Congressional Record, Volume 168 Issue 11 (Tuesday, January 18, 2022)

[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

[[Page S266]]

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.

____________________