[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 56 (Wednesday, March 25, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1631-S1644]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SAVE AMERICA ACT

  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we are fortunate. We are blessed to inhabit a 
country where freedom is the norm, where popular sovereignty is the 
objective, and has been since the dawn of our Republic. We are 
celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of this country,

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which, itself, was founded upon the idea that all human beings are 
created equal; that we have certain inalienable rights, among these, 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these 
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just 
powers from the consent of the governed.
  The consent of the governed--that is the key part. That is what 
differentiates a tyrannical government--which is to say most 
governments that have ever existed--versus a government in which men 
and women are allowed to be free, in which government exists for the 
specific purpose of serving the people. That is part of what was 
recognized in the document whose 250th anniversary we will be 
celebrating on July 4, that governments are indeed instituted among 
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
  So what does that mean to provide your consent? Well, among many 
other things, it means the ability to participate in selecting who may 
operate your government, who will wield the levers of government power.
  Government power is something that is easily misunderstood. These 
things don't necessarily occur to us automatically. To remember what 
government is, sometimes we are inclined to attribute to government 
qualities that it does not have and can never have, qualities that 
government can never have specifically because the government is not a 
person; the government consists of official power, the power to act in 
the name of an entire country or other body politic, in order to 
establish rules carrying the force of generally applicable law, 
enforceable with the immense power of government.
  Ultimately, it is, then, about power, and that is one of the many 
reasons why, even though we need to respect government and respect the 
authority of government--especially when it is a government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people--we should never lose sight 
of the fact that government is best understood as wielding authority 
that is dangerous.
  In other words, like other things that we rely on, that we need, that 
are necessary in some cases to sustain life, or in other cases to make 
life manageable or enjoyable, government is one of those many things 
that, while a key indispensable part of our lives, it is, at its core, 
dangerous because it is ultimately about force.
  And what differentiates government from other entities or other 
people--endeavors that can bring about force. Government has the 
ability to use force to enforce law, to enforce compliance with rules 
that we call laws because they are enforceable by force, with the 
degree of official sanction and impunity that goes along with being a 
government.

  And that is why--I believe it was George Washington who pointed out 
that, like fire, government is necessary, but it has to be carefully 
contained and constrained, less it take over and destroy those very 
same things that it is there to serve.
  James Madison explained it really well in Federalist No. 51, when he 
explained that if human beings were angels, we wouldn't need government 
because if we were angels, we would be naturally benevolent, kind, 
virtuous, and respectful of the law, respectful of order, respectful of 
each other. And that is not to say that human beings are not that way; 
I believe that human beings are fundamentally, generally good. But not 
all human beings are that way, and no human being is that way all of 
the time.
  So getting back to Madison's point, if all human beings were angels, 
we wouldn't need a government because we wouldn't harm each other; we 
wouldn't physically injure each other; we wouldn't try to take other 
people's possessions, things that don't belong to us; we would live in 
harmony. That is not the condition that we inhabit because, alas, we 
ourselves are not angels.
  So he said: If men and women were angels, they wouldn't need 
government. He also said: If we had access to angels to run our 
government, we wouldn't have a problem with government that would 
require us to subject government to rules.
  And that is where this document comes in, the document that was 
written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration 
of Independence, remember, in many respects, sort of helped kick off 
the Revolutionary War. It was sort of already underway a little bit 
anyway, but it made it really official.
  But after the Declaration of Independence was put in place, it took 
years for us to win that war. By most accounts, 6 or 7 years. I believe 
it was about 7 years before it was deemed officially won and we 
defeated the world's last standing superpower at the time.
  Now, this was a conflict as if between David and Goliath. Now the 
original conflict between literally David and Goliath was not a 
conflict in which the smart money would have been on David. David was a 
small shepherd boy. David was no match for Goliath. Had the Vegas 
oddsmakers been in business then, there is no chance that they would 
have given David good odds at all facing Goliath--this huge individual, 
armed to the gills, fiercely trained warrior; he was a professional 
killer. Nobody would have bet on David. Unless they were really, really 
thrill-seeking, risk-oriented gamblers, they would not have placed bets 
on David. Now had they done so, I am sure they would have made a 
fortune because nobody else would have believed that it was possible 
for David to win, but he did.
  So too with the American Revolution. We were David in that battle, 
and England was Goliath--the world's last-standing military and 
economic superpower. We chose to take them on. And despite all odds 
being against us, we won. Took us about 7 years to get through that, 
but we won, and we reflexively, instinctively put in place a weak 
system of national government under the Articles of Confederation, 
which ultimately failed, in large part because in our reflexive 
instinct to resist that which we had endured under British colonial 
rule. We had come to fear large, distant national governments--because, 
in many respects, that is what the American Revolution was about.
  It is not as though our American forbearers sat there one day and 
said: You know, we are tired of flying the Union Jack, or we are tired 
of having a Monarch. That didn't really explain what happened nor was 
it about them being tired of singing ``God Save the King'' or tired of 
the pronunciation they had over there.
  Actually, I have no idea whether, or to what extent, the 
pronunciations differed as much then as they do now, depending on which 
side of the Atlantic you found yourself on.
  It really had to do with this: We were subject to a large, distant, 
omnipresent, brooding, intrusive, heavily taxing, aggressively 
regulating national government, one that was so far from the people 
that it was slow to respond to their needs, even their urgent pleas. It 
became overly aggressive, and it knew no boundaries around its 
authority. That is really what the American Revolution was about.

  During the seasons, the decades--really, the nearly two centuries--in 
which we were in this pattern of being British Colonies, we went 
through cycles. There were seasons when the national government of 
Great Britain would withdraw and let us sort of govern ourselves. It 
was during those seasons, in particular, when our local self-rule--our 
Colonial governments--blossomed, and Americans learned the art of local 
self-government.
  Then there would be other seasons, often during or in the aftermath 
of a large conflict, a large-scale expensive war. The Crown and 
Parliament needed to raise funds for a war or to pay off war debts, and 
very often that is when they would send forth their swarms of 
regulators and tax collectors to the Colonies, and they would start to 
hold the Colonies with a tighter grip.
  And it was after several cycles of this drama--several cycles of this 
bipolar, passive aggressive pattern--that we faced from the Crown and 
Parliament that, in 1776, we decided we had had enough.
  So back to the early 1780s, we won the war. We instinctively put 
together a government that would not resemble the system that we lived 
under previously. And so we reflexively created this quite weak, anemic 
national government, and that too proved problematic.
  Within just a few years, it became apparent that we couldn't survive 
unless we had a national government that

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was capable of functioning as such; and that our national government 
couldn't function effectively as a national government unless it had a 
few powers--including the power to coordinate and regulate commerce 
between the States and with foreign nations, including the power to 
raise taxes to, among other things, fund war efforts, fund national 
defense, assemble armies, and so forth.
  And so it was against that backdrop that our Founding Fathers came 
together in that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They tried the 
previous year in 1786. They assembled in Annapolis to deal with the 
same inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation. They tried to 
convene, but they failed because they failed to achieve a quorum.
  And they assembled in the late spring of 1787. It was still, 
ostensibly, with the mindset of amending the Articles of Confederation. 
It was not officially their objective to write an entirely new document 
and ordain an entirely new structure and framework for our government 
to operate, and yet that is what they came up with.
  I happen to believe that those men were special. They were unusually 
gifted, unusually well educated, both as compared to their day and 
ours, in every respect. I believe they were wise men raised up by 
almighty God to that very purpose, because it is my belief that this is 
a land that God has preordained for liberty, that he did not intend the 
sons and daughters of the United States of America to live in captivity 
under the oppressive yoke of any tyrant, foreign or domestic.
  And that is why we are so blessed with those uniquely inspired and 
inspiring and gifted and well-educated individuals who understood 
liberty. They understood power. They understood its dark side, and they 
understood the potential for greatness of any society that can live 
under the rule of law with this system of laws that attempts to treat 
people equally.
  We may not be equal in our capacity, in our possessions, in our 
stations in life, but we are all treated equally in terms of the fact 
that we are all equally subject to a just system of laws. That, from 
the American Republic's very beginning, has been the objective. While 
we don't always live up to that to the degree that we should, that is 
the aspiration; and, in that respect, it is something that 
differentiates us from so many other nations and certainly did at the 
time.
  What they came up with in the end was a system of government that 
fairly allocated powers between the States and the Federal sovereign. 
And it acknowledged that it is just as important for the Federal 
Government to have power, to be exclusive in its domain over the 
Federal sovereign, as it is for the States to retain all other powers 
not granted to the Federal sovereign. It is no less bad for the Federal 
Government to intrude upon the sovereignty of the States than it is for 
the States to intrude upon and undermine the sovereignty of the Federal 
Government.
  And that is why the Founding Fathers were inclined to devote so much 
time, attention, and brain power to this difficult task of assigning to 
each level of government what its responsibilities would be, and then 
separately assigning to each branch of the Federal Government--the U.S. 
Government--which powers could be exercised by and within each branch.
  These things were relatively foreign to our English counterparts. 
They were even relatively new concepts here in some respects. In 
others, there were patterns that emerged in which you can see a close 
resemblance between the British system and ours--you know, like a 
bicameral legislative body, as there was in Parliament; a chief 
Executive, as there was in England, with a President and a Parliament.
  There was some separation of powers, yes, but it wasn't complete. It 
was nothing like ours was. And then, as now, the dual sovereignty 
system did not exist in the United Kingdom. It was very rare in the 
entire world. It was a relatively new creature here.
  There were a couple of antecedents. I will mention two of them 
briefly.
  One of them was the Swiss cantons, which had survived for centuries 
based on an allocation of power. The Swiss Confederacy, as it was 
known, consisted of a consortium of regional governments called 
cantons, and they came together for certain national purposes--
including, and especially, national defense.
  So, too, was a more local, homegrown, familiar example known as the 
Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois Confederacy had existed and lived 
for centuries with Tribes that came together, maintained their right, 
their authority to govern themselves locally at a local level as to 
internal matters. But they came together and were one when it came to 
external affairs, especially military matters.
  It was in the 1740s that one of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin 
Franklin--many decades before we would become an independent Nation and 
many decades before we would have a Constitution--Benjamin Franklin 
attended a conference of sorts in Albany, NY. Other attendees at that 
conference included a chief from the Onondaga Tribe named Canassatego. 
Canassatego and Benjamin Franklin became friends, or at least allies, 
as Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin the secrets of the 
Iroquois Confederacy's longevity, its durability, its ability to defend 
itself--showing him that if you take one arrow and you want to break 
it, it is easy to break a wooden arrow. But if you take a bundle of 
five or six of those thin, wooden arrows and you bow them together, you 
can't just break them like you can easily break an arrow.

