[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 52 (Saturday, March 21, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1484-S1493]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SAVE AMERICA ACT
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we have had more discussion today on a number
of topics. One of the topics that has commanded a lot of today's
discussion is the bill that is now pending before the U.S. Senate, the
SAVE America Act.
There have been more assertions made on this bill today than there
have been in the past. So I need to address each one of those points,
particularly those that have not been refuted--or at least adequately
refuted today--in connection with these debates. While it is difficult
to know exactly where to begin, I am going to begin--before I refute
these--just with a generalized statement up front that will facilitate
my ability to refute.
These scurrilous and false arguments that have been made against this
bill--now, although some of these arguments have been mingled with
truth, they are almost entirely false. They are built on lies. They are
built on a blatant mischaracterization of the legislative text now
pending before the Senate. They are based on a mischaracterization of
the legal status quo and the effects of existing laws.
[[Page S1485]]
They are based on mischaracterizations of the Constitution. They are
based on mischaracterizations of the individual motives of the
lawmakers in this body--something that we are not supposed to call into
question but that has been called into question on a number of
occasions today.
First, as to the general backdrop against which we are operating, we
remember that the whole purpose of the SAVE America Act is to make it
easy to vote and hard to cheat.
We remember the fact that the purpose of the SAVE America Act is to
do this through a two-step mechanism--one that focuses on requiring
proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration and another that
requires photo ID at the time and place of voting.
The whole reason that this law became necessary, that this bill, this
legislative project came into existence about 2\1/2\ years ago, was
that Congressman Chip Roy and I--Congressman Roy comes from Texas--he
and I were talking, and, having been informed by some experts in this
area, we pieced together a number of features--legal, factual,
historical developments--that have converged into one, producing a
massive gap in our election security.
Remember that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 has been
interpreted by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of
Arizona as prohibiting the States from doing any followup to verify,
confirm, or refute someone's citizenship.
Although Federal law does, in fact--as has been noted repeatedly
today on the floor of the Senate--require that you be a U.S. citizen to
vote in a Federal election, that doesn't enforce itself. In fact, that
criminal prohibition against noncitizen voting in Federal elections has
become more or less impossible to enforce because noncitizen voting is
nearly impossible to detect under the status quo.
Because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal
Council of Arizona in 2013, the States can't ask for proof of
citizenship for anyone who registers to vote at a DMV--through an NVRA
form at a DMV while applying for a driver's license and simultaneously
going through the process of registering to vote.
Remember, all you have to do with an NVRA form at the DMV while you
are applying for a driver's license is check one box saying: Yes, I
would like to simultaneously register to vote.
The only further act is to sign your name certifying that you are, in
fact, eligible to vote. That is the end of the inquiry, and there can
be no more inquiry, and that is part of what is causing so much of a
problem.
Decades ago, there were simply fewer noncitizens in the United
States.
In many instances, it was difficult to get a driver's license if you
were a noncitizen--especially if you were an illegal immigrant--and
that, too, has changed. We have now got 30 million-plus noncitizens in
this country. We have 10- to 15 million illegal immigrants in this
country, specifically illegal immigrants who arrived within that 4-year
period between January 20, 2021--the day President Biden took office--
and January 20, 2025--the day President Trump became President for the
second time. This veritable flood of illegal immigration--a mass-scale
border invasion invited by the Biden administration, contrary to our
laws--brought these circumstances about.
So when you merge that with the fact that we have a lot of
noncitizens here generally, coupled with the fact that it is impossible
for the State to ask for any type of proof of citizenship for someone
registering to vote at a DMV through an NVRA-supplied form, you have a
recipe for disaster that we have never had previously in this country.
All right. So as to the arguments, they are picking apart arguments
with it. Now, these arguments, first of all, are themselves at odds
with how the American people approach this. The American people
understand that it is not that big of a deal--it is not the end of the
world; it is certainly not Armageddon--to suggest that somebody ought
to show who they are and that they have the right to do what they want
to do, to establish that they are citizens when they register to vote,
to establish on the day of voting at the polling location that they are
the person indicated on the voter registration file. The American
people overwhelmingly understand and accept the fact that this isn't
that big of a deal. Sure, it might be an incremental burden for some,
but it is not going to be a problem, and it is a problem that Americans
are used to dealing with.
You don't go to the bank or to the pharmacy or to the doctor's office
or to a hospital, you don't apply for a hunting license or a fishing
license, you don't buy a gun, you don't go through TSA and travel--you
don't do any of these things and much, much more without being able to
prove who you are and that you have the right to do the thing you are
about to do.
The same is true with the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Super
Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention. You cannot get into and
participate in the Democratic National Convention unless you show up
with voter ID and credentials.
What else is like that? Oh, yes, I know: the U.S. Senate. You cannot
come to the U.S. Senate, you can't cast a vote in the U.S. Senate, you
certainly can't make it into this Chamber without ID and without
credentials establishing that you have the right to be here as a
Senator, the right to vote as a Senator, to make laws as a Senator.
Every one of us has had to go through this over and over again--not
just when we vote or do any of the other things that I mentioned, but
when we register as candidates, we have to show who we are and that we
are eligible to run for the U.S. Senate, that we meet the
constitutional requirements for service in the U.S. Senate. We have to
show our ID again when we vote.
Then even after we win our elections--if we are so fortunate as those
of us serving in this body have been--you still have to show up and
produce an ID on a couple of different occasions. You have to show your
ID and your birth certificate or a U.S. passport in order to establish
your citizenship, just as you would with any other job.
Remember, every American citizen who has any job as an employee in
the United States of America has to establish their citizenship. They
have to do that by either showing a U.S. passport that establishes
citizenship or, alternatively, a birth certificate and a photo ID.
So we have to do that here, just like any other government employee,
any other private sector employee in America. But as Senators, we also
have to show up with other documentation. In addition to showing that
we are who we claim to be and that we are that person who claims to
have been elected to the U.S. Senate in the most recent senatorial
election, we also have to show up and have the benefit of an election
certificate by our chief elections officer--the secretary of state or
Lieutenant Governor in most States--to establish that we are eligible
to participate here. So this is no different. And the Democratic
National Convention and the Republican National Convention as well.
These are not unusual standards or requirements.
So let's get onto these arguments. Over and over and over again, we
heard this from both the senior Senator from Rhode Island and from the
junior Senator from Rhode Island, among others, over the last few days.
We are being told this would bring about a massive campaign of voter
disenfranchisement.
Let's remember what ``disenfranchisement'' means. In this context, it
means you are taking people who can vote today and making it so that
they can't vote tomorrow.
This is an argument conceived in Hell by the Devil himself because it
is just utterly false. There is not a scintilla of truth to this. You
could try to breathe life into it by adding inference upon inference,
taking different statements out of context; you would still be lying if
you were making this argument because there is nothing about it that
disenfranchises anyone.
(Mrs. BRITT assumed the Chair.)
If anything, what this would do is this would prevent the
disenfranchisement of actual U.S. citizens by those who are not
citizens of our country, by those who--whether through mistake or, more
likely, fraud--may register to vote notwithstanding the fact that they
are not eligible to do this.
The modern left has become obsessed with what they consider
victimless crimes. We hear about this from the
[[Page S1486]]
modern left all the time, and we have heard about that in this very
Chamber this very day. They approach noncitizen voting as if it were
such a minor thing not only in terms of the numbers, the frequency or
infrequency with which it occurs, but also that even if it does happen,
let's not worry about it.
