Electing officers of the House of Representatives.

Mr. President, thank you for the recognition today.

I rise today for the people. I am glad to be joined by Senator Merkley. We have worked a long time together on

government reform issues, campaign finance reform, and rules reform-- some very, very important issues that face the country.

Today, in this country, there is a deep disconnect between what the American people are demanding from their leaders and what the President and the Congress have been giving them. Poll after poll shows that the American people want affordable healthcare. Yet the Republican leadership and this President have tried time and again to take away healthcare rights and healthcare protections.

Poll after poll shows that the American people want good-paying jobs. Yet the Republican leadership and this President gave a massive tax-cut windfall to the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations.

Poll after poll shows that the American people want clean air and clean water. They want Congress to tackle climate change. They want to protect our public lands. Yet for years the Republican leadership has done the opposite, and the Trump administration is dismantling environmental protections and sabotaging our efforts to fight climate change.

Poll after poll shows that the American people support commonsense gun safety laws. Yet for decades the Republican leadership has refused to take any action whatsoever on even the most basic safety laws, like universal background checks.

Poll after poll shows that the American people want Dreamers to stay in our country. They don't want children separated from their parents. They want comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system. Yet the Republican leadership has opposed these priorities for many years, and now this President moves forward with his divisive and hateful immigration policies.

It is no wonder that trust in government is so low. According to a recent survey, just 19 percent overall trust the government to do what is right. Famously, root canals have a higher approval rating than Congress.

We are a representative democracy. Yet the people are not being represented. Their will has been stymied.

The situation has gotten dramatically worse under this President. There is no doubt about that. But these problems precede this President, and they will live much longer than his time in office unless we act.

To put it bluntly, some of our most basic, democratic institutions are broken--our voting rights system, our campaign finance system, and our ethics rules.

The American people know in their gut that this system is rigged. That is why the drug companies get what they want, and people pay through the nose. That is why the millionaires and billionaires get more tax cuts, and the working people get left behind. That is why the polluters get off scot-free, and the rest of us get dirty air and contaminated water.

Unrigging this system requires reform--real reform--so that we bring power back to the everyday Americans and out of the hands of the special moneyed interests that rule Washington.

Let's talk about how we do that. For years, I have stood with others in this Chamber to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, for an independent, nonpartisan drawing of House districts, and for closing the revolving door in Washington.

In the past, some Senate Republicans were independent of their leadership and supported these ideas. The President had even promised to ``drain the swamp.'' As we all know by now, unfortunately, that promise was empty.

But with the change in leadership in the House of Representatives, Congress is now making progress to enact the reforms that the American people want.

The House will soon pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act--a major reform package to fix our broken system. It will be up to the Senate to follow suit.

Next week, my Senate colleagues and I will introduce our own ``For the People Act''--a comprehensive set of reforms to move this effort forward. I hope we will have bipartisan support, but I was disappointed to hear the Republican leader deride this essential reform bill as ``the Democrat Politician Protection Act.''

This is not only a warped political comment, but it is also cynical and totally misses the point, especially when you consider that the American people overwhelmingly--across party lines--support these kinds of reforms. It is the special interests who oppose them because they are threatened by them.

If the Republican leader feels the same way about this bill as the special interests do, perhaps the bill is not the problem.

Every Member of the Senate will have a choice. Do they support reform, where our ideas and policies can compete on a level playing field, or do they choose to side with the special interests to do their bidding in return for their protection and money during election season?

I have known plenty of Americans who oppose this system. John McCain was one of them. Senator Alan Simpson is another. Senator Cochran was a cosponsor of my constitutional amendment.

No party has to side with the big money and special interests. It is a choice. It is a choice we must make together to return our democracy to the people and to rid our system of corruption.

This bill will do just that. It will make it easier, not harder, to vote. It will bring an end to the dominance of big money and politics, and it will ensure that politicians actually serve the public interests.

First, on voting rights, for 50 years the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has stood as a bulwark against voter suppression practices and enfranchised millions of voters, but in 2013 the Supreme Court eviscerated it in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, unleashing a torrent of State laws designed to suppress the vote among minorities.