  Canassatego explained to Benjamin Franklin that this is the secret of 
the Iroquois Confederacy. If we were just one Tribe--his Tribe, the 
Onondaga Tribe--if just the Onondaga Tribe had to defend itself, it 
would be much easier for an enemy Tribe to break. But when we are part 
of the Iroquois Confederacy--as they had been for centuries--we come 
together as a confederacy and defend ourselves when we are under common 
attack, when we need to defend ourselves, and that worked.
  In many respects, it was really much more the Iroquois Confederacy 
than the Swiss cantons that were an inspiration. After all, this was 
right here on the American continent. Individuals were able to meet and 
interact with them far more so than they would have ever had the 
opportunity to interact with government officials from the Swiss 
Confederacy. And in many respects, the U.S. Government closely 
resembles at least that spirit, at least that general concept, embraced 
by the Iroquois Confederacy.
  So they wisely came together, and I believe it is fortunate. I 
believe it was providential and the product of a lot of divine 
inspiration and intervention that in that hot, sweltering summer of 
1778, in Philadelphia, having convened ostensibly for the purpose of 
amending the Articles of Confederation to cover a couple of major 
deficits in the Articles of Confederation--they were just going to 
amend them.
  The concept was: We will get together. We will figure out how to deal 
with the interstate and foreign commerce problem, and with the ability 
to raise funds, the ability to raise an army and wage war, when 
necessary, and a few things like that. And then we were going to move 
on, but they didn't do that. And I think that was another part of the 
pattern of divine providence intervening on behalf of American people 
with these wise men raised up by almighty God unto that very purpose to 
bring about the result that they did.
  Finally, in the midsummer of 1787, they signed that document--that 
document that has now persisted, that has now endured close to two-and-
a-half centuries and helped foster the development of the greatest 
civilization the world has ever known.
  Without each of these ingredients, this combination of local self-
rule and national government, each remaining in its lane--this concept 
that we sometimes refer to as federalism--the American experiment would 
have failed.
  So too--and that, by the way, is what I refer to as the vertical, 
structural protection in the Constitution. We have a lot of 
protections. The whole thing is a protection. The whole Constitution is 
a protection in that its purpose for existence is itself restraining 
government power. In literally every instance, with one possible 
exception, that is what the Constitution does: It restrains government 
power.
  So it restrains it on these two axes, the one I just described--the 
allocation of power between the States and the Federal Government is 
the one we call

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federalism. The horizontal protection is the one that I alluded to 
briefly earlier--the separation of powers. We have got three separate 
branches of government. I prefer to refer to them coordinate rather 
than coequal branches. People use different terms to describe them.
  I never call them just equal because they really are not equal. They 
don't wield equal power. They are not equal in terms of their danger.
  Many people mistakenly refer to the judicial branch as the most 
dangerous branch. I think that is a huge mistake. It is just not true. 
Now, sure, when mistakes happen over there, they do have consequences. 
They can be bad, especially because it is the least democratic of the 
three branches. It is the least accountable to the people--by design, 
because its job is not to curry favor with the people. It is, rather, 
to decide cases and controversies. And having been appointed by the 
President and confirmed by the Senate, the Justices who hold the 
highest judicial office in this country, on the highest Court of the 
land, the Supreme Court of the United States--the only Court that is 
itself established by the Constitution, with the rest of the courts 
being the creations of Congress, pursuant to our constitutional 
authority under article III of the Constitution--they are the least 
accountable to the government because they are there to just decide 
case and controversies.
  The executive branch, run by the President--and, by way, as far as 
the Constitution is concerned, the President, and to a degree the Vice 
President, acting together, but primarily the President, is vested with 
the power of the executive branch.
  Insofar as we follow the Constitution correctly, if we were following 
it to its full capacity, we would continue to recognize today, as the 
Constitution itself does and has from the beginning, that all executive 
power is vested in the President of the United States.
  Yes, the Vice President is also elected and serves with him. The Vice 
President serves two principle functions under our Constitution. 
Function one is to serve as a spare, as a backup, as the person who 
steps into the role of the President in the event of a death, 
resignation, impeachment, and removal of the President of the United 
States.
  The second function is to serve as the President of this institution, 
the U.S. Senate. But beyond that twofold role that I described of the 
Vice President, the entirety of the executive power is vested in the 
President of the United States.
  This is significant power, to be sure; and yet that power and the 
power of the Courts is still ancillary to--it is still less than--the 
power vested in this branch of government, where we work--the executive 
branch of the U.S. Government, the Congress of the United States.
  How do we know it is the most powerful? We know it is the most 
powerful because we make the law. The other two branches perform 
ancillary functions to the lawmaking. We make the law. We decide what 
the law should be, what the penalty for not obeying the law should be. 
We prescribe these rules of action in the abstract, and it is then up 
to the executive branch--meaning the President and those who serve 
under the President--to execute, implement, and enforce the law; in 
other words, to carry out what it is that we decide. If you want to 
give it a corporate model analogy, it is as though we are the board of 
directors and the President is the CEO.
  The other way that we know that it is the most powerful and the most 
dangerous--beyond the fact that we make the laws that the executive 
implements and enforces and executes and that the judicial branch 
interprets where people disagree as to its meaning--again, both 
ancillary functions. Executing and interpreting are both ancillary to 
lawmaking. The other reason we know that the lawmaking function--and, 
therefore, the lawmaking organ--the Congress, the legislative branch, 
is the most dangerous and the most powerful is because they entrusted 
that power only to the branch of government that they made most 
accountable to the people at the most regular intervals.
  Presidents stand for election only every 4 years. By contrast, every 
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, by constitutional design, 
stands for election every 2 years, every 24 months. In many respects, 
this feels like a nanosecond in the legislative timeline. It is very 
frequent. So every Member of the House is up for reelection every 2 
years. In the Senate, one-third of our Members are up for reelection 
every 2 years. That is why we are never very far from an election cycle 
that will reorder things, that will send in new personnel, send some 
back home, bring others back in.
  This wasn't just because the Founding Fathers decided in the abstract 
or for optical reasons that this would be fun to try. They did it 
because they knew that this was the most dangerous power, the most 
abusable power within the Federal Government and that it shouldn't be 
entrusted to those who are detached from the people. You need to make 
them accountable to the people at very regular intervals, and that is 
precisely what they did.
  So when we look at that government today and what it does, it is, in 
many respects, far more powerful than the Founding Fathers could have 
imagined, and that is not just because the United States of America has 
grown from this sort of outpost of ragtag rebels who rebelled against 
their mother country to being the world's greatest economic and 
military and educational superpower, not just in existence today but 
perhaps that human history has ever recorded.
  So they would have been surprised by that, but that is not what I am 
really referring to here. They would have been surprised by the extent 
to which this government, our national government, our Federal 
Government, based in this city, has become as powerful as it is within 
this country, separate and apart from the prominence that this country 
has acquired through economic growth, military prowess, and so forth. 
In other words, this government performs a lot more functions than the 
Founding Fathers ever envisioned, ever ordained, or ever authorized it 
to perform.
  If you read through the Constitution--and you can do it in a few 
minutes, it is around 5,000 words, it doesn't take that long--most of 
the powers of the Federal Government are those powers enumerated or 
listed and given to Congress in one part of the Constitution. There are 
a few others that you can find throughout the document. Most of them 
can be found in article I, section 8, with 18 separate clauses. And its 
powers include primarily the power to establish a uniform system of 
laws governing immigration and naturalization: who can come into the 
country, who becomes a citizen, and so forth; the power to collect 
taxes, to raise money, and to spend that money in pursuit of Federal 
purposes as ordained by the Constitution--those are both deficits in 
the Articles of Confederation that they filled--the power to regulate 
trade, or commerce, between the States with foreign nations and with 
the Indian Tribes; the power to establish a uniform system of weights 
and measures and the power to set up a system of postal roads; the 
power to establish a system of what we now call intellectual property 
laws: trademarks, copyrights, and patents, basically. They used 
slightly different language then, but the idea was to protect the right 
of authors and inventors to protect their art, so to speak, whether 
that was a design or an invention, a poem, a book--whatever it is. 
These intellectual property rights would be distinctively national and 
Federal.
  And what, might you ask, do these things have in common? Well, they 
tend to be the sorts of things that need to be done at the national 
level. Basically, that seemed to be their standard: Let's figure out 
what has to be done at the national level lest there be chaos, and 
let's leave everything else to the States and localities.
  There are a few others. Bankruptcy laws come to mind and, of course, 
the power to provide for our national defense: to assemble an Army and 
a Navy, the power to declare war. Then there is perhaps my favorite 
power of Congress that often goes unutilized and inert, almost rendered 
vestigial but shouldn't be: the power to grant letters of marque and 
reprisal.
  I am referring there, of course, to letters of marque. That is 
spelled M-A-R-Q-U-E. This is basically a hall pass issued by Congress 
in the name of the United States that allows the person holding it to 
engage in state-sponsored acts of piracy on the high seas with

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utter impunity, backed by the full faith and credit of the United 
States. If that is not awesome, I don't know what is. Now, it has been 
a couple hundred years since we have used those with any regularity. 
And perhaps it is time we do it again. It is a way of involving 
privateers in our dirty work, in our military work without the U.S. 
Government itself having to put American sweat, blood, and treasure on 
the line.
  If individuals want to sign up to do so, they may do so with the hope 
and expectation that they will reap a liberal, rich reward if they 
succeed in taking things away from our enemies and being able to bring 
those things back into our country. It is part of how we have won wars, 
particularly at a time when we didn't have a whole lot of money. We 
haven't used those in a long time. Perhaps we ought to look at doing 
those again.
  But my point in reciting all of these--and there are a few others, 
but this is the lion's share, where the bulk of the power is. There is 
one other I will mention here that is not found in article I, section 
8. There is one that is found in article I, section 4, clause 1 that 
gives Congress the power to establish rules and regulations 
not governing elections generally, but governing the election of 
Federal officials, principally U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. 
They understood and, in fact, openly provided in article I, section 4, 
clause 1 that those elections would be conducted not by a Federal 
election official--we don't want that, the Founding Fathers didn't want 
that then, we don't want that now, and we should never in the future 
want that--but that the States will conduct those elections and that 
the States could come up with basic rules to govern the time, place, 
and manner of those elections. And in the very same clause, they said: 
But Congress may alter or add to those basic rules and regulations, 
specifically concerning--exclusively concerning--the election of U.S. 
Representatives and U.S. Senators.