Remember, our mantra is, let's make it easy to vote and hard to
cheat.
Their mantra appears to be, let's make it easy to vote and screw the
rest. We don't care.
When you focus obsessively on ``easy to vote'' to the exclusion of
all other things, you are not just increasing marginally the risk of
voter fraud--something that they claim doesn't exist and that we have
invented into existence because of our own tendencies toward paranoid
fantasy--but they are also ignoring the fact that when we allow that to
happen, we are disenfranchising actual American citizens, because their
vote matters less. Their vote can be canceled out entirely by 1 or more
or 1,000 or more or 10,000 or more people who vote in the same
jurisdiction who might not be eligible to do so.
So, yes, it matters. And this is not disenfranchisement. It is a
little bit like saying you are excluding entire categories of people by
requiring them to prove who they are when they start a job--something
that we all have to do every time we start a job. And somehow, the
American economy continues to function. Somehow, men, women, people of
every race and combination of races imaginable in America do that every
single day. Most of us do that many times in a single career--we start
a new job, we prove who we are. When we go to the DMV, we have to prove
who we are. When we get pulled over in our car, we prove who we are.
Why is this any different?
They say: Well, it is a constitutionally protected right.
Darn right it is. And it is our job to make sure that is protected.
But the fact that it is a constitutionally protected right in no way,
shape, or form means that we have to make it easy to vote and screw the
rest; let's let them cheat. That is not a rational conclusion--unless,
of course, your objective is to facilitate noncitizen, fraudulent
voting in our elections, to the disenfranchisement of actual American
citizens who are there to vote.
This is not a victimless crime, and shame on my colleagues for
suggesting otherwise.
We also heard--this one was from the junior Senator from Rhode
Island, and we heard it multiple times not only from him but from the
senior Senator from Rhode Island--that it requires a passport to vote
under the SAVE America Act.
This is not just a lie; this is a damned lie because the plain black-
and-white text of the bill makes it very clear that there are a zillion
ways that you can prove your citizenship. Now, there are a couple of
them that are easy, that are familiar, that roll off the tongue because
we use them elsewhere--like, for example, providing a U.S. passport
that establishes citizenship on its own and like showing up with a
birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. That will do it
too. Those are the documents we use in the employment context under the
I-9 form.
But there is a whole lot of other stuff that we have added to this
one. For example, there are certain types of driver's licenses. I don't
mean REAL ID because there are a lot of REAL ID driver's licenses that
are issued to citizens and noncitizens alike. That has become a point
of confusion. There is a subcategory of REAL ID driver's licenses known
as the enhanced driver's license issued by some States to some people
that contain indicia on the face of the driver's license that will
establish citizenship. There are, as I understand it, some Tribal
identification papers that will also establish U.S. citizenship--not
all of them, but some of them do. There are a handful of other things
that will do that.
But in addition to all these mechanisms, you can also show up without
a single document in hand. If you don't have them--you can't find them,
you lost them, your house burned down, whatever it is--you can show up
and you can fill out an affidavit, a sworn affidavit, saying: I, Mike
Lee, swear under penalty of perjury that I am a citizen of the United
States and this is where I was born.
If you are a natural-born citizen, as I am, as I think most of us
here are: I was a citizen as of the moment of my birth by virtue of the
circumstances of my birth when I was born on June 4, 1971, in Mesa, AZ,
to U.S. citizen parents.
If you are not a--and those are the basic facts. You outline the
basic facts of how it is that you became a natural-born citizen--enough
facts so that the State election official knows what to look for, knows
where to look, and can confirm or refute the existence of your
citizenship as a natural-born citizen. You shift the burden onto the
State. It doesn't cost you a dime. It doesn't even have to take more
than a few minutes to show up and provide that information. Now, some
might say: Well, that, too, is a step. Well, yeah, there are a lot of
steps in a lot of things, and it is what we do to make sure that the
vote matters, to make sure that the vote isn't being just completely
left open to fraud and manipulation.
If you take the easy vote nonsense far enough and you don't couple it
with anything that makes it hard to cheat, you really are just inviting
and--in fact, guaranteeing--fraud. You are guaranteeing effective
disenfranchisement, nullification of U.S. citizen voting, and often
facilitating foreign election interference--something that my
Democratic colleagues claimed for years to be obsessively concerned
about, and now, Nah, let's not worry about it. We just want to make it
easy to vote.
So it is not true to say that you have got to have a passport to
vote. One of the reasons why they like to make this argument, as
dishonest as that argument is, is because passports, of course, are
something that not everybody has. Some Americans do, but some don't.
Some don't travel enough for it to matter, and if and when they needed
to travel outside the United States, they will get one. And it is
expensive. It costs a couple hundred bucks to get a passport.
And all of us, as Senators, have had a lot of experience helping our
constituents get passports. Every one of us has had the experience, not
just once or twice but often once or twice a day, where we get a call
from a constituent saying: I am supposed to be boarding a plane. I am
on my way to London or Yemen or Tokyo or wherever it is, and I can't
find my passport or it has expired. And we walk them through the
process of doing it.
It does have some expense involved, and there are often delays
involved in getting one, but if you have got one, it can be helpful.
But the reason they like to use that argument--falsely claiming over
and over and over again for the last 4 days in a row--that you have got
to have a passport to register to vote under the SAVE America Act is
because they like the fact that there is a cost associated with a
passport, and they can use that to make one of the other spurious
arguments, which is that this is a poll tax.
Well, of course, we outlawed poll taxes more than 60 years ago by a
constitutional amendment, and, of course, this is not a poll tax
because you needn't shell out a dime. A poll tax is something that you
have to pay for in order to have the right to vote. This is not that--
nothing like that.
All right. Next point. My colleagues continue to argue that every
part of this is so fraught with peril, including the very basic
elements of what, under this law, the States would need to do to
coordinate with and share voter registration data with the relevant
Federal Agencies, primarily those within the Department of Homeland
Security who operate the already existing SAVE database so that this
coordination can occur between State elections officials--those who
maintain their voter rolls--and the Federal personnel who maintain this
database.
The argument that they are making is that even those parts--even the
sharing of data between State officials and Federal officials just to
make sure that we don't have noncitizens voting is something that is
going to happen, particularly with this many noncitizens in the
country, the ease of going into a DMV and applying for a driver's
license and simultaneously checking a box and signing your name to
register to vote. Given how easy it has become to do that, it is an
absolute certainty that
[[Page S1487]]
you are going to have a number of people who are noncitizens who are
registered to vote.
Now, some of them might be doing it deliberately. I suspect there are
quite a few who might do it inadvertently. There may be language
barriers involved. They may think they are supposed to check that box,
and they will sign their name. They might not know entirely what they
are doing or they might not have a complete understanding that whatever
their immigration status is, it doesn't allow them to vote.
The point is this: It is a known fact that we have a lot of
registered voters in this country who are noncitizens. Let's talk about
how we know that.
In the first instance, we have got a small handful of States--but a
growing number of States--that have begun a systematic review of their
own voter registration files, and they have shared their voter
registration file data with the individuals and Agencies within the
Department of Homeland Security in Washington, DC, to figure out who is
a citizen and who is not.
Those that have done this have found many thousands of noncitizens in
their voter files so far. My hat goes off to those who have done it.