The Court's 5-to-4 decision rendered the Voting rights Act's preclearance provisions ineffective and cleared the way for States to engage in voter suppression. Since Shelby, nearly 1,000 polling places have been closed across the country, many in southern Black communities. Voter ID laws have been tightened, and early voting has been slashed. Voter rolls have been purged, and House districts have been redrawn to dilute the minority vote.

One of the many egregious examples is North Carolina. Less than 2 months after Shelby, that State enacted far-reaching voter suppression requirements. North Carolina's law was struck down by a Federal court of appeals, finding that the law targeted African Americans ``with almost surgical precision.''

Just this last midterm, we saw voter suppression tactics surge. For instance, in North Dakota, the State legislature passed a law right before the November election that took aim squarely at the Native vote. The law required voter IDs to list physical addresses--an impossibility for many Native American voters living on reservations. A Federal court found that 5,000 Native American voters did not have the necessary identification.

We have no choice but to respond and to restore the Voting Rights Act so States are stopped from closing off the franchise. That must also include the Native American Voting Rights Act to address voter suppression tactics in Indian Country and to make sure the Native vote is counted, not discounted.

Bills to restore lost voting rights protections have been introduced in both Chambers. I hope the Senate majority will work in a bipartisan way to restore this landmark legislation.

We should make it easier for voters to register, not harder. In a healthy democracy, automatic voter registration, online voter registration, and same-day voter registration for eligible voters would be noncontroversial.

Voting should be easy. Too often, for too many, it is hard. It is our duty to fix that, and this bill will do that.

Extreme political gerrymandering continues to skew State and congressional elections. Results from legislative races don't reflect the proportion of each party's voters. Voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.

Congress must direct nonpartisan, independent line drawing in each State to draw congressional districts, and congressional districts must fairly reflect States' racial compositions so our representative government truly represents the electorate.

There is no other way to put it. Our campaign finance system is broken. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens

United decision opened the floodgates for unlimited contributions and dark money, and this Congress's negligence has allowed the flood to drown out regular people's voices.

Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on candidates. The super wealthy can and do try to buy elections. Dark money groups can receive unlimited amounts of money from big corporations and wealthy individuals, spend their unlimited sums to influence elections, and never disclose their dollars or what they wanted in return for their investment.

There was $1.4 billion spent on the last Presidential race in 2016. This midterm's outside expenditures topped a billion dollars. The system is rigged right before our eyes.

How do we reverse course and return elections to the American people? For starters, Congress needs to shine a light on the dark money and require realtime disclosure, close loopholes that allow for foreign money, and create a small donor, public matching fund system for everyday contributions. Most critically, we must overturn Citizens United and related decisions. A Supreme Court that equates big money with speech puts campaigns for sale to the highest bidder.

Once again, I will offer an amendment to the Constitution to overturn Citizens United, as I have since 2016. Congress has a long way to go to push our popularity above a root canal and to restore the public's confidence.

We also need comprehensive ethics reform. Elected officials and public servants should not reap huge personal profit from their public positions. We need to tighten the revolving door. We need to tighten lobbying disclosure laws, and we must require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.

Beyond that, Presidents and Vice Presidents must divest of any and all assets that create a conflict of interest. Candidate Trump promised to disclose his tax returns. He didn't. He then promised to disclose them after an alleged audit. He hasn't. That is unacceptable.

We know the President has business and financial ties with Russia and Saudi Arabia, and this may well explain his strange closeness with Vladimir Putin and Muhammed bin Salman. Transparency and divestiture are the only ways to avoid conflicts of interest and corruption. These issues go to the heart of what it means to be an American.

Our democracy is supposed to exist by the will of the people and by the consent of the governed. Congress has an amazing opportunity before it. The House of Representatives is starting debate on its comprehensive reform package. My colleagues and I will introduce our legislation next week.

To Republicans around the country: Don't fall for the majority leader's cynical name-calling. I know you love your democracy as much as I do. This is not about protecting Democrats or Republicans; it is about protecting Americans from a rigged system. Let us commit to work together to pass reforms the American people hunger for.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am pleased to be here on the floor with my colleague from New Mexico, who has been a champion for restoring our democracy, working year after year over the last decade toward that vision, and presenting tonight superb comments on the history of where we have been and where we should go.

This last weekend, I went to Alabama. I went with Congressman John Lewis to be there to look into the history of discrimination in our Nation, the history in which we had separate entries to buildings for Whites and for Blacks and separate water fountains. We had front doors for White America and back doors for Black America.