  Why? Well, because that is a Federal power. Congress is the Federal 
policymaking body. Congress would necessarily have that power. But my 
point is this: In all of those 18 clauses of article I, section 8, and 
then in all the other miscellaneous powers of the Federal Government 
almost always described in the Constitution as powers of Congress--
because, again, it is our job to set the policy. The two other branches 
perform ancillary--important but ancillary--functions of either 
executing and implementing the laws we make or interpreting the laws we 
make.
  The Constitution, in giving this power, never once gave the Federal 
Government power to just legislate generally. They instead gave the 
U.S. Government the power to do these limited things, to exercise these 
limited enumerated powers that James Madison described collectively in 
Federalist No. 45 as few and defined, while by contrast to those powers 
reserved to the States as numerous and indefinite.
  There is no power in there that says you can make good law generally, 
do good things for good people. That was not what it was about. State 
legislatures, except as constrained by their State constitutions or as 
prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, may have some limitations, but 
except as those limitations are found either in their State 
constitution or in the U.S. Constitution.
  State governments are free in our system to legislate on whatever 
they want just because it might be good policy, but not all good policy 
is constitutional within the Federal system because there are a whole 
lot of things that are not within our power. Among those things are 
things that tend to happen in one State at one time that aren't 
crossing across State lines, that don't trigger any of the issues that 
I mentioned a few minutes ago--national defense, weights and measures, 
bankruptcy laws, intellectual property laws, and so forth.
  Things like labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, 
safety, and welfare historically, except as they touch one of the 
Federal powers, were the province of States and localities. This was 
always how it was supposed to be.
  Now, we have deviated from that substantially, particularly since the 
1930s in the New Deal era and particularly since one date that often 
goes overlooked in American history: April 12, 1937. It is a date when 
the Constitution was changed but not by constitutional amendment. Had 
the change in the Constitution that was wrought that day been 
implemented, been adopted as a constitutional amendment, it would have 
been one of the most significant constitutional amendments ever 
adopted, but they didn't do it that way. It was done by the Supreme 
Court.
  The Supreme Court, I believe, exceeded its authority and, by so 
doing, authorized the U.S. Congress to exceed its authority by 
interpreting one provision--clause 3 of article I, section 8, the 
commerce clause--to give Congress the open-ended power to regulate not 
just what it had theretofore been able to regulate as interstate 
commerce--meaning, up until that time, the commerce clause had always 
been understood--historically and according to its text, the text, the 
original understanding--it had always been understood and accepted as 
authorizing Congress to do a few things: No. 1, we could regulate 
things or persons moving in interstate commerce; meaning moving across 
State lines; meaning, if you had interstate commercial transactions. 
Let's say if you had a farmer in Virginia growing tobacco and he was 
selling his raw tobacco to a cigar manufacturer in Maryland, that was 
an interstate commercial transaction. That is part of why the commerce 
clause was put in there, because neither the laws of Virginia nor the 
laws of Maryland would be competent to address all the issues that 
could come up in that commercial transaction occurring across two 
different States.
  You had to have at least some government power that was capable of 
resolving disputes where one State claimed all of the authority to 
regulate that transaction and the other State did likewise. Just one of 
many examples of how and why the commerce clause was designed and 
originally understood: among other things, to authorize Congress to 
regulate interstate commercial transactions--things and persons moving 
in commerce across State lines.
  (The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore assumed the Chair.)
  It was also understood historically as authorizing Congress to 
regulate channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, the 
conduits and processes and means by which persons and things typically 
move interstate in a stream of commerce. And by this we mean interstate 
roadways, waterways, canals. Today we would add airways, airwaves, and 
so forth. These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate 
commerce. There are a lot of these.
  To give you an example of one: our telephone system or the internet. 
These are networks of wires that themselves are all connected, and 
those wires stretch across States--across every State. If you pick up a 
telephone here and you make a phone call in Washington, DC--or if you 
are in Utah--if you pick up a telephone in Provo, UT, my hometown, and 
you call someone else in Provo, UT--it hasn't crossed interstate 
lines--that is still subject to Federal regulation because you have 
touched a channel or an instrumentality of interstate commerce.
  By the same token if you board an aircraft in Salt Lake City, UT, and 
you fly to southern Utah, land in St. George, UT, that is an interstate 
flight. You have not crossed State lines. And yet that is properly 
regulated as a Federal thing because you are traveling in interstate 
airways.
  These are channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce. So 
what changed on April 12, 1937? Well, it was that the Supreme Court of 
the United States interpreted the commerce clause giving Congress the 
power to regulate not only that, not only channels and 
instrumentalities and interstate commercial transactions but also 
anything and everything that when measured in the aggregate, even if it 
takes place in one State at one time, as long as it substantially 
affected interstate commerce when measured in the aggregate one could 
regulate it Federally.
  Now, does that sound like legalese? Yes, because it is. Does it sound 
confusing? Yes, it is probably intended to be so. Let me just put this 
in perspective.
  This radically transformed our government the U.S. Government that 
was originally established and ordained as

[[Page S1636]]

a government of powers that James Madison described in Federalist No. 
45 as ``few and defined'' while describing the powers reserved for the 
States as ``numerous and indefinite.''
  It almost flipped the equation.
  Because of the supremacy clause where we do act, where we have the 
authority to act, our law governs, our law trumps the inconsistent 
State law that might conflict with it.
  And so, yes, that matters. And that mattered immensely because all of 
a sudden we went from being a Federal Government with few and defined 
powers to a government with numerous and indefinite powers because 
almost everything--almost every aspect of human existence--in one way 
or another can sort of be characterized as something that when measured 
in the aggregate substantially affects interstate commerce.
  Let me give you an example of this carried to its logical conclusion 
where it went: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel was the decision the 
Supreme Court made on April 12, 1937. It did so in the context of labor 
regulations.
  They said: Yeah, labor, even when we are talking--as we usually are--
about somebody who is working in a job in one State at one time not 
across interstate lines, not in a channel or instrumentality of 
interstate commerce, not in the District of Columbia, an Indian 
Reservation, or some other Federal enclave, but just garden variety 
labor in a particular State.
  Because other people work in other States and people sometimes move 
from one State to another and money is frequently transacted from one 
State to another, that means Congress can regulate labor--or that is 
what they concluded at the time.
  Within 5 years, this culminated into a really illustrative 
flashpoint. In a case called Wickard v. Filburn the Supreme Court of 
the United States reviewed a case involving the plight of a wheat 
farmer named Roscoe Filburn. He was a wheat farmer in Ohio, and he got 
in trouble with the U.S. Government. He was fined many thousands of 
dollars.
  I don't remember what the exact sum was, but as I recall, it was the 
present-day equivalent of what would have been many tens or perhaps 
even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a grave offense against the 
United States.
  What, you might ask, was his grave offense? Did he kill somebody? Did 
he rob a bank? Did he remove too many mattress tags that you are not 
supposed to remove?
  No, they didn't have those then.
  No. This was his offense: He grew too much wheat. He grew more wheat 
than Congress in its infinite wisdom felt was appropriate. Technically 
speaking, it wasn't Congress' judgment, and this is part of the 
problem.
  Congress, in 1937, perhaps egged on by NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin 
Steel--Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937. In the 
Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937, Congress decided to ordain and 
establish the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the omniscient, 
omnipresent arbiter of who may grow what crops and in what quantity, 
because after all we can't have people growing whatever crops they want 
in whatever quantities or that would be chaos--dogs and cats living 
together in the streets, Book of Revelation-style chaos.
  We could not have that. We have got to have Congress controlling 
prices. So we delegated out to the Secretary of Agriculture the power 
to make his own set of laws, thus violating at once both the vertical 
protection of federalism because all of the sudden we cannibalized a 
lot of the State power and made it Federal. We had taken it over from 
them.
  And then we simultaneously disrupted the horizontal protection of 
separation of powers because we are supposed to make the laws--and we 
kind of still do--but ever since 1937, we have also kind of just been 
delegating it out to other people. That is what Congress did with the 
Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1937.
  So they said: Secretary of Agriculture, you may--in fact, you must 
establish production quotas for a whole host of agricultural products.
  Why? Well, because we can't have farmers deciding how much wheat or 
hay or rice or beef to raise. That would be chaos because then we won't 
be able to control prices. And if Congress can't control prices, it 
will be chaos. Dogs and cats living together in the streets, Book of 
Revelation-style apocalyptic nightmares. That was their warning.
  So they handed that power over to the Secretary of Agriculture. And 
what did he do? Well, he sent out to every farmer--we will start at 
least with every grain farmer in America--these little cards.
  I have one of them framed. My son John gave it to me for Christmas a 
couple years ago. It is a little card just like the one that Roscoe 
Filburn the wheat farmer would have received, telling him how much 
wheat--how many bushels of wheat he could grow based on the number of 
acres he farmed to grow wheat. And they said: You may not exceed X 
number of bushels.
  So we had just exercised the power that was always historically 
considered a State and local power--if they exercise that power. It 
would have been a State power because a wheat farmer typically grows 
wheat--at least in those days they would have and most farmers still 
today--they were typically operating in one State at one time. They are 
not growing wheat while on a conveyor belt or a bus that moves 
interstate or something. So it would have been subject to State and 
local power.
  No. We made it Federal. Once it was Federal, then we messed up the 
vertical protection of federalism. We then outsourced the lawmaking to 
the executive branch--not to the President directly, but to the 
Secretary of Agriculture--and we said: OK. You can now make a bunch of 
other laws, and those laws will decide how much wheat per acre a wheat 
farmer may grow and then the same thing for a whole host of other 
agricultural products.