This is the responsible citizen thing to do, and they have gone through
the process of figuring out how to correct the errors.
So some of them have found out that way. Others, as is the case, for
example, with the State of Oklahoma--it is a general phenomenon that
occurs all over the place, but in Oklahoma they have a law designed
specifically for this situation.
Remember, when you are summoned to show up for jury duty, that
happens through a random selection of names from voter registration
files in the jurisdiction in which potential jurors are drawn, so
nobody should be summoned for jury duty unless they are on a list of
registered voters. And when registered voters show up for jury duty,
with some regularity, they will stand up, and they will say: Hey, I am
not a citizen, and I, therefore, cannot serve as a juror.
Now, there all kinds of reasons. I have seen this happen, as a
lawyer, many times. People get summoned for jury duty, and some of them
will look for excuses not to do it. And some are really good reasons,
others less so.
You hear people joke about different ways they could avoid it. I have
heard people joke about showing up and saying, you know: I believe in
jury nullification; that the jury can do whatever it wants
without regard to the law. It doesn't matter. It is all our choice. And
some say that is a way to avoid it. I don't encourage that.
Others will say that, well, there was this great episode of the
sitcom ``30 Rock'' years ago where I believe Liz Lemon, the main
character of the show, showed up for jury duty while dressed as
Princess Leia and with just as many indicators that she was really
weird as possible, hoping that some of the lawyers would exclude her,
perhaps using one of their peremptory challenges to get over it.
Others still might show up and fraudulently claim that they are not
citizens when, in fact, they are citizens. So, in Oklahoma, in order to
ferret this out, they passed a law that said: All right. If you show up
for jury duty having been summoned to show up as a potential juror and
you claim that you cannot serve because you are not a citizen, we are
going to check. We are going to check to see if you are, in fact, a
citizen because if you are not a citizen, you shouldn't have registered
to vote, and that is one kind of a problem. We are going to need to
remove you from the voter registration files.
If you are, in fact, a registered voter in our State, then you have
just stated under penalty of perjury, in order to escape jury duty,
that you are not a citizen when, in fact, you are. That is also a
problem.
Look, it is much better--don't lie. If you really don't want to do
it, show up dressed as Princess Leia or as Chewbacca or something like
that. That is probably a better point. I don't recommend that either.
Just do your duty as a citizen.
Those States that have adopted procedures like that, whether in the
form of a formal law like Oklahoma or as is the case in Michigan, they
have adopted a practice: When they assemble those names, they run them
through, and inevitably they find a bunch of them were not citizens and
then they can remove them.
In other States still, there are four or five States and the District
of Columbia in which they openly admit that they register noncitizens
to vote because in some local elections within those jurisdictions,
they allow noncitizens to vote.
That is a terrible idea. I don't know why they would want to do that,
but they do. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits
it in a State or local election, as long as there is nothing in State
law or the applicable State constitution that prohibits it; therefore,
they can do so, and some of them have--some of them do. Foolish as it
is, they do it anyway.
Curiously, in those States, when U.S. Federal authorities have asked
them to explain how it is that they deal with the problem of voter
registration files consisting of people who are allowed to participate
in certain local elections as noncitizens, how they prevent those same
voters who are not citizens, but registered to vote, from casting votes
with a normal ballot as for Federal offices like the U.S. House of
Representatives or U.S. Senate, every time that question has been
asked, they go silent. They won't say a thing, and then they refuse to
cooperate.
Now, a few minutes ago, I referred to a number of States that have,
on their own, just because they are good citizens--they have taken
advantage of the SAVE database within the Department of Homeland
Security. They have shared their data, usually having entered into a
memorandum of understanding between the State and DHS beforehand.
And then they say: Hey, run the numbers. Show us where we have got
people in there that we shouldn't have. To their great credit, they
have done that.
But there are a whole bunch of other States that refuse--most so-
called blue States. States with Democrat legislatures and/or Democrat
Governors have been refusing to do that. And so they have no idea--or
at least we have no idea--how many noncitizens might be registered to
vote in those States.
So this is kind of a problem.
Anyway, back to the argument made, I believe, by both of the Rhode
Island Senators. Boy, the Rhode Island Senators sure had a lot to say
today. They just didn't have a lot of good things to say about the SAVE
America Act--and by ``good things,'' I don't mean that they were
criticizing it. I mean they were using really bad arguments that are
not rooted in truth and that are made with either knowledge of their
falsity or reckless disregard as to their truthfulness.
So this is where it gets interesting. They argue that we can't even
trust the States--the States can't even trust the Department of
Homeland Security or anyone in the Trump administration with that data
that under the SAVE America Act they would be required to supply to the
Department of Homeland Security for this review.
And we can't, why? Well, the argument--they use a lot more words to
say it, but it basically boils down to three words: ``Orange man bad.''
Now, that is not a good reason. That is a lame-ass argument to get to
a very simple point. They are saying: We don't trust the U.S.
Government with data because some of it contains personally identifying
information.
Well, welcome to the U.S. Government. They know everything about us.
There is no fact that they do not have on us, on every American
citizen, like it or not.
We do everything we can--and we do everything we can in this
legislation--to make sure that privacy is respected. But with or
without that information being handed over by a State election official
to the Department of Homeland Security for the sole purpose of
ascertaining voter eligibility, it does nothing to maximize or to
further protect the privacy of the American people, nor are my
Democratic colleagues saying or even suggesting in any way, shape, or
form that they want to undo all the thousands, if not millions, of
other instances, areas in which they collect a whole lot of data,
including a whole lot of personally identifying data on U.S. citizens.
So they are just hyperfocusing on this one where, by the way, the
ease and simplicity of protecting the privacy and the personal
information of
[[Page S1488]]
individual U.S. citizens is far easier than it is in the context of the
IRS or of the financial transactions or everything else that the U.S.
Government keeps track of. So this strikes me as pretextual; and, of
course, pretextual is a fancy word for it is a cheap excuse for the
real reason.
Now, maybe we will get to a real reason in a minute. Let's just say
that they are opposing this for a reason, but none of the reasons that
they are offering pass muster--not one of them can withstand scrutiny.
So their argument that ``Trump bad'' equals no State should have to
share its data, even where necessary in order to weed out fraud in
Federal elections--that argument isn't good. That argument is basically
saying that we don't want our States to have to do that because we are
pretty sure that our States have registered a whole bunch of noncitizen
voters, and we don't want to have to give them up.
(Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.)
From day one, when they talked about this, even before debate began
in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues have been arguing that anyone
whose name would likely trigger alarm bells through the processes
established by the SAVE America Act warranting their removal based on
their status as noncitizens--they said that anyone who would likely be
removed from the voter registration files would be more likely to be a
Democrat than a Republican and that would be bad for us. They literally
said this.
Now, they are careful not to say ``because they are noncitizens,''
but that is the reason. That is the only reason you would be removed
through this framework is if they are noncitizens.
And so when they say over and over again this is going to
disenfranchise people, it is going to take away their vote--well, yeah,
if you are a noncitizen. But if you are not, it is not going to.
And so this process that they go through in defending the status quo
and in saying that Armageddon will be upon us if we require people to
show up with a photo ID when they vote, to show that they are citizens
when they register to vote, and that the States are going to share
their data on their voter registration files with the Department of
Homeland Security just to make sure that they are, in fact, not voting
in U.S. elections as noncitizens--when they object that strongly to it,
it makes you wonder why they are so upset. And I think the question
answers itself. It speaks for itself when they freak out over something
like this.