We were standing on the spot where Rosa Parks stood before she stepped onto the bus and said: I will not sit at the back of the bus. I will be treated like every other American. She asked for equality, and she started a big movement to break down discrimination.

Last weekend, we also gathered together in Selma, AL, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This spot is where John Lewis and a whole set of individuals took a stand. They were planning a march. They were going to march for voting rights--for voting rights in America, voting rights that had been taken away as a strategy of suppressing the voice of the people, particularly the voice of African Americans.

We have struggled in the history of our country toward full equality of opportunity--full equality to participate in this beautiful democratic Republic we call America. We started with a Constitution that was flawed by not recognizing the full equality of every American.

We fought a war over slavery, and after that war, a strategy was devised to continue to strip the right to vote from African Americans by taking African-American men, arresting them as felons, and then saying that felons can't vote--a determined strategy both to reenslave, because the constitutional amendment said that you could put people to work if they were a felon, and to strip voting rights from them.

That is a history we should be putting behind us--a history of voter intimidation and a history of voter suppression. Have we not come to the point where we can recognize that the real vision in our ``we the people'' democracy is that every person gets a full chance to participate, that we should be looking for voter empowerment, not voter suppression?

This beautiful document we have worked to perfect and fulfill over time. It was President Lincoln who said: ``America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.''

Aren't we at that point now, where the vision of government of, by, and for the people has been corrupted by voter suppression, by voter intimidation, by gerrymandering, and by dark money flooding our campaigns? Aren't we at that point now that our very essence of our constitutional vision of government by and for the people is being destroyed by these corrupting forces?

Here is what we have in America right now. We have a circle of power of those of great wealth and those of great privilege, and they want to run this government and write our laws to benefit those inside that circle.

That circle isn't that large. It is a small percent of our population, but they use their great wealth and their great leverage to continue to corrupt the vision of our Constitution because the last thing they want is a government that serves the people.

What they are invested in, what they fight for is government by the powerful few and for the powerful few. If anyone has any doubt that we have reached this point of huge corruption in this country, look simply at what happened in this Chamber in 2017 when the majority party said that we have two missions: Mission one, take down healthcare for 20 to 30 million Americans; mission two, raid the national Treasury for $1\1/ 2\ trillion and give it to the very richest Americans and largest corporations.

That is what happens in a corrupted government by and for the powerful rather than by and for the people. That is what happens in dictatorships around the world where the elite raid the National Treasury and steal the money for themselves.

I will tell you what else happens. They don't invest in ``we the people.'' They don't invest in the foundations for families to thrive. We know what those foundations are: good public education, debt-free college, employment programs that include apprenticeships and career technical education, a healthcare system that is simple and seamless and is there when your loved one is sick or injured, and it doesn't send you into bankruptcy, a system where drug companies can't gouge you and raise their prices dozens or even a hundredfold because the laws were written to let them do it, a system that invests in affordable housing so every family can have a decent home in a decent community, investment in infrastructure, rural broadband, repaired highways, expanded transit systems, all kinds of infrastructure that enable our economy to thrive and our people to do well.

Did we see what this corrupted system now in place of government by and for the powerful, did we see an investment in healthcare or housing or education or infrastructure or living-wage

jobs? We did not because this Chamber is now run by and for the powerful of the United States of America, not the people.

So along comes the other Chamber at the end of this hall, and this other Chamber says: We want to restore the vision of our Constitution, and they put together H. Res. 1. They said: Let's take this on. Let's take on the gerrymandering. Let's take on the voter suppression. Let's take on the dark money. They put together this bill for the people--for the people, not for the powerful.

They proceeded to say: Let's start with that challenge of gerrymandering. Let's make sure the people pick their leaders instead of their leaders picking their electors. Then they proceed to take on voter suppression and voter intimidation.

It was President Lyndon Johnson who said ``the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.''

That powerful instrument is at the heart of our Constitution. It is the instrument that the powerful and privileged want to diminish, destroy, and take away so they can continue to run this country by and for themselves.

So this bill says: Let's proceed to do voter empowerment. Let's extend early voting to all States. Let's ensure that there is an opportunity for people to register to vote, sign up to vote on the internet, and