  Back to Roscoe Filburn. He got in trouble. He got fined a ton of 
money, many thousands of dollars, which is lot more then than it is 
now.
  But, you know, this farmer Roscoe Filburn, he was no simple-minded 
human. And Roscoe Filburn had what every American should have; he had a 
darn good lawyer. So when he got to the Supreme Court of the United 
States he said: You know what? I shouldn't be in trouble at all for 
this because, yes--yes--it is true. I grew more wheat than Secretary 
Wickard--the Secretary of Agriculture at the time--told me I could 
grow. I did it. But I shouldn't get in trouble for that because the 
wheat--the amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my Federal grain 
production quota--my limit--never entered interstate commerce.
  And that, after all, was the hook, the Federal hook that allowed the 
U.S. Government authority over Roscoe Filburn's wheat and the wheat 
grown by every other farmer in America.
  So he said that: The amount of wheat that I grew in excess of my 
quota never entered interstate commerce. Why? Because it never entered 
commerce at all because it never even left my farm. I took that wheat, 
the wheat I grew on top of my grain production quota, and I kept it on 
my farm to use as food for my family and for my animals and to reserve 
the balance to use as seed in subsequent growing seasons.
  That is a darn good argument. It should have been the end of the 
matter. It wasn't. The Supreme Court wasn't finished with its verbal 
legal and mental gymnastics.
  They said: Ah, but by not complying strictly with your grain 
production quota and with growing even a small amount of wheat in 
excess of your grain production limit as granted to you by the 
Secretary of Agriculture, that means that you bought less wheat than 
you would have had to buy on the open market; because had you not 
retained that for use on your own farm, you would have to have bought 
it somewhere else. And that, in turn, when replicated by other Roscoe 
Filburns all over the country would itself have in the aggregate a 
substantial effect on interstate commerce.
  It is really quite disgusting if you think about it. We went from a 
government of few and defined powers to a government of powers that can 
be described as numerous and indefinite, all without altering or 
amending the Constitution, which was made deliberately difficult--to 
amend the Constitution--because it is a law of laws.
  It is not supposed to be something you can just change like changing 
a

[[Page S1637]]

pair of socks. You have got to amend the Constitution, and amending the 
Constitution was made deliberately difficult. There are two mechanisms 
by which you can do it. We have only ever used one, and that is the 
mechanism by which two-thirds of both Chambers of Congress propose a 
constitutional amendment, and that amendment becomes effective only 
after it has been ratified by three-fourths of the States.
  We didn't use that. And had they tried to amend the Constitution like 
that, it would have never succeeded. It would have failed miserably 
because they would have known.
  It is kind of a problem because ever since then, we have just 
accepted this premise that the U.S. Government is really powerful, that 
it can exercise pretty much whatever power it wants because it is only 
a mental step or two removed from saying: well, this or that affects 
interstate commerce.
  Once we have all this power vested in this government, it became far 
too easy and far too tempting--far too alluring for Federal lawmakers, 
U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives, to cease to be the lawmakers 
and instead to make other lawmakers to delegate the lawmaking power, to 
pass laws that read sort of like this: We hereby declare as Congress of 
the United States that we shall have fair labor standards in the United 
States and we hereby delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the 
power to make and interpret and enforce their own rules carrying the 
force of generally applicable Federal law to make sure that we have 
fair labor standards.
  We hereby declare that we shall have fair trade practices in the 
United States and hereby give the FTC the power to make its own laws 
that govern what fair trade practices are, and they can make the law 
now.
  You do this with Agency after Agency after Agency, and so now the 
people who were once closely connected or at least only one step 
removed from those who made even their Federal laws, now they are 
several steps removed from it. And you have got people making their 
laws who were neither elected by the people nor accountable to them.
  Now, lest you think this is a de minimis problem, let me give you 
this example. I have got two visual aids in my office in addition to 
the Agricultural Adjustment Act grain production quota just like the 
one Roscoe Filburn had.
  I keep these two stacks of documents. One is a short stack. It is 
about that tall. It is usually a few thousands pages long, consists of 
the laws passed by Congress last year. Some would say that is too big, 
too many pages. Maybe they are right. Regardless, it is about that big.
  The other stack is 13 feet tall. In a typical year, it is about 
100,000 pages long, stacked--with each of these documents stacked on 
top of each other. It is 13 feet tall, 100,000 pages long. That 
consists of the Federal Register.
  The Federal Register is the annual cumulative index of Federal 
regulations as they are first announced, released for notice and 
comment, creating the illusion of a democratic process--it is just the 
illusion, the notice and comment process in what is known as modern 
administrative law in the United States.
  It is a fraud. It is a farce, at least as far as any kind of 
democratic input goes. They do whatever they want. They don't really 
care that much. I mean, they try to go through the notice and comment 
period, receive the comments, and make some nominal changes, perhaps if 
they see something they haven't thought of before.
  But for the most part, they are going to do whatever they want 
because they don't care. They don't work for the American people. They 
can't be fired by the American people. They don't ever stand for 
election. Most of them don't even work for anyone who him or herself 
can be fired.
  It is almost government on autopilot, which is a type of government 
that can't be removed, which is not just something that has the 
potential for tyranny, it is the literal definition of tyranny.
  In fact, some of the leading political philosophers, some of the 
political philosophers that have the greatest imprint on the thinking 
of our Founding Fathers, noted that the consolidation of the power to 
make law with the power to enforce law--if that power is wielded 
whenever, if ever it is wielded by the same people, it is not just the 
case that that can lead to tyranny; it is tyranny. It is what tyranny 
is. So that is a problem.
  These are all areas in which we have strayed in one way or another, 
and it explains how it is that we started from this simple system that 
was established from the beginning on popular sovereignty and started 
also from the premise that we wanted local self-rule, local government 
to be the norm except, where necessary, to wield Federal power, and 
where Federal power was appropriate, it should be distributed between 
these three branches of government--one making the laws, one executing 
and enforcing them, and one interpreting them. We went from that system 
to a system in which consolidation of power has become the norm rather 
than distribution of power, which was the entire objective of the 
Constitution.
  Why, then, am I speaking of this today? Over the 2\1/2\ centuries of 
our country's existence and the soon-to-be 240 years of our operation 
as a constitutional Republic under the U.S. Constitution of 1787, we 
have seen these structural protections granted to the American people 
as part of their freedom, as part of what it means to have popular 
sovereignty. We have seen them whittled. We have seen them diminished, 
oftentimes in small increments, other times in giant leaps. But these 
offenses to the structural Constitution shouldn't be overlooked, they 
can't be overlooked, and when they are overlooked, it causes other 
problems. It also makes that much more severe what can happen whenever 
any other constitutional insult or injury or offense or deviation comes 
into existence.
  Let's take for example--let's suppose that even though most 
Presidents operating the executive branch of government would pledge 
while running to faithfully execute the laws of the United States as 
our Chief Executive Officer--in fact, that is kind of part of the job, 
part of the oath of office that they take. Insofar as they stray from 
that and they either exercise power that is not theirs or they refuse 
to execute power that they are charged with enforcing, that creates its 
own set of problems.
  One of many points in our history that I can point to where that 
became a problem is during the years January 20, 2021, to January 20, 
2025. The President of the United States decided that the borders of 
the United States and the laws designed to protect the borders of the 
United States and the laws designed to decide who may enter this 
country and who may not were sort of optional, and that, after all, it 
really just needed to be much more about letting people who wanted to 
be here into our borders and live among us--in many respects, as one of 
us.
  During that 4-year period alone, as stunning as it may seem, 10 to 15 
million people entered our country unlawfully with the President of the 
United States and those serving under him basically--not just basically 
but genuinely beckoning them on, saying: Come on in. May we get you a 
cold beverage? Is there anything we can do to make you more 
comfortable?
  Ten to fifteen million--now, this is problematic on so many levels. 
Congress, over many decades, has enacted laws deciding who may enter 
and who may not. Congress has, over many decades, decided the terms and 
conditions by which that may happen, who may enter, and for what period 
of time, who may work and in what capacity, subject to what 
restrictions.
  These were all just overlooked for the most part as that President--
the one serving from 2021 to 2025--just said: Let's just bring them all 
in.
  He paid lipservice to a couple of laws that appeared to grant fairly 
broad authority to allow people in for humanitarian purposes, but he 
didn't follow those. He did not follow the restrictions that those laws 
put in place; he just said: Come on in.
  Realizing that, you know, it was going to be very difficult to stop 
him from allowing that to happen--and it was. Ten to fifteen million 
people entered the United States unlawfully during that time period. 
That by itself is a type of insult, a type of injury to the 
constitutional structure in that if you have a President who refuses to 
enforce