They have no problem with any of the other myriad areas in which
voter ID is required--or photo ID is required. In fact, in the last
Congress, when President Biden was still in office and when the
Democrats had the majority in this Chamber--we are talking just a
little over a year ago--every Democrat in the Senate then joined in and
supported legislation that contained a voter ID element. So the voter
ID component of it, most of them have said they are OK with it.
Then when we tried to offer that one up and pass it by unanimous
consent at the motion of our friend and distinguished colleague, the
junior Senator from Ohio, who has got probably more knowledge of how
elections work and State election systems operate than any other Member
of the House or Senate--past, present, or future--this guy is sort of
the--he is the Einstein of election systems. So he offered that up,
accepting at face value our Democratic colleagues' repeated insistence
that they don't have a problem with voter ID requirements, and it still
drew an objection. Now, it drew an objection that made no sense because
the objection articulated had nothing to do with voter ID. At least
that is how I heard it. So that was kind of an issue. All right.
Next argument: This one came specifically from the junior Senator
from Rhode Island who, if I have this right, falsely claimed that the
Supreme Court of the United States has said that it is unconstitutional
to ask a registering voter for proof of citizenship. Now, if I
misunderstood that, I hope and expect to be corrected, but I don't
think I did. I think that was the argument. And if that was the
argument, that argument is a lie. It is absolutely false. It is not
only guilty of being false; it is innocent of being true.
The Supreme Court ruling to which he is referring is this case called
Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona. It was wrongly decided, but
it is conclusive nonetheless. The majority opinion reached this
conclusion. It did not say it is unconstitutional to ask a registering
voter for proof of citizenship--far from it. It said that based on the
text of the 1993 NVRA, as passed by Congress, that the text, as a
matter of statutory interpretation, preempts, prohibits any State using
the NVRA form at a DMV from asking any driver's license applicant
simultaneously registering to vote to also establish citizenship.
That is a statutory conclusion--one that we are free to change. It is
not a constitutional mandate. It is far from a constitutional mandate.
Now, if that is what my friend and colleague the distinguished junior
Senator from Rhode Island meant to say, then he is just plain wrong.
But by saying that, he is suggesting that we are powerless, absent a
constitutional amendment, from requiring any registering voter to
provide proof of citizenship, which would make no sense, by the way, I
mean, given how many times you are required elsewhere in Federal law--
to say nothing of State law but even just in Federal law--to establish
who you are and that you are a U.S. citizen.
Now, for example, you have to do that on the I-9 every time you start
a new job. Every American has to do that or you can't start the job.
You also have to do it when you apply for a passport. And there are
related issues of proof that you have to do in many, many other
circumstances. If you want to buy a firearm and you go into a federally
licensed firearms dealer, you have to provide a photo ID. You then have
to go through a background check. You have to show who you are.
To this the Democrats say: Oh, but this is a constitutionally
protected right. You have a constitutionally protected right to vote.
True. There are multiple provisions of the U.S. Constitution that in
different ways protect your right to vote. Yes, it is constitutionally
protected. So too are a whole lot of other things. So too is your right
to travel, and yet your right to travel is not unqualified. If you want
to travel in and out of the United States, then you are going to have
to get a passport. If you want to travel between two States or even two
cities through commercial air travel, you are, at a minimum, going to
have to show a driver's license. Yet your right to travel is
constitutionally protected; the right to bear arms is constitutionally
protected, as is the right to vote.
So the fact that something is constitutionally protected doesn't mean
that there are and can be no guardrails around that to make sure that
you are a person who is allowed to exercise the constitutionally
protected right in question. That never has been the case, and it never
will be the case. You still don't escape the need to establish who you
are and that you have that right.
Next comes the argument made repeatedly by both the junior Senator
from Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Rhode Island that this
will somehow disenfranchise women. This has to be one of the dumbest
arguments that I have ever heard, not just in connection with this
bill, the SAVE America Act, but with any bill ever debated in the 15\1/
2\ years I have been in the U.S. Senate. I find it utterly offensive to
suggest that women just can't possibly be expected to get their stuff
together enough to establish who they are and that they are citizens;
or, as the argument goes, women who get married and change their name
upon getting married are never ever going to be able to prove who they
are after they change their name because, after all, their parents
couldn't have known what their married name would be when they were
born, so we just can't pass this law.
This is really, really dumb. I mean, first of all, we have a lot of
women serving in the U.S. Senate, every one of whom had to prove their
citizenship, had to establish their election certificate, and many of
whom have been married and changed their name in connection with that.
And it is not just the women of the U.S. Senate; it is all women
anywhere. And I know a lot of women. I have five sisters. My wife also
has five sisters. Between us, that is 10 sisters. That is a lot of
sisters. Every
[[Page S1489]]
damn one of them knows how to establish who they are and that they are
entitled to vote. This is not a problem. And they are all married, and
they all have married names that were different than the name listed on
their birth certificate. It is not a problem. It is not just my family
that is like that. I would imagine that the Presiding Officer's family
is the same way. Women are no less capable than men of establishing who
they are and supplying the necessary documentation.
Now, of course, what they say is: But what if they did--what if they
did get married and what if they could find all the other pieces of
documentation--maybe their maiden name is still on their passport, if
they have one. And their maiden name would obviously be used on their
birth certificate. Well, that is not a problem either, for the same
reason that it is not a problem if you don't have any documentation.
It is best if you have the normal documentation because it is going
to save the State governments a whole lot of trouble under this bill.
It makes it a lot easier for them if you just show up with the right
documentation, which most people have. But if you don't, that is OK. We
have made that OK too. You just have to do an attestation, a short
paragraph outlining who you are, when and where you were born, how you
became a citizen, whether you were a citizen as of the moment of your
birth by virtue of the circumstances surrounding your birth, or whether
you were naturalized, and, if so, when, where, and how.
It is not hard. You could write that out. Any American could write
out that information in probably less than 2 minutes. I know I could.
Whether or not it would be fully legible is a different question. I
might need 3 minutes to make sure that my handwriting is neat enough to
be read, and even then it is a jump ball. It is an open question, but I
am pretty sure I would be OK.
Every single time we bring this up, they refuse to acknowledge the
language in the statute, in the bill. Page 12, line 22 and the text
that follows from it makes very clear that if you are missing any of
that documentation--let's say you are a married woman whose birth
certificate and whose passport and whose other documentation uses only
your maiden name and not your married name and you can't find your
marriage certificate. By the way, if you can find it, that is
conclusive proof of the name change. You don't have to worry about it
at all.
But let's say you can't find the marriage certificate and you have
everything else. Then you swear out a brief affidavit: I got married on
July such and such of such and such a year. And I married so-and-so.
His name is Jones. My maiden name was Smith, so I changed it from Smith
to Jones.
You are done. That is it. From that moment forward, whether you are
missing one document or all documents, you fill out the affidavit, you
hand it over to the State election official. They will ask any follow-
up questions they need, and from that moment forward, the burden is off
your shoulders; the burden is shifted to the State authorities, whose
job it is to confirm or refute your citizenship or lack thereof.
States, remember, have access to all kinds of information: birth
certificates issued in that State. I believe many, if not most, if not
all States, have reciprocal arrangements with other States where they
can confirm or refute information on each other's databases about birth
and death records and so forth. This is not hard. Yet they refuse to
acknowledge that language. They just go on over and over again saying:
You are going to disenfranchise women.
