint because it was no 
longer primarily an instrument to crush the political rights of Black 
Americans.
  People started saying: You know, maybe I can use this on something 
other than civil rights or something other than voting rights.
  By the way, it had been used almost entirely on final passage of 
bills.
  Maybe I can use it on nominations, to prevent nominations from going 
through expeditiously. Maybe I can use it on amendments. Maybe I can 
use it on motions to proceed.
  Let's take a look at the issue of amendments. Prior to the sixties, 
one time, there had been a cloture motion on an amendment.
  You know that vision that I saw in 1976 where one amendment was 
debated, and then when it was done, there were no pending amendments, 
so the next person would say: ``Wait''--they would always say ``Mr. 
President'' because there was always a man in the Chair at that point; 
I am now glad to say ``Madam President''--``Madam President,'' and 
whoever got heard first would put up the next amendment.
  Well, that world started to change along the way. People started to 
obstruct not just final passage but obstruct amendments. There has been

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steady growth in that over time. We are now up, in the last decade, to 
about 14 times per year or 143 times in the decade.
  Then we have the question of the motion to proceed. You would think--
we have a legislative calendar, and that calendar has a list of bills 
eligible to consider. Someone says: I want to make a motion--normally 
the majority leader--to go to a particular item, a particular bill on 
that calendar. You would think that it would be like ``Hey, we are 
going to go to the election bill. Do I have majority support to do 
that?'' You would have a 15-minute debate and vote. You decide to go to 
that bill or not.
  Why would you take up a lot of the Senate's precious time debating 
whether to debate a bill? But that logic has not prevailed, so we have 
a continuous increase in the attack on the ability to get a bill to the 
floor. Well, in the sixties, about one per year; in the seventies, 
about one per year; four times per year in the eighties; more than 10 
in the nineties--it escalates.
  Here is the thing: To get a bill to the floor, if a group is intent 
on forcing a cloture motion, you have to have a motion, an intervening 
day, 30 hours of debate, and then you have to be able to have an 
additional hour for any Senator who wasn't able to speak in those 30 
hours. In other words, it takes an entire week to decide whether to 
actually debate a bill. That is absolutely insane.
  If you want the U.S. Senate to be unable to address issues, then 
allow unlimited debate until there is a cloture motion on the motion to 
proceed. I think most Senators agree that that should go. But here is 
the problem: Whichever party is in the minority doesn't want to make 
things easier for the majority. And this really goes to a core 
challenge of our highly tribal parties.
  In the Senate that I first saw, the philosophies of the two parties--
if you were doing a bell curve of each party, they overlapped. They 
overlapped a lot. There were Republicans who voted more like Democrats 
and Democrats who voted more like Republicans. There was a lot more, 
therefore, bipartisan work. Now, if you do those same two bell curves 
on how people vote, there is a chasm. If you do a bell curve where the 
Democrats are and a bell curve where the Republicans are, there is a 
deep valley, a chasm in the middle.
  We have become more intensely tribal in ways that are absolutely 
reinforced by social media, all those commentaries on various 
Instagrams or a tweet reinforcing the idea that the other side is evil, 
that the two sides are far apart, which leads the minority in this 
Chamber to say: Since the other side is evil, we will just prevent them 
from ever getting to a bill. If 41 of us--and right now, there are 50 
desks on this side of the aisle, and there are 50 desks on that side of 
the aisle--if 41 of us proceed to say we will not vote to close debate 
on a motion to proceed, you can never get to a bill.
  We have had that happen multiple times this year in which my 
Republican colleagues voted to prevent us from debating voting rights, 
the protection of voting rights. What a change from 1890, when, in the 
House of Representatives, every vote cast for the bill to defend the 
right to vote in America was a Republican vote. Now, every vote against 
debating the issue has come from the Republicans. What a swap over the 
time period.