[[Page S1638]]

the law and, in fact, facilitates the violation of our law, that is 
itself a type of injury to the Constitution.
  It is a type of injury that is often difficult in many respects for 
the courts to enforce. In some cases, the courts have the chance to do 
so, and they don't enforce it. But there are a number of constitutional 
injuries that are very, very difficult for the courts to enforce, and 
the problem continues.
  This by itself was an injury, but the injury compounded. As you might 
imagine, people were fleeing countries in numbers that large, that many 
millions of people, all at once. Some of them were running from 
something. They were all running from something, and some of those 
people who were running from something had no doubt led a life of 
criminal activity in their home countries.
  Nearly every one of those people, nearly every one of the 10 to 15 
million people--maybe more--paid an exorbitant sum. At the low end, we 
are talking $3,000, $4,000 a head. At the high end, for the higher risk 
ones--the people who had to travel from farther distances or who had 
bounties on their heads or warrants out for their arrest on Interpol or 
whatever--those people were paying many tens of thousands of dollars a 
head. To whom? Well, not to the U.S. Government--to international drug 
cartels, which ended up making tens of billions of dollars a year, year 
after year, during that 4-year reign of terror in which Joe Biden 
refused to enforce our border.
  Meanwhile, if we back up a few years, back up 30 years or so, when 
Congress passed another law--a law that I am going to reconnect with 
what happened between 2021 and 2025 in just a moment.
  In 1993, Congress enacted a law called the NVRA, the National Voter 
Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law. It was designed 
for a purpose--it was meant to make it easier for American citizens to 
vote. It said this: For any State that agrees to participate in this, 
they get an amount of Federal funding for cooperating in the Federal 
program. Nearly every State agreed to participate in it and 
participates in it to this day.
  The program works like this: Under the NVRA, an American citizen in 
any participating State, which is nearly all of them, can go into a 
DMV--a department of motor vehicles or whatever you call it in your 
State--and apply for a driver's license. When they apply for a driver's 
license, they are free to check a box saying: I would like, while 
applying for my driver's license, simultaneously to register to vote.
  It is kind of a good idea in some ways, I suppose, because when you 
go to a DMV and you are applying for a driver's license, you typically 
have to establish who you are. They are going to take your picture. 
This is going to become an official document. It is sort of like when 
you register to vote. So why not do both of them at once? It made a lot 
of sense, I suppose.
  But the way it works out is all you have to do is check a box saying: 
I want to register to vote as I am applying for a driver's license. 
Then here comes the kicker. All you have to do is sign your name at the 
bottom saying ``I certify that I am a citizen and otherwise allowed to 
vote,'' meaning ``I haven't lost my right to vote by virtue of a 
criminal conviction or something like that or for renouncing my 
citizenship'' or whatever else could end up doing that. There isn't 
much else that would have that effect. But that is all it requires. 
There is no proof. There are no details. Nothing.
  Well, back in 1993, even though it wasn't that long ago, the world 
was a little bit of a different place. We didn't have 30 million-plus 
noncitizens residing in this country then. We do now. And it wasn't 
commonplace in those days for the noncitizens who were here to need to 
have and, in fact, to have a driver's license. So many of them didn't 
apply for them. Many States didn't offer them if you weren't a citizen.
  That has changed, too, since 1993. Nearly every State today will give 
you a driver's license--no problem--if you are not a citizen. In 19 
States plus the District of Columbia, you may freely apply for and 
receive a driver's license even if you are by your own admission an 
illegal alien. Even if you are a known illegal alien, you may do so.
  So what is to stop them from going in to apply for a driver's license 
and checking the box saying ``I want to register to vote too''--
especially when all they have to do is sign their name at the bottom? 
No further questions asked. That is it. It seems risky, right? It seems 
dangerous.
  Well, a couple decades ago, some States started to wrestle with this. 
Some States started to consider, well, maybe we ought to ask a few 
questions. Maybe we ought to ask for some type of documentation as to 
their citizenship.
  That issue was raised by the State of Arizona, and in 2013, two 
decades after the NVRA was passed, the Supreme Court of the United 
States decided a case called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of 
Arizona. In that case, the Supreme Court said: We have looked at the 
NVRA, and we conclude that the NVRA prohibits Arizona or any other 
State--when registering voters using an NVRA form at a DMV, we conclude 
that the NVRA prohibits those States from requesting any proof of 
citizenship or asking further questions with regard to citizenship 
because this is a Federal matter and any discretion about the 
requirements of the NVRA have been preempted by Federal law such that 
the States have no authority to act in that area.
  So since 2013, no State is even allowed to inquire into somebody's 
citizenship when they do this.
  It didn't get that much attention at the time. In fact, this is a 
case that until fairly recently--I introduced this bill in the Senate. 
My partner on this bill in the House of Representatives is Congressman 
Chip Roy from Texas. He and I started piecing this puzzle together 
about 2\1/2\ or 3 years ago. When we put it all together, we realized 
this really is a problem, and it became an especially acute problem 
during the Biden Presidency when 10 to 15 million illegal aliens came 
into this country. We realized the extent to which this could be 
abused--perhaps is already being abused.
  But our greater concern has from the beginning been based on what 
could occur in the future as people realize the extent to which voting 
in U.S. elections is really easy if you are not a citizen. That is why 
we wrote, that is why we introduced what was originally called the SAVE 
Act, which is a very simple approach. The SAVE Act simply said that 
when you apply to register to vote using an NVRA form or otherwise 
register to vote, you have to prove you are a citizen if you want to 
vote in Federal elections.
  Now, the States are free to do whatever they want with regard to 
their elections. State and local elections are the province of State 
and local governments. And they themselves may decide, consistent with 
the terms of their own State constitutions, who may vote in what 
election.
  Until a few years ago, I would have considered it an absurd 
suggestion if anyone even hinted at the possibility that some States 
might legalize noncitizen voting. Well, some States have at least for 
purposes of some local elections.
  There are three or four States, plus DC, that at least in some local 
elections openly allow noncitizen voters. Now that means that they are 
registering noncitizens to vote in those elections.
  As Federal authorities have inquired into how it is they go about 
separating out those voter registration files and making sure that 
those noncitizen voters registered to vote in those States are 
precluded from voting in Federal elections, they go mute. They refuse 
to answer. They won't say anything.
  That is chilling. They are registering noncitizens to vote. We asked 
them: How do you keep them from voting in Federal elections? And they 
won't answer. That is not the worst of it.
  About half of the States, particularly those with Democrat 
legislatures and Democrat Governors, refuse to answer any questions 
about whether, to what extent, in what way they are taking any steps to 
review their voter registration files to make sure that no noncitizens 
are not found among them. They refuse to answer. They refuse to share 
data.
  We have established, within the Department of Homeland Security, a 
database, a database known as the SAVE database, hence the term SAVE 
Act. I will get in a minute to the name change that happened more 
recently with the SAVE Act.

[[Page S1639]]

  It is this database called the SAVE database that was established and 
designed for this very purpose--to help States to review their voter 
registration files and take their voter registration data. It is one of 
the great miracles of modern technology. We have this huge country, 
some 350 million people who are still living here, most of whom are 
citizens. But we have got more noncitizens living here than ever 
before.
  But through the miracle of modern technology, it is relatively easy 
to take these huge files, these huge databases of voter registrations 
in the 50 States and the District of Columbia, run them through the 
SAVE database. And it will fairly quickly kick out a report, showing 
these individuals appear not to be citizens of the United States.
  To their credit, a lot of States have taken advantage of this. 
Interestingly enough, it is basically most, nearly all States with 
Republican legislatures and Governors have done that or at least have 
started the process of doing that. In the process, they have discovered 
many thousands of noncitizens who have, in fact, registered to vote--
many thousands.
  That is just in the States that have decided to clean up their files 
and decided to run them through the SAVE database. Those are the 
conscientious ones. What about the nonconscientious ones or the ones 
that are conscientiously, if they might want to call it that, refusing 
to comply, refusing to even figure out whether they are violating the 
law?
  Remember, it is a Federal offense--it is a Federal felony offense to 
vote in a U.S. Federal election. It is, likewise, a Federal felony 
offense to knowingly facilitate and arrange for someone who is not a 
citizen, knowing that they are not a citizen, to vote in U.S. Federal 
elections.
  And yet these States are just refusing to comply. It is like don't 
ask, don't tell. Do not tell me where the noncitizens who are voting in 
our State might be found because we don't want to remove them.
  What other legitimate reason could there be to turn a blind eye to 
this? Knowing all that we know, about 30 million noncitizens living in 
the United States, 10 to 15 million who just arrived in the last few 
years alone--how easy it is in almost every State to walk into any DMV 
and by signing your name and checking a box, registering to vote, 
including in Federal elections, with four of those States and the 
District of Columbia openly allowing noncitizens to vote in some local 
election, and then refusing to tell us what, if anything, they are 
doing to prevent those noncitizens from voting in Federal elections.
  That is why we introduced the SAVE Act. And then in the last couple 
of months, at the request of President Trump and Majority Leader Thune, 
we changed the SAVE Act to the SAVE America Act. We had the name 
change. It is descriptive. It is what we do. We save America by passing 
this.
  And we also added the voter ID provision. This was kind of part of 
the plan from the beginning. We had originally wanted to introduce it 
with the voter ID provision of the bill. But we were advised at the 
time to keep it simple so that we have a simple message about 
citizenship.
  But as time has moved on, we have realized that there is actually 
great symmetry. And we have come up with this mantra that the SAVE 
America Act is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. It is 
equally important to accomplish both of those objectives.
  Without both of them, you mess things up. If you leave off either of 
them, you are in trouble. So if you make it easy to vote but also easy 
to cheat, you are going to have problems. It is going to be chaos.
  If you make it hard to vote and hard to cheat, that is going to cause 
its own set of problems. You don't want to make it hard to vote. You 
want it to be easy because exercising that constitutionally protected 
right, that is the fundamental incident, the fundamental blessing. The 
core element of what it means to be a U.S. citizen should not be 
difficult to exercise.
  And so we wrote a bill that, when passed into law, will make it easy 
to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of those, if you 
give short shrift to either objective, you will have a problem.
  Now, how do we do that? Well, we achieve it through two principle 
means: The SAVE America Act requires voter ID at the time of voting, 
government-issued photo ID showing that you are who you claim to be and 
that you are the same person listed under your voter registration file. 
Very simple.
  A whole lot of our States, including, I believe, 22 States 
represented by at least one, if not two, Democratic Senators, have 
photo ID laws. So if a whole bunch of Democratic Senators come from 
States that have voter ID laws, you don't hear them complaining about 
the voter ID law.
  If they don't complain about their own States' voter ID laws, why 
should they be concerned about ours? Why should their State and local 
elections be any different than ours when we have the clearest and the 
strictest penalty against noncitizen voting?
  Well, there shouldn't--there isn't a legitimate defense against this. 
There isn't a legitimate reason to not have a voter ID law in place in 
the Federal Government, just as so many of the States have.