Look, the American people don't buy it, and the American people know
that when you raise bull-crap arguments over and over and over again,
you are not taking the American people seriously, especially when you
insult their intelligence and competence by saying that vast swaths of
people--and I have heard everything under the book. You name it. I have
heard it stated with regard to rural Americans as opposed to more urban
Americans--or suburban Americans, people of certain ethnic or racial
backgrounds, men, women, old people, young people. They try to otherize
just about everybody imaginable and say that certain subgroups will
somehow be disenfranchised, disadvantaged. This is all nonsense, and it
all ignores the same central feature in the bill that makes this
tremendously easy.
All right. The next argument that they both make: fees. You have to
pay fees somehow to vote. This gets back to their poll tax argument.
Utter lie built on paranoid fantasy, conceived in hell by the devil
himself, to make these arguments over and over again to scare people.
This really has to stop at some point or another.
At times, they start to argue against the photo ID point minimally,
and then they remember that many, if not most of them, at one point or
another--including some in the last few days--have said they are OK
with photo ID. And so they don't argue with that one too much. But at
the same time, they don't own up to the fact that every Democrat in
here in the last Congress was, I believe, a cosponsor of legislation
that contained an ID requirement. Now, it was a little bit different
than this one. The biggest difference was that it wasn't quite as
tight, but there was a type of ID requirement in that bill. It is not
that different.
Now, they kept arguing also that this would disproportionately burden
citizen voters, that it would be citizens that really would have to
worry and that this would end up resulting in the disenfranchisement of
lots and lots of citizens.
The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went so far as to say a
couple of things. I had to listen carefully when he started to say this
because I thought he was joking at first or I hoped I was
misunderstanding him.
He started to theorize back to this point that ``the orange man
bad,'' so none of this can happen. We hate Trump. We can't trust Trump
or anybody in his administration. Therefore, we are going to just say
that all of it is unacceptable.
He was saying that if this law passes, we can expect that the Trump
administration might just willy-nilly cancel the voter registration
files of anyone they felt like canceling. If somebody looked like they
might not be a Trump voter or something bothered them about this or
that person, they might just willy-nilly say: When in doubt, throw them
out.
The senior Senator from Rhode Island even went a step further, in a
way that pained me to hear because it is so absurd. He said it is even
something we should have to worry about, that the Trump administration
could go in and just cancel all the voter registration files in an
entire State.
This is nonsense.
Not only is that absurd--to think that they would do that, to think
they could get away with it--it is utterly at odds with the text of the
legislation. Nothing in the legislation would allow them to do that
under any circumstance, other than where, having received the data from
the States, they run it through their database, and they identify
people: These appear to be noncitizens.
They, then, notify the States: These appear to be noncitizens, voters
1 through 5,000--whatever, however many there are.
Even at that point, they are not removed. The State then does its job
of going back through, and if the State believes that the Federal
authorities got it wrong, they can push back on that.
The U.S. Government under this regime wouldn't have the authority to
just go in and say: He is gone. She is gone. Get rid of this file. Get
rid of that file.
They can flag things for the States, and it would be up to the
States, ultimately, to remove them. But it is a collaborative,
iterative process. It is not one in which they could go in and just
say, ``This guy bothers me; get rid of him,'' or cancel all the voter
registrations in an entire State.
I mean, let's be realistic. That is not realistic, and it is absurd
to argue because it is utterly false that this bill, if it were signed
into law, would have that effect. It is just a lie.
OK. Next, the senior Senator from Rhode Island had a real doozy with
this one. He said: You know--after doubting whether any of this
occurs--let's not bicker and argue about who might be registered to
vote as a noncitizen. It probably doesn't happen ever. If it does, it
is only a little.
Well, that is cold comfort to anyone in a jurisdiction that has ever
experienced what happens when there is a
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close election and somebody wins by just a handful of votes. It is cold
comfort to say: Well, there are only a few noncitizens fraudulently
voting.
But separate and apart from that, he was saying: The best way that we
can handle this is just enforce existing law.
Do you know how absurd that is? Do you know how sophomoric, shallow,
simple-minded that is--not to mention how reckless and utterly
dishonest that is?
Let's work that through for a minute. What does that mean, ``enforce
existing law''? This is like the candidates who run for existing office
that say: Well, I know how I will balance the Federal budget. Just
eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.
Oh, gosh, we didn't think about that before.
The difficulty lies in identifying it. You have to be able to
identify the waste, fraud, and abuse, which we should do a better job
of doing that we do. It is one of the reasons why we have systems like
DOGE and why we have things like rescissions packages. I wish we did
them more often and more aggressively, but it is why we have them.
It is not as easy as just saying: Let's just do it.
It reminds me of a movie. There has been a remake of it that I don't
think was as good. The original movie was called ``Meatballs''--you
know, the one that came out in the 1970s, I think. It stars Bill
Murray.
Bill Murray is this camp counselor, and in the camp Olympics, they
were going up against Camp North Star. Camp North Star had a lot of
almost professionally trained athletes. Bill Murray, the camp counselor
character, just kept reminding people that they had their own coaches,
their other personal masseuse on board. And they were really worried
about going into the camp Olympics against the rival camp, a bunch of
rich kids at Camp North Star--I think is what it was called.
The one young man was about to compete in the high jump, and he went
up to Bill Murray and he said: Do you have advice for me just before I
make this jump?
Bill Murray looked at him and he said: Yes.
He got this very introspective look on his face, and he said: Try to
jump very, very high.
That is kind of what happens when you hear someone say, ``Oh, it is
easy--waste, fraud, and abuse''; or ``It is easy; let's just enforce
existing law.''
So this was his argument. It was that we can just enforce existing
law because existing law, including but not limited to laws codified in
18 U.S.C. 1015, prohibit noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. So
let's just enforce it.
That is the whole darn point. That is the whole reason why Chip Roy
and I wrote the SAVE America Act in the first place. It is the whole
reason we had to, because our existing laws, as interpreted and as
implemented, make it impossible--impossible--to find out where this is
happening.
We can't enforce existing law, at least not existing law within
States that, No. 1, refuse voluntarily to come forward and share their
voter registration file data with DHS to run it through the SAVE
database, which I think roughly half of the States, blue States in
particular, are refusing to do.
And those States include especially the small handful of States that
openly, brazenly admit that they allow noncitizens to register to vote
to participate in certain local elections, even though they are
noncitizens.
So with all those States, including the handful of States that
allow--expressly allow--noncitizens to vote and then offer no
explanation as to how they keep them separate from those who are able
to participate in elections for Federal office, they expect us to just,
oh, enforce the law.
Now, Rhode Island is a blue State. I will check to make sure, but I
will bet $5--a lot of money where I come from--that Rhode Island is one
of those States that defiantly refuses to share their voter
registration data.
So how in the heck are we supposed to enforce the law when they make
it impossible to enforce the law? It is unknown, and it is unknowable.
This is like--I guess it is like the ancient Egyptians telling
the children of Israel that they had to make bricks without straw.
It can't be done, but they are just fine with that, just as the
ancient Egyptians weren't all that concerned about the working
conditions, the health, or the pragmatics behind their slaves.
Apparently, our Democrat colleagues are not all that concerned about
noncitizens voting.
All right, one more movie quote while we are on the topic: ``Shrek''
is one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40, 50 years;
half-century--``Shrek.''