  This, essentially, is a strategy to kill bills in the cradle before 
they are debated on this floor.
  Both caucuses, by the way, have done this. When I speak of voting 
rights, it is now my colleagues across the aisle who are deliberately 
blocking it from being debated time and again, but on other issues and 
when the Democrats have been in the minority, we have done the same 
thing. It needs to end.
  You know, I had conversations with a whole group of Republicans last 
year saying: Next year, we have no idea who will be in the majority. We 
have no idea. So let's just have 1 hour at most, evenly divided, to 
discuss whether a bill comes to the floor, and then we will vote. 
Instead of an intervening day and 30 hours, plus extra hours if you 
didn't get to debate, you have 1 hour evenly divided. If one side 
yields back its time, that means in 30 minutes, we can then decide to 
get on the bill or not.
  Thirty hours, an intervening day, or 30 minutes. That makes a lot 
more sense. We have to end this.
  I have had this conversation with nine of my colleagues across the 
aisle and said: Let's do this. Let's fix the motion to proceed and 
guarantee germane amendments on the floor.
  They were interested. Some said they would go and take it to their 
policy team, some said they would take it to their caucus, and some 
said they would take it to their leadership. Then they all said 
``Sorry'' because their leadership said ``No way are we going to have 
kind of the ordinary Senators who aren't in leadership have a movement 
to fix the Senate.''
  Mitch McConnell told them: No. We will make changes depending on what 
is best for our caucus. And if we are in the majority, that is 
different than if we are in the minority.
  So those efforts failed, and people keep saying to me: Hey, wouldn't 
it work if you draw up rules and implement them with the next Congress?
  Well, we have tried that. My colleague Tom Udall, who is now our 
Ambassador to New Zealand, was there, coming in with my class in 2009. 
He had followed this as well. So we teamed up, and we worked on these 
conversations, but ultimately we couldn't make it happen.
  We need to fix the Senate. We need to guarantee germane amendments. 
When I say ``germane amendments,'' I mean amendments that are on the 
topic.
  When I was staffing that tax bill for Senator Hatfield, every 
amendment was on taxes. Should we proceed to increase or rein in the 
tax credit that goes--or the tax deduction that goes to deducting the 
cost of your home office if you are a teacher in our public schools? It 
was one I heard in a lot of letters. There were a ton of letters from 
teachers in Oregon about that.
  I remember that another amendment was on employee stock ownership 
plans, which enable you to be able to enable your workers to own a 
share of the company. How do we make those ESOPs work better? and so on 
and so forth, one tax issue after another--nothing to do with highly 
polarizing social issues on a tax bill because people knew that when 
another bill came on healthcare, they could put healthcare issues on 
that. When one came on transportation, they could put their 
transportation amendments on it.
  Now the assumption is, hey, if there is a bill that is going to pass, 
we better throw in every idea we ever had because that is like the only 
bill that will get through the Senate. The result is these massively 
thick bills, which are an insult to democracy because in a 1,000- or a 
2,000-page bill, you are talking about thousands of ideas, of new laws, 
of new ideas being embedded.
  There is no way the citizens can hold us accountable when we are 
voting on a bill that is yea thick. There are a bunch of things that 
are good. There are a bunch of things that are bad. Plus, we can't even 
figure out what some of them are before we have to vote because when 
the deal is struck off the floor because we can't do amendments and 
because there is no debate, well, we are stuck with a big bill being 
delivered and described to us. That is not the way it should work. That 
is not good for us. That is not good for the citizens.
  Let's note that what is happening in those 19 States puts us at an 
absolutely critical moment. You can think of democracy as a flickering 
flame or a flame that has to be maintained and nurtured from one 
generation to the next. Now, it is our challenge--our challenge--
because laws are being passed on registration, laws are being passed on 
the process of voting, and laws are being passed on the process of 
counting that are designed to manipulate the outcome, to basically 
cheat Americans out of a fair election and, in many cases, cheat them 
out of the opportunity to vote at all or if they can vote, not have 
their vote fairly counted. So it is our responsibility to act.

  I see my colleague from Massachusetts has come to the floor. I think 
she is ready to speak.
  I just want to sum up with this notion: The failure of this Senate to 
act in 1891 led to three generations in which civil rights for Black 
Americans were suppressed in our country. If we fail to act--if we fail 
to act this year, 2022, and allow the authentic integrity of 
elections--then we may see three generations in which we lose 
government of, by, and for the people.

[[Page S267]]

  You see, voting rights are the critical component because if those 
who are elected break the laws or go off track, you throw them out 
through fair elections, but if they go off track and there are no fair 
elections, they increase their power.
  You have to have fair elections to maintain government of, by, and 
for the people. That is the reason we must act this week to pass the 
John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act that are 
before this Senate right now.
  I yield to my colleague from the great State of Massachusetts.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I want to say a very special thank-you 
to my colleague, the Senator from Oregon. Senator Merkley has worked 
harder and more persistently on questions about the filibuster and the 
procedures of the U.S. Senate for years now and tried to lead us to a 
more functional situation than we are in right now. I want to thank him 
for his leadership.
  I know that tonight must be frustrating for him because he has tried 
so hard to get us to a better place. But I very much appreciate all 
that he has done, and to the extent we make progress, we make progress 
in no small part because of his leadership.
  Thank you.

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