  The second element involves citizenship, citizenship verification. We 
achieve this citizenship verification in two different ways: One, it is 
the citizen's responsibility. When a voter shows up to register to 
vote, he or she must provide some type of proof of citizenship.
  Now, ideally, we would like that to be the same type of proof of 
citizenship that is used in other areas of the Federal Government, most 
notably, most commonly, the type of proof of U.S. citizenship that 
every American citizen has for decades and still to this day has to 
provide when starting a new job, whenever you begin a new job as a new 
employee.
  In fact, everyone in this room, everyone in this building, everyone 
in the entire Capitol Complex, nearly every--essentially, every 
employee in the United States of America has had to provide this 
documentation whenever he or she starts a new job as an employee.
  You have to fill out a form called the I-9, where, in addition to 
stating your name and date of birth and basic information like that, 
you are also required to provide documentation of your U.S. 
citizenship. And that is to make sure that those working in the United 
States, those employed in the United States are either citizens or, if 
they are not citizens, that they are here on a visa that allows them to 
work.
  Not all visas allow employment; and those visas that allow some 
employment usually have pretty significant restrictions attached to 
them, defining the nature and the duration of the work they may carry 
out here while being paid.
  That documentation typically consists of a birth certificate and a 
government-issued photo ID. Sometimes an original copy of the Social 
Security card can also suffice to buttress, to supplement the birth 
certificate. It has got to be an original copy of the birth 
certificate. Not hard to get. Easier today to get than ever before.
  In most States--I believe in every State today, in fact--you can 
order one of these online if you can't find yours. And for a few 
dollars, you can order a copy and have it mailed to you within just a 
few days.
  It used to be a little bit harder. You know, in the days before the 
internet, you would have to write out a letter, put it in the mail, 
stamp it, wait for it to come back. Maybe they would get it. Maybe they 
didn't. But it is a lot easier today.
  These documents are so common that every American has to provide a 
set of documents every single time they start a new job. I myself have 
had to do this a number of times. Since becoming an adult, every single 
job I have started, I have had to fill out an I-9; and I had to provide 
that documentation.
  I had to do that even here when starting as a U.S. Senator. I had to 
provide that documentation, and that wasn't the only documentation I 
had to provide. I also had to provide my election certificate that 
showed that the people of Utah had, in fact, elected me to the U.S. 
Senate.
  Had I not done so, I couldn't have started this job, just as I 
couldn't have started any previous job without proving who I was and 
that I was a U.S. citizen and that I was entitled to be here.

[[Page S1640]]

  So it requires you to prove your citizenship. The preferred form is 
the birth certificate, coupled with a government-issued photo ID.
  But when we wrote the law, when we wrote this bill, we really wanted 
to make sure that we didn't make it too hard because, again, we want to 
make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. If you cheat either one of 
those, if you pay too little attention to either one of those elements, 
you are going to mess up the equation.
  And so we said: Look, there may be some people who have incomplete 
documentation. Maybe they have got a government-issued photo ID but no 
birth certificate. Maybe they have the birth certificate but no 
government-issued photo ID.
  Or maybe some people will be missing something else. Maybe they have 
had a name change. Maybe they have--you know, a woman who has gotten 
married and decided to take her husband's last name has her birth 
certificate. The birth certificate doesn't have her husband's last name 
on it because, you know, obviously, her parents would have had no idea 
what her husband's name would be or who she would marry. So it wouldn't 
be on there.
  If she can't find her marriage certificate or some other proof of a 
name change, we don't want that to become a problem. And, in fact, we 
don't even want it to even become a problem if a voter registering to 
vote can't find any of his or her documentation. Most of us have those, 
and we can find them without too much trouble. And if we can't find 
them, most of us can order one--order a copy and get what we need.
  But even if you can't find one of the necessary documents, or you 
can't find any of them, or because your house burned down, or because 
your dog ate them or something else--I don't know--we still wanted to 
make that easy.
  And so we provided text in there that is now found in the legislation 
now pending before the Senate. It starts on page 12, line 22 of this 
legislation.
  And it says that if you can't find any of the other documents, I 
mean, any of them or all of them, it is OK. You can fill out an 
affidavit. It is just like filling out a form. You just have to provide 
a little bit more information.
  And then you allow the State to confirm or refute that information 
that can establish the critical elements of your citizenship.
  So, for example, the affidavit would look something like this. If you 
are a natural-born citizen of the United States, meaning you were a 
citizen as of the moment of your birth, by virtue of the circumstances 
surrounding your birth, then you are a natural-born citizen.
  And if you are a natural-born citizen, then your affidavit would look 
something like this: I, John Smith--or whatever your name is--was born 
on such and such a date in this or that city. Here were my parents' 
names. Maybe you need that; maybe you don't. And I was a citizen as of 
the moment of my birth.
  It is about all you would need if you had the birthplace, the birth 
date, and especially your parents' names. It would be very easy for the 
State to document that. Then, once you fill out that affidavit under 
penalty of perjury--it is a sworn statement. Once you fill that out, 
the burden shifts to the State, and unless the State concludes that you 
have been lying--and if you were to lie about it, there would be 
consequences because you will have signed it under penalty of perjury--
then you are good. There is no further responsibility, and there is no 
cost. If you are lying, then, yes, there would be problems, but I don't 
think most people are going to do that. Most people have sense enough, 
by the time they have to sign something under penalty of perjury in the 
form of an affidavit--providing that level of detail--that it is going 
to be less likely.
  In any event, that is a risk that we take on in this legislation. 
Why? Well, because we want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. 
We don't want to skimp on either one of those elements.
  You can also prove your citizenship with one document if you have got 
it. That document is a U.S. passport. Not everybody has one of those. A 
lot of Americans do. It is useful to have, especially--if you are ever 
going to engage in any international travel, you are going to need one. 
If you don't ever travel internationally, you probably don't want to go 
through the hassle and expense of getting one as they cost a couple of 
hundred dollars; but if you do have one, you can use it.
  So here we are. It is very simple legislation requiring that which we 
already require in other laws. It is requiring people to do what they 
do all the time. Every day in America, a whole lot of people are 
starting a new job. In fact, I would dare say that, of the working-aged 
adults in the workforce today--I don't know what the average is, but I 
would imagine that the average American employee probably changes jobs, 
changes employers, at least every--I don't know--5 or 6 years. Maybe it 
is more than that. This is not an uncommon thing. And every time you do 
that, you have got to pony up the documentation for the I-9 to prove 
you are an American citizen or you can't start the job. So we know 
people are doing this because we know most adults in this country--at 
least those who are able to work--do, in fact, have jobs. So this is no 
mystery.
  We also know that--I don't know--I think it is, maybe, 160, 170 
million people have passports. To get a passport, you have got to 
provide--obviously, you can't provide a passport to get a passport 
unless you have already got one that hasn't yet expired. Then it will 
serve as proof. If you have never had one or if you have one that has 
expired, you are going to have to come up with the original 
documentation: a birth certificate, a government-issued photo ID, a 
Social Security card, whatever.
  But a lot of people go through this--and not just a lot--we are 
talking hundreds of millions of Americans do this all the time. It is 
not that difficult. Yet you would never guess this based on the hue and 
cry we hear from our colleagues across the aisle.
  This law has taken on a life and a flavor all its own. This proposed 
law, this bill, is really, really popular as 90 or 95 percent of all 
Republican voters support it, and between 70 and 75 percent of 
Democratic voters support it.
  Do you know how hard it is to find any bill or any set of policies 
that will garner that much support in every racial and age and 
geographic demographic imaginable? in every party affiliation 
demographic? It is really uncommon. This thing seems to be growing more 
popular every single day. In fact, it is controversial only in the 
halls of this building, the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. Congress is the only 
place where it is controversial. Only Senate and House Democrats don't 
like it. The American people overwhelmingly do. Sure, you will find a 
few people out in the country who don't, but they are vastly 
outnumbered.
  So why would the Democrats here oppose it? Well, let me go through 
some of the arguments that we hear most frequently against it.
  The first argument that we often hear is not necessarily the most 
common, but it is one that almost always comes up, so I will list it 
first, which is stunning to me.
  The argument goes like this: We can't do this because States are in 
charge of elections, not the Federal Government. This is a violation of 
the vertical protection of federalism for the U.S. Government to impose 
this mandate on the States, which are constitutionally responsible and 
exclusively responsible for conducting elections.
  This is a lie. This is just a baldfaced lie. It is incompatible with 
any reading of article I, section 4, clause 1. It is, moreover, the 
height of hypocrisy for people who continue to support a whole litany 
of laws already enacted by this Congress, pursuant to the very same 
provision of article I, section 4, clause 1--under the very same 
provision--yet they don't oppose those.
  In fact, the only reason that this law even became necessary--what 
first got us thinking about it--has to do with this expansive, absurdly 
incorrect interpretation of the NVRA made by the Supreme Court back in 
2013. I say it was absurdly incorrect and it was and it remains that 
today. It, nonetheless, remains conclusive over the dissent of my 
former boss Justice Alito, who wrote a masterful dissent explaining why 
that interpretation was wrong. The majority of the Court persisted with 
what was an unconscionably bad ruling and not supported by the text.

[[Page S1641]]

  What irritates me, what astounds me, and what leaves me almost 
speechless is that not one of our Democratic colleagues--nearly all of 
whom are raising this trumped up, baseless federalism argument against 
the SAVE America Act--not one of them has ever breathed a word about 
the NVRA. Not one of them has ever even hinted at the possibility that 
we might need to repeal the NVRA. They are not saying that, and I am 
not arguing that. But taken to its logical conclusion, their own 
argument leads inexorably to the conclusion that the NVRA itself is 
unconstitutional, which it is not, but that is where it goes. That is 
where the hypocrisy starts and does not end.
  Shame on them to make a federalism argument here when the plain text 
of the Constitution says that this is a Federal responsibility and when 
our existing law that they do not oppose; that they wholeheartedly 
support; and that some of them were even here and voted for and 
supported and aggressively advocated to pass--they say nothing about. 
Yet it is the same law. If this is unconstitutional, that one was way 
more unconstitutional. Neither one of them is. They know it, and they 
persist in making these arguments.
  Argument No. 2: This argument was made just a little while ago by my 
friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from Vermont--the last 
speaker in this Chamber before I started speaking this evening and a 
good friend of mine. I really do like him, but he is wrong on this. He 
is not just wrong, but somebody has badly deceived him. He is making 
the argument that this disenfranchises women. He even read a letter 
from a constituent, from a woman, in his home State of Vermont who was, 
understandably, expressing outrage because she believes that she and 
other women around the State of Vermont and throughout the country are 
about to be disenfranchised should this bill become law. She will not.

  Now, her argument and his argument, in building on her argument 
raised in her letter and sending alarm bells, should have been 
something that he as a U.S. Senator would have wanted to correct. After 
all, we don't want our constituents panicking, especially needlessly, 
and this one is a needless panic. She wrote to him in a panic, 
understandably concerned that she and other women across the State of 
Vermont and throughout the United States of America would be unable to 
vote because, if after getting married they take their husband's name 
and their birth certificate doesn't contain their married name--unless 
you happen to marry somebody with the same last name that you were born 
with, which very rarely happens--then all of a sudden, you would be 
unable to vote.
  What? This has never been the case. This has never been a problem. It 
is not a problem when you fill out the I-9 when you start a new job. 
Yet you use a birth certificate for that. It is not a problem when you 
apply for a passport. You use a birth certificate for that. It is also 
not a problem when you register to vote under the SAVE America Act. We 
make it very simple and clear: If you have got a marriage certificate, 
that can suffice for establishing the name change. If you have got a 
name change that occurred for other reasons having to do with adoption 
or you just wanted to change your name, you can provide the court order 
approving the name change and recording it. People do change their 
names, and sometimes there are interesting stories about this.
  Years ago, when I was a young missionary in the Lower Rio Grande 
Valley of the State of Texas, I met a family who told a story of a 
family friend who decided, one day, that he wanted to change his name 
to Squirrel. He went to a local courthouse and appeared before the 
judge.
  The judge said: Do you want to change your name?
  Yes, sir.
  To what do you want to change your name?
  And he said: Squirrel.
  The judge said: Squirrel? ``Squirrel'' what?
  And he said: Squirrel--period--meaning that is it. He just wanted to 
be ``Squirrel,'' sort of like--I don't know--Cher, Bono, Sting. 
``Squirrel--period.''
  Well, the court reporter, apparently, recorded that as an answer, so 
his name is now ``Squirrel Period,'' with the last name spelled P-E-R-
I-O-D. That is what it is. So, from now on, unless he has changed his 
name since then, Squirrel Period has had to establish his identity as 
Squirrel Period. I hope he has changed his name since then because that 
doesn't seem like a great last name and rather confusing.
  In any event, Squirrel Period, if he were to newly register to vote 
under this law--and keep in mind, it is only if Squirrel Period decided 
to move or otherwise had to newly register to vote--this law wouldn't 
require anything new in terms of his voter registration, meaning, if he 
is already registered to vote--and there is nothing that requires him 
to reregister as this law does not--he is not going to have to go in 
and redo his voter registration. That doesn't change unless or until he 
moves. Nobody's status quo changes under the citizen provisions of the 
SAVE America Act unless or until you move.
  So, assuming Squirrel Period moved, Squirrel Period would need to, in 
the first instance, either provide a--if he had a U.S. passport, that 
would be the easiest way to do it because you can use one document. So 
he comes forward with his passport. If his passport says ``Squirrel 
Period,'' then he can register to vote with that. If he doesn't have 
one of those, then he would get his birth certificate. I have no idea 
what this individual's name was at the time of his birth. Let's say his 
name was John Smith. He would provide the birth certificate that says 
``John Smith'' and then a copy of the court recording, with the court 
seal, saying that John Smith had changed his name to Squirrel Period.
  But even if Squirrel Period couldn't find any of those documents--not 
his birth certificate, not the court documentation of his name change 
from John Smith to Squirrel Period--he could still square out an 
affidavit establishing those essential elements: I was born John Smith 
in Harlingen, TX, in 1954. My parents were James and Emma Smith, and I 
changed my name 25 years later in the general district court of 
Harlingen, TX, from ``John Smith'' to ``Squirrel Period.'' I am a 
natural-born citizen.
  That would be the end of it.
  They hand that over to the State election officials, and it is up to 
the State election officials to do the rest. Even if he doesn't have a 
single document to his name at that point, he could still register to 
vote.
  What is wrong with that? There is not a darned thing wrong with that. 
This is just good government. This is protecting and preserving popular 
sovereignty--a form of popular sovereignty that we will lose if we 
continue on this course toward not caring about who votes in our 
elections.
  Yes, we lose a degree of popular sovereignty also when we allow, when 
we enable, when we facilitate, when we deliberately turn a blind eye to 
the risk of noncitizens voting in our elections. This is an act of 
facilitating foreign interference in our own elections. This is a form 
of democratic suicidality that I don't think we have ever observed in 
this country.
  Why any country would want to attack itself or allow or invite itself 
to be attacked like this, I do not comprehend. Against such a known 
risk, it is difficult to understand.
  Of course, in addition to these provisions that require the citizen 
to provide documentation at the time of voter registration, of new 
voter registration, there are some back-end citizenship verification 
requirements that don't impose any burden at all on any citizen, that 
just require the State election officials to routinely go through and 
review their voter registration files in an effort to weed out those 
who are not citizens.
  Now, they may leave them in there for purposes of voting in State or 
local elections if their State and local laws and State constitution 
allow that. That is their business--crazy, in my opinion, but they can 
do whatever they want on that. But for purposes of ascertaining who may 
receive a ballot to vote in a Federal election under the provisions of 
this law, they would be required to work with the people at the 
Department of Homeland Security who run this SAVE database, cycle their 
data through that database periodically to identify those who may have 
registered to vote, and then remove them from eligibility to vote in 
Federal elections.

[[Page S1642]]

  Again, that imposes no obligation, no burden on any U.S. citizen 
other than the government officials involved in that, whose job it is 
to enforce and apply the law anyway. This doesn't do anything to 
undermine anyone's right to vote.
  So back to the arguments against it. We started with the federalism 
argument; we refuted that one.
  We proceeded then to the argument that this would disenfranchise 
women--absolutely absurd. There is not a single particle of truth to 
that.
  Argument No. 3, Jim Crow 2.0--that this would somehow disenfranchise 
racial minorities, Black Americans. Sometimes they articulate it as 
``rural Americans,'' which is weird, as if certain demographics within 
this country, whether racial minorities, rural Americans, or otherwise, 
can't be expected to have documents. This is just racist. It is not 
just unsettling; it is not just disturbing; it is not just insensitive; 
that is racist. Some refer to it as the ``soft bigotry of low 
expectations.'' There is nothing soft about this bigotry; it is just 
bigoted. And this is coming from the party of Jim Crow, the party that 
pioneered and designed Jim Crow, the party that designed this system of 
laws throughout the Southern United States to systematically, hatefully 
exclude African Americans from public life and much of private life, to 
segregate them.
  This is evil. I can't imagine why a member of the party of Jim Crow 
would want to resurrect memories of Jim Crow, especially when making 
accusations of Jim Crow where accusations of Jim Crow have absolutely 
no place. There is nothing about this that is that way.
  So for them to accuse us of supporting Jim Crow policies--were this 
not the U.S. Senate, where we have the speech-and-debate clause 
privilege--I mean, those are not only fighting words, those are 
defamatory. They are false and defamatory words spoken with knowledge 
of their falsity and reckless disregard as to their truthfulness. Even 
under the very, very strict standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, as 
against a public figure, that is defamatory language. Yet they do it 
over and over again.
  Do you know what else? To show you how absurd this is, if that is Jim 
Crow, do you know what else is? Well, the Oscars, the Grammys, the 
Emmys, the Super Bowl, and the Democratic National Convention, because, 
you know what, to get into the Democratic National Convention, to 
participate as a delegate in the Democratic National Convention, guess 
what you have to do. You have to produce photo ID and documentation 
that you are entitled to be there and that you are eligible to 
participate and vote in the Democratic National Convention. So if the 
SAVE America Act is Jim Crow, then so is the Democratic Party.
  But, of course, the Democratic Party is not Jim Crow. Yes, they were 
into that thing many decades ago. Fortunately, that ended many decades 
ago. But neither is the SAVE America Act.
  On that note, let me talk about how that ended many decades ago. How 
did it end, this awful regime? For centuries before then, when slavery 
was a thing, African Americans lived in violent oppression and in a 
truly evil system that deprived them of the dignity of being human 
beings in every way imageable.
  After the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were 
adopted and Reconstruction began, we were supposed to emerge from that. 
We were making progress toward racial equality in this country until 
gains made by the Democratic Party in national elections in the 1870s 
halted Reconstruction, and in many ways, that oppression--the same 
oppression that kept African Americans in bondage for so long--took on 
a different form.
  Now that slavery was abolished, of course, with the 13th Amendment, 
the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment accorded them the 
rights of full citizenship, no differently than anyone else, and 
established this principle that the government may not treat you 
differently based on your race. The 15th Amendment ensured that those 
formerly in the bondage of slavery would have the right to vote.
  Yet, as Reconstruction was halted, a different form of oppression 
took over and lasted for far too long--for many decades. In fact, kind 
of the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in many respects started with 
the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, but there 
were still vestiges of Jim Crow alive and well after that.
  In many respects, what sounded the death knell--not immediately but 
really started nailing down the end of Jim Crow--was the enactment of 
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law is instructive here. When that 
law was still a bill, a proposal, it was passed by the House of 
Representatives in March of 1964. At the time it was passed by the 
House, it had a national approval rating of about 51 percent.
  It came over here to the Senate. Many people considered it doomed to 
failure over here because in the Senate, the supporters of the Civil 
Rights Act didn't have nearly enough votes to achieve cloture in the 
Senate.
  Cloture is, of course, the mechanism codified in rule XXII of the 
Senate rules that allows the Senate to bring debate to a close.
  They were 32 votes shy of the supermajority required for cloture. To 
his great credit, the Senate majority leader at the time, Senator Mike 
Mansfield, a Democrat, decided that he was not going to give up even 
though he was 32 votes short of cloture, which meant effectively that 
it couldn't pass, or at least that was conventional wisdom.
  He said: Nope. We are going to see about that. We are going to debate 
it, and we are going to require those who oppose this law to come down 
here day after day, week after week, for as long as it takes to state 
their opposition to it, and we will require them to hold the floor and 
to continue to state their opposition and see what happens to the 
popularity of that bill as they do that.