There is a character named Lord Farquaad. Lord Farquaad is not what
you would call a nice guy. Lord Farquaad is a despot. He is a tyrant.
He is a fascist, and he is talking to his soldiers as he is about to
send them into battle.
He says: Now, I realize that in this battle some of you may die, but
that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
It seems like some of our Democrat Senators are approaching this with
an analogous attitude. I realize if we do nothing, if we do not pass
the SAVE America Act, we could have thousands, perhaps tens of
thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of noncitizens currently
registered to vote in this country who will end up voting in Federal
elections, and in some instances might even decide the outcome of
elections. But that is a sacrifice we are willing to make.
Why? It benefits them. That old Latin phrase, cui bono--who benefits?
They do. They benefit from the status quo in which it is impossible to
enforce existing law.
So, no, Mr. Senator from Rhode Island, don't talk to me about the
fact that we don't need this because all we have to do is enforce the
law.
It can't be done. You know that, and you are all too content with
that. So knock it off.
The senior Senator from Rhode Island goes on to say that they will
just use it to purge voter rolls.
Well, yes, that is the idea, to purge voter rolls of illegal voters,
of noncitizens, not U.S. citizens.
Nothing in the law would authorize that. If somebody tried to do it,
not only would they lose in court, but they would be fired from their
job, and they might even be imprisoned.
I mean, this is serious business, and they are treating it as if they
could just make up the facts and make up the law.
They are entitled to their opinions. They are not entitled to their
own facts. Those things they want us to accept as facts are just damned
lies.
All right, there were several references made to my home State of
Utah, talking about how relatively clean Utah's voter registration
rolls are--clean of noncitizens--great, yes.
Do you know why? My State is not one of those that refuses to clean
up its voter registration files.
Now, I don't know whether we know the sum total of all those who
might have been registered to vote or whether they have been able to
review all those. I don't know. I am not going speak to that.
But I will say that in the 18 months of the Biden Presidency, Utah
had more incoming illegal immigrant traffic into the State than any
other State in the Union, measured on a per capita basis.
So even though, over time, yes, we probably have pretty clean voter
registration files, there is no telling whether that is still the case
today. There is no telling whether that could change between now and
this November's election, especially when people figure out that, hey,
no citizen, no problem. Just go into a DMV, fill out a form, check the
box, sign your name, and, all of a sudden, you are a registered voter.
Next, federalism: This is one of my favorite arguments that they
make, and they make it over and over and over again. Both Senators from
Rhode Island made the federalism argument today.
They talk about the fact that--part of what they say is true--the
U.S. Government is a government of limited powers. James Madison, in
Federalist 45, described this government, the one we operate, the one
for which we make laws, as a government with powers that Madison
described as ``few and defined.'' And the powers reserved to the States
are ``numerous and indefinite.'' Unlike the States, which are
governments of general jurisdiction--they can
[[Page S1491]]
legislate on anything just because. Anything that is not prohibited to
the States, either by the U.S. Constitution or by their State
constitution, they can do it.
We are not the same. This government is not the same. We have to have
a specific reason to legislate, a reason that falls within Congress'
limited enumerated powers, most of which--not all of which--can be
found in one part of the Constitution that too often goes overlooked,
article I, section 8.
But there are a handful of other scattered authorities throughout the
Constitution, including the one that is most relevant here, and that is
the one found in article I, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution,
that gives us the authority to establish rules and regulations specific
to the election of Federal officials, namely U.S. Senators and U.S.
Representatives.
That same provision, article I, section 4, clause 1, says, in the
first instance, that the States will conduct those elections. And that
is true. It also says the States will establish the rules governing the
``Time, Places, and Manner'' of those elections. And that is true. But
then it also says, in the very same sentence, that Congress may at any
time impose its own rules and regulations, not regarding elections
generally but specifically Federal elections--Federal elections for
U.S. House and Senate races.
And so, we have that authority. That authority is being exercised
here. There is not a single credible argument that the SAVE America Act
falls outside that authority--not one.
And it is very amusing. I talked about this a little bit last night.
It is amusing to me that my Democratic colleagues in the Senate are
making a federalism argument claiming that our authority is too
limited--so limited that we don't have the power to enact this.
I am surprised by that for two independent reasons. Reason No. 1:
Generally speaking, they don't like federalism. They are not fans of
it. Ever since at least the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration--
arguably it goes back to the Woodrow Wilson administration--the
Democratic Party has not been the champion of federalism, and that is
really, really putting it mildly. It is a little bit like saying that
Jack Daniels and Jim Beam are not fans of teetotalers or of the
temperance movement.
I mean, look, these guys go whole hog into federalizing everything,
and ever since April 12, 1937, they have had their way most of the time
because most things they can now justify.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had Democratic supermajorities in both the
House and the Senate. He bullied and intimidated the Supreme Court of
the United States, which had been knocking down his legislative agenda,
and threatened them right after his first reelection in the fall of
1936.
Franklin Roosevelt was mad because a lot of the laws that he had
pushed through as part of his New Deal program--remember, the villain
was the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be the
hero, and his weapon of choice was going to be the New Deal programs
dramatically increasing the size, scope, reach, and cost of the Federal
Government, putting it in charge of all kinds of things. The Supreme
Court, during his first term of office, kept knocking him down, one
right after the other. You can't do that, can't do that, can't do that.
And they were right.
A lot of them were relying on an expansive interpretation of the
commerce clause, which is there to give us authority to regulate things
or persons moving in interstate commerce, across State lines, as part
of interstate commercial transactions or instrumentalities or channels
of interstate commerce, interstate airways, waterways, and so forth.
Whenever they tried to get too cute with it and say ``Well, it goes
beyond that''--anything that is sort of economic-ish and that involves
money should do it--the Supreme Court kept knocking it down.
So what did Franklin Roosevelt do? I would imagine that he was one of
these guys who probably played tee ball only as a little kid, never
made it to baseball, and even when he was on tee ball, he was probably
on one of those teams where they don't keep score because everyone is a
winner. So he never learned how to lose like a gentleman. He got tired
of losing and couldn't lose like a gentleman, couldn't accept the
Constitution. So what did he do? He threatened to force the retirement
of a bunch of the Supreme Court Justices whom he didn't like, whom he
had named the ``four horsemen of the apocalypse''--not exactly Mr.
Congeniality here--and threatened to pass legislation entitling himself
to pack the Supreme Court, to increase it up to a tribunal as big as
like 15 people.
Now, they had just barely moved into their marble palace across the
street about a year earlier--no, it was 2 years earlier to the day. The
Supreme Court had always been sort of the anchor tenant of this
building or the subtenant--redheaded stepchild, if you will.
On April 12, 1935, this beautiful building over here opens its doors
for the first time. They had been in there only 2 years when this Court
packing plan began in earnest because F.D.R. never learned how to lose
like a gentleman and wasn't willing to accept the Constitution as the
ultimate outcome. So he just threatened them. He threatened them to the
point that enough of the Justices flipped their votes.
On April 12, 1937--2 years exactly to the day they had moved into
their marble palace--the Supreme Court of the United States rewrote the
commerce clause giving Congress newfound power over basically
everything. Not only could they regulate things or persons moving in
interstate commerce, across interstate lines, as part of interstate
commercial transactions, and things involving channels or
instrumentalities of interstate commerce, but now they could also
regulate anything and everything, any and every activity that, when
measured in the aggregate while occurring in one State at one time, had
a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
Yes, this is legalese. Yes, this is jargon for a very simple concept
that just means Congress could now regulate whatever the hell it wants.
Every aspect of human existence--labor, manufacturing, agriculture,
mining, health, safety, and welfare--even occurring in one State at one
time, was now on the table, was now Federal.
Democrats championed this the whole time. It was their Court packing
plan that forced them to push that through.
So my point is this: It is ironic--one could say hypocritical and
deeply so--for the party of unlimited Federal power that distorted the
vertical protection of federalism and, with it, the horizontal
protection of separation of powers--we have never retreated from that
position, and as soon as we gave Congress the power to regulate
anything and everything--that messed up the vertical protection of
federalism--we started messing up the horizontal protection of
separation of powers. Because no sooner had we as Senators and
Congressmen gotten all this new power that we started saying: Holy
crap. I am going to have to work a lot harder, and I am going to have
to take a lot more votes that they are going to make a lot of people
mad at me.
So they stopped making real laws, and they started passing
platitudes.
It goes something like this: We hereby declare as a Congress that we
shall have fair labor standards and practices in this country, and we
hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the power to
make, interpret, and enforce rules carrying the force of generally
applicable Federal law that will guarantee fair labor standards.
They do that over and over and over again. This is what happens with
their version of limited government.
So don't talk to me about federalism. This is an area where we
actually have a very specific Federal power, and we have a very narrow,
nonabusive, nonabusable grant of Federal power to the Federal
Government from the Constitution itself. This is not a federalism
problem--not by a mile.
That leads to the next argument closely related to that one. The
senior Senator from Rhode Island--who was on a roll tonight; I will
give him credit for that. The problem is that in an hour and a half, he
failed to make even a single correct point without the use of abusing
the English language, the law, the Constitution, and common sense.
Other than that, it was a great speech.
Having sort of exhausted his lame federalism argument, which doesn't
work, he then said: Ah, but we have to
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remember that whatever power is granted under article I, section 4,
clause 1 to the U.S. Congress to provide rules and regulations
governing the election of Federal lawmakers, that is only for Congress.
And you look at the SAVE America Act, and it gives responsibilities to
executive branch Agencies.
Well, no crap, Sherlock. That is how we do everything. Everything
that is delegated to Congress, all Federal powers--when there is a
Federal grant of authority in the Constitution, with very few
exceptions--like the Commander in Chief power that is given directly to
the President, not through the Congress--when the Constitution,
throughout article I, section 8--and the same would be true in article
I, section 4, clause 4--when Congress is granted a power, it is
understood that we make the law, but the execution and implementation
of that law is given to someone else.
This is not the same as what I was describing a minute ago where the
lawmaking power is handed in the first instance over to an executive
branch Agency. That is different. And that, by the way, is why we need
to pass the REINS Act after we are done passing the SAVE America Act. I
know the Presiding Officer is a fan of that legislation, as am I.
Because anytime we are making new law under article I, section 7 of the
Constitution, you have to pass through this dual gauntlet of article I,
section 7. You cannot make a Federal law--meaning you cannot make a
rule enforceable by the overpowering, brooding, omnipresence of the
U.S. Government--unless you have satisfied this two-part gauntlet: You
have the bicameral passage--House and Senate, same text--followed by
presentment to the President of the United States for signature, veto,
or acquiescence.
So this is totally different than that. We are not outsourcing the
lawmaking power; we are adopting a single visible, understandable,
intelligible principle-based legal standard and then handing over to
the Department of Homeland Security for the execution of that standard,
which we have made with abundant clarity.
So the Senator from Rhode Island says: Ah, but it gives Congress the
power to do this, not the Department of Homeland Security or any part
of the executive branch of the U.S. Government.
This is just nonsense. I have never heard somebody make such an
argument. It is wrong. We do have that power. That power doesn't
evaporate simply because we ourselves don't implement it.
Do you know what is funny here? It would be unconstitutional for us
to execute it. Why? Because we don't have the executive power. We have
a narrow piece of executive power expressly given to us on our
Executive Calendar. On our Executive Calendar, we handle the
confirmation of Presidential nominees, and we handle treaty
ratification, but that is it. That is the extent of our executive
power.
It would be unconstitutional for us to make a law and then also put
ourselves in charge of executing that same law. That would put us in
the position of the lawmakers in our mother country, who don't have
separation of powers like we do. They are barbarians; that is why we
left them. It is why we don't fly the Union Jack. It is why our dental
care here is much better than it is there. It is why our food doesn't
suck--because we left them a long time ago because we got tired of them
and their hoity-toity butchering of the English language. But we got
sick and tired of their lack of adequate separation of powers.
So those guys are involved in the execution and implementation of the
law. We are not. We can't be.
So not only is he not making a good argument, he is making an
argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would be
unconstitutional.
All right. Mass purges. The senior Senator from Rhode Island, still
engaging in his paroxysm of paranoid fantasy, theorizes that somehow
the Trump administration--and I am trying to imagine the animated
characters running around in his mind's eye as he is saying this. Like,
who is it? Is it Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Stephen Miller? I
don't know who it is, but these very Trumpy members of the executive
branch who are friends of the President are just going to come in and
say: We cancel all of your votes. Mass purges. Let's do this just to be
mean.
This is absolutely insane. That is not at all--there is nothing in
the bill that would allow a mass purge of U.S. citizen lawful voters,
and it is never ever going to happen.
There was one interesting point that the senior Senator from Rhode
Island made shortly after making the argument I just refuted where he
said there are zero dollars appropriated for them under this
legislation. That is true.
Now, if the senior Senator from Rhode Island is suggesting that we
could make the bill better by adding an appropriation, well, we can
talk about that. I don't believe that is necessary. The reason I don't
believe it is necessary is that we already have several legal regimes,
several statutory frameworks through which there are Federal dollars
already allocated to the States for their role in carrying out these
responsibilities under laws like the NVRA and under laws like the Help
America Vote Act. Now, if those are inadequate, which I don't think
they are, but if they are, then let's have that conversation.
By the way, before we get to our next flawed argument raised by the
senior Senator from Rhode Island, I have to get back to the federalism
argument. I left out a key point of it.
In addition to the fact that the Democratic Party is about as into
federalism as they are into kosher delis in Tehran--in addition to
that, they themselves pushed a bill ironically called the For the
People Act in the 117th Congress.
Remember, this was that lovely time between January 3, 2021, until
exactly noon on January 3, 2023, when the Democrats held the majorities
in the House and the Senate and also held the White House.
They pushed this bill called the For the People Act which purported
to be drawing its authority from article I, section 4, clause 1. Now,
not only were there lots, lots, and lots of executive branch Agencies--
like multiple executive branch Agencies and Departments--that were
going to be empowered under that, thus eviscerating his own argument,
but not one of them expressed a single reservation about that. In fact,
every single Senate Democrat here at the time was fully supportive of
the SAVE America Act. Not one of them ever, ever suggested they didn't
have authority to do that.