  They did that day after day, and this continued for weeks, a total of 
60 days, excluding Sundays, when I think they would discontinue, so for 
70 calendar days, but they were in session for 60 days.
  Eventually, that started to sharpen the senses of the U.S. Senators 
who were opposing the legislation. They got tired of standing here day 
after day to defend the indefensible, to defend an oppressive system of 
Jim Crow laws, and they got especially tired as they realized that law 
was getting even more popular even as they were trying to defeat it.
  Their position became indefensible, but it took weeks of debating 
it--literally many, many weeks, like 10 weeks of debate--before they 
got to the point where they decided they had had enough and they were 
losing. Their arguments were unpersuasive, and in the end, those 
arguments became impossible for them to overcome.
  So as a result of that fact, having their minds sharpened by physical 
exhaustion and by the sort of political exhaustion that comes from 
having to defend an indefensible position, they started negotiating 
amendments--perhaps initially to save face with the American people and 
eventually in an effort to try to resolve whatever lingering 
substantive concerns they had. They were able to do that, and they 
negotiated amendments, and they adopted amendments. Those amendments 
eventually were sufficient for them to be able to overcome a 32-vote 
cloture deficit. The law passed, and with that came the end of the 
oppressive Jim Crow era.
  I believe that the time has come again when we need that kind of 
filibuster. People who are aware of the filibuster, what it means, 
start to conflate it, view it as the other side of the same coin as 
cloture. They are kind of the same thing but not really. They are kind 
of the other side of the same coin but not really.
  You see, cloture is a procedural mechanism--one procedural mechanism 
that can be used to force debate to a close. You have to have a 
supermajority of Senators in order to stop all Senators from continuing 
to speak.
  But this isn't necessarily a static thing. The fact that in March of 
1964, when there was not a sufficient supermajority to force debate to 
a close with a cloture vote--in fact, they were 32 votes shy of that--
these guys had the courage to continue debating week after week after 
week, meaning those who wanted to pass the law, those who were probably 
being told by some of their colleagues: You are wasting everyone's 
time. This can't pass. We are 32 votes shy of cloture.
  But thank Heavens that we brought Jim Crow to an end. That hateful, 
oppressive, evil system of laws was

[[Page S1643]]

brought to an end because Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, a 
Democrat, was willing to make Senators defend their indefensible 
positions until they could no longer defend them or, alternatively, 
until they decided it was time to start to agree, to start to negotiate 
changes and to make changes, to make the bill acceptable, and they 
finally did that, and they got it passed into law.
  Do you know what? Jim Crow is dead, and it is dead in large part 
because of Mike Mansfield's courage in forcing Members to debate. Thank 
heavens he didn't give up and throw up his hands and say: Oh, everybody 
is telling me we can't do this. Thank Heavens he didn't give up and 
say: Our Members are tired, and they want to go home, or they want to 
go to Paris or whatever it is that they want to do when the Senate is 
in recess. Thank Heavens that they were willing to stand with something 
knowing that it was the right thing to do, knowing that the American 
people wanted them to do it until it could get done. And it worked, and 
we are all the beneficiaries of it.

  Who knows how long that tyranny would have ended? Who knows how long 
that hateful regime of Jim Crow would have lasted had Mike Mansfield 
not had the courage to do that. Yes, I am a Republican, and he was a 
Democrat, and my hat goes out to him. Thank Heaven above for Mike 
Mansfield.
  I will not pretend for a moment that the similarities between the 
SAVE America Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are any greater than 
they are, but I am also not going to ignore the procedural parallels to 
them or the procedural dynamics at play in the U.S. Senate that I think 
warrant our best efforts to try to pass this thing. Unlike March of 
1964 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the House, when it 
had a 51-percent approval rating with the American people, the SAVE 
America Act is supported by 80 or 85 percent of all Americans today.
  And unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which when it arrived in 
March of 1964 in the Senate Chamber, it faced a daunting, seemingly 
insurmountable cloture deficit of 32 votes, we have a cloture deficit 
of only 10 votes. Unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was 
groundbreaking, revolutionary, brave, yes, but also somewhat complex, 
it plowed a lot of new ground, a lot for people to digest to understand 
how it might work--this bill, the SAVE America Act, is relatively 
simple. It is only 28, 29 pages long.
  I think one of the reasons for its popularity is that people totally 
understand the need to do it, and most people can tell you what it 
does: It makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Well, how does it do 
that? Voter ID and proof of citizenship, it is that simple.
  So, yeah, it is hard. Yeah, we face a cloture deficit, but we have 
overcome harder obstacles before. We can do hard things. In the U.S. 
Senate, perhaps we sometimes forget that we can do hard things, but we 
can. And I assure you, we must. And if I have anything to do with it, 
we will.
  Now, I know that some want to give up, and I know that far too many 
of my colleagues who want this bill to pass maybe are wondering: How do 
we do it? I will tell them: Hold on, have faith, have hope, and have 
the courage to stand up and continue to defend what it is that we know 
our voters want and what in our hearts we know is right, what we know 
in our hearts the American people need and deserve. And it is, after 
all, already against Federal law for noncitizens to vote in U.S. 
elections, so why not make it official? Why not make it real? Why not 
make it enforceable?
  You see, because this ties to one of the other arguments made 
regularly against the SAVE America Act, however disingenuously, however 
shamefully. One of their favorite arguments against the SAVE America 
Act is we don't need it, we don't need it because noncitizens don't 
vote. In fact, they don't register to vote because--and here is the 
kicker--because it is already illegal.
  You know how crazy that is? Do you know how absurd that makes you 
look when you make that argument? That literally is like saying we 
don't need police to enforce the law because crime is already unlawful. 
It is like saying we don't need to require liquor store operators to ID 
their customers to make sure that they don't sell liquor to children 
because selling liquor to children is already illegal. This makes no 
sense.
  In fact, what they are arguing against the SAVE America Act is 
arguably even more absurd than those two extremely absurd hypothetical 
examples I just provided. Why? Because our system of laws, yes, makes 
it unlawful for noncitizens to vote, but our system of laws, because of 
the way this has been interpreted and the way it has evolved over the 
years, it makes it impossible to detect. And when something is 
impossible to detect, it is impossible to enforce.
  Now, it is not impossible to detect in the sense that if you run the 
voter registration files through the SAVE database, as many States--
primarily those run by Republicans--have done, it is pretty easy to 
figure out who shouldn't be registered and to remove them from the 
voter database, to remove their voter registration--or at least their 
voter registration for purposes relevant to Federal elections.
  So it is not that hard if you are a State that doesn't want 
noncitizens to vote because noncitizens voting in Federal elections is 
unlawful. So that is really what we are talking about here, isn't it? 
It is about the States that don't care. It is about the States that 
know they have got noncitizens registering to vote--and we do because 
every State that has looked into it has found them. And just from the 
few States that have started doing it, we know of thousands.
  I suspect before long, we will know of thousands just from the small 
handful of States that have started cleaning out their voter 
registration files and running their data through the SAVE database. 
And those are just the States that are conscientious enough to try to 
make some minimal effort to detect it.
  What are we to make then of the States that refuse to answer the most 
basic questions about who is registered to vote in their State? I would 
imagine--I am willing to make a guess--that some of those have some of 
the most rampant problems within their voter registration rolls, some 
of the most noncitizens.
  And so I will not be surprised if, at the end of the day, we discover 
that tens--perhaps hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are currently 
registered to vote. That number could sharply spike to many millions or 
even tens of millions, given the 30 million-plus noncitizens currently 
residing in this country and the 10 to 15 million noncitizens who 
entered this country illegally between 2021 and 2025 alone.
  And so we will end where we began, talking about our country's 
birthday, about our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of 
Independence, of these core concepts of popular sovereignty that this 
is, in fact, a government of the people, by the people, and for the 
people; that this is a government in a country in which we acknowledge 
and have acknowledged for almost exactly 250 years that governments are 
instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the 
governed.
  This government isn't legitimate without our consent, and it ceases 
to be legitimate when we allow those who are not citizens, who are not 
part of our body politic, to exercise decisions. If everyone is family, 
no one is family. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. If 
everyone is given the benefit of citizenship by allowing them to vote, 
then citizenship means nothing. That is the core message that I wish 
our Democrat colleagues would accept, and I am confident they will 
ultimately accept, as we continue to make this argument because we are 
not going away.

  I am not going away. I will be back on this floor in this Chamber day 
after day, week after week, month after month, as long as it takes. I 
am not giving up--not a chance in hell am I giving up on this because 
this is about the American dream itself. This is about the fact that 
when you allow noncitizens to vote, you are robbing something from the 
American people, from each individual American citizen, something which 
is distinctively, rightfully theirs.

[[Page S1644]]

  You cannot take that away. You are taking it away when you allow 
somebody else to cast a vote that will cancel out yours. That is 
unfair, it is unacceptable, it is un-American, it is illegal. We must 
not tolerate it, and we will not.
  At the end of the day, we can ignore this problem all we want. I am 
not going to ignore it. Eighty-five percent of the American people 
aren't ignoring it. If there are a few people in this building who want 
to ignore it, so be it, but it is not going to be easy. And they will 
eventually have to acknowledge that they are on the wrong side of 
history, just as those who stood against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 
eventually learned that they were on the wrong side of history.
  And make no mistake, you are. You are on the wrong side of history. 
You will ultimately be proven wrong on this. I hope that they come 
sooner rather than later for your sake, for mine, and for all those we 
represent.
  I fundamentally believe that America's best days remain yet ahead of 
her. They remain yet ahead of her because the American people, as 
Winston Churchill is noted to have said--perhaps apocryphally, perhaps 
accurately so--that the American people will always ``do the right 
thing'' after they have exhausted every other alternative. If Mr. 
Churchill didn't mean that as a compliment to the American people, I 
nonetheless take it as such. It is what we do.
  As I noted at the beginning of my remarks, we have certain 
aspirations that we try to live up to that are embodied in our founding 
documents, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. 
While we have, countless times, done so imperfectly and at countless 
times we have fallen far short of that to which we have agreed before 
God and before government, we know when we need to do better. This is 
one of those times.
  Almighty God intended this land to be a land of liberty--a land of 
liberty--and I hope and pray it always will be as we honor Him, as we 
honor our founding documents, and perhaps, most importantly, as we 
honor each other, as we honor our own citizenship and that of our 
fellow citizens. In order to do that truly, we must pass the SAVE 
America Act.
  I will be back again and again until this is done. I have miles to 
go--many, many miles in this journey. I have promises to keep and miles 
to go before I sleep. And it is not time to sleep. That time is in the 
future when this is done. Until then, I will not rest.

                          ____________________