This article 1, section 4, clause 1 is a thing. Ironically--and we
don't need to go too deep into this, but they actually pushed the
envelope of article 1, section 4, clause 1 so far that I don't think
that could have been upheld as constitutional. I mean, they trampled on
all sorts of State sovereign authority matters that went far beyond the
realm of just Federal elections. They would have subjected every voting
jurisdiction in the United States--it would have rendered every voting
jurisdiction in the United States a preclearance jurisdiction. Whether
you had ever had a history of racial discrimination or not, if you
wanted to change your voting precincts, your legislative district maps,
whatever it was, you would have to go and seek a ``Mother May I'' from
a political appointee in the Democratic Party at the Department of
Justice. It is wildly unconstitutional. They would have changed all
kinds of things like voter registration deadlines. It actually strips
the State legislatures of their constitutionally derived power to draw
congressional district boundaries. So, for them to argue federalism
here, give me the biggest break. This makes absolutely no sense.
He makes the argument that this bill, the SAVE America Act, is not
about election security; it is about disenfranchisement. It is really
cheap. It is a really low argument, especially because there is not a
single word, not a single syllable, not a single letter in the bill
that can justify that. I know that my friend and colleague from Rhode
Island must not mean that. I don't know who wrote that speech for him
or who told him he had to say that or whether he did it himself. Look,
we are all entitled to a mulligan once in a while, and I will give him
one here, but that is a doozy. There is literally no truth to it, and
that is the hard part about arguments that have zero truth to them. It
is that, when they have as little truth to it as that argument, it is
[[Page S1493]]
kind of hard to refute it. You have to build it up in order to knock it
down, and that is hard too.
The next point that I needed to refute was really important, and this
is where I am reminded of the limitations of my own handwriting. I
can't read that one, so I am going to step forward to the next
argument.
In each instance, both the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the
senior Senator from Rhode Island--this being Rhode Island day with the
SAVE America Act--they both kept relying back on the fact that it is
already illegal. Yes, it is. It is already illegal for a noncitizen to
vote, but the fact that something is already illegal doesn't mean that
it is self-executing, that it is self-implementing, that it is self-
revealing. It is none of those things. Some things are; some things are
not.
This reminds me of an argument that I had to refute either yesterday
or the day before. Somebody said--they compared it to laws governing
the running of a stop sign. One of our Democrat colleagues said the
other day, in a way that reminded me of what the two Senators from
Rhode Island argued today, is that you don't have a law prohibiting
people from running a stop sign at an intersection and then say: We now
need another law prohibiting the running of a stop sign in a stop sign
controlled intersection. They missed the whole point altogether.
The way that you could make that argument fair and analogous here
would be to say, if you had a law prohibiting the running of a stop
sign and then you had another law or maybe the same law was interpreted
oddly by some creatively thinking judges as prohibiting the police from
monitoring or watching intersections guarded by a stop sign, then, yes,
that would be a fair analogy, and, yes, then we would need another law
saying: No, it is not illegal for the cops to watch that intersection.
Another analogy here that I think is helpful just deals with another
instance where you have got to prove who you are. I don't personally
drink alcohol, but I know, nonetheless, the way this works is that
whether you are a young person or an old, bald person like me, if you
go into a liquor store or any other place where alcoholic beverages are
sold, you are going to get carded. I know some people profess to being
very flattered when they get carded because it makes them feel young
when they do that, but my understanding is that you pretty much always
have to show your ID when you go in there. They are just not going to
take any ifs, ands, or buts. You have to show your ID.
This is the same kind of comparison. If we didn't have that law that
you had to show your ID when you bought alcohol, then it would be
impossible not only to enforce but even to detect violations of laws
saying that liquor stores can't sell booze to kids. That is why we have
the ID requirement. You have got to establish who you are. Then there
are some recordkeeping obligations that go along with that.
So this is just really foolish to think for even a second that it is
enough to say: It is already illegal. Back to our point earlier of: Oh,
I know how we are going to save money. We are just going to eliminate
waste, fraud, and abuse. Great. You can't just say: We are going to do
this.
Whenever you have a system of laws in place that are being broken,
there is a grave risk that, by not enforcing those laws, you will
cheapen the rule of law itself, not just the law that is being broken
but the dynamic in which we as citizens, in a free Republic, choose
voluntarily--most of us, mercifully--to abide by the law. We try to
keep the law, and things work better when they do. When people break
the law, there are generally consequences. When you live in an
environment where the law is just disregarded and cast aside, bad
things happen, but it gets infinitely worse--infinitely worse--
whenever, wherever. You not only say: We are going to just disregard
it, but you put legal restrictions, legal impediments, in place so as
to make it impossible not just to prosecute but even to detect where
the laws are happening. Then, on top of that, it gets exponentially
worse beyond that.
Whereas, here, it is not just any law, but it is the law that
determines who is going to make our other laws. This is upstream from
everything else. It impacts the legitimacy of this government. It is
what is standing between us and untold amounts of not just election
fraud but foreign election interference. So we can't pretend that this
is academic, that this is a frivolous concern.
And I will not indulge for another minute the absurd suggestion that
this is about President Trump and his administration wanting to just go
in and disenfranchise an entire gender or an entire race or an entire
political ideology or a set of party affiliations. Nothing in this law
would authorize that. There would be hell to pay if anybody tried for
it, and it is absurd to suggest that it is going to happen.
But even worse than that absurdity is the absurdity that goes along
with saying our elections will be fair and free of fraud when we have
had 30 million people living in this country who are not citizens,
about 15 million of whom entered the country unlawfully just in 4 of
the last 5 years under the open border policies of the Biden
administration, where we have got a law that allows anyone, even a
noncitizen, to apply in most States--the overwhelming majority of
States--just by going into a DMV, checking a box saying, ``I want to
register to vote,'' and signing their name, saying, ``Don't worry about
it. I am a citizen, and I am otherwise entitled to vote.'' When we tell
our own fellow citizens that not only are we not going to enforce that
law but that we are going to continue to make it impossible to detect
and prosecute and punish violations of that law, heaven help us all.
So, no, this is not about a party or a part of a country or this or
that subgroup or demographic. This is about one thing; it is about
citizenship. Yes, it is already against the law. So let's act like it.
Let's allow for the law to be enforced. If we did the same thing with
our drug laws, everybody would be taking drugs. It is almost like
encouraging people to take drugs if you do it that way. But this is
even worse than if you let our drug laws be unenforced, because this
one determines who makes the laws. This one determines the legitimacy,
or lack thereof, of our government. This, in effect, will
disenfranchise Americans who will have their votes diluted and canceled
out if we allow persons who are not citizens to vote.
We can get this done, and we will get this done. I was here yesterday
and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that
and the day before that, and I will be here every day until this is
passed. I will not stop, and I know the Presiding Officer won't stop
either. We are going to stay on this legislation. We will continue to
debate. We will debate in the rain on a train, in a box with a fox--
anywhere, everywhere. We will debate this thing, and we will make them
speak until they are tired. We will make them speak until every one of
their arguments, frivolous or legitimate--I have yet to hear any of the
latter, but you know, it could happen--have all been exhausted, and
then we will win.
At some point, we will move away from the frivolity. At some point,
we will stop making arguments rooted in science fiction, paranoid
fantasy and move on to what the bill actually says. That is what
happens when we are exhausted. That is what happens when people have to
actually stand and speak and articulate their concerns with the bill.
Sooner or later, you start being able to separate fact from fiction,
from paranoid fantasy. And, at that point, that is where the magic
happens. We can start to look for where the real points of contact are.
If there are amendments to make to this thing, let's make them. Let's
make it work as well as possible, but let's get it done. We are not
going to quit.
We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep. We will not
sleep until this is done.
I yield the floor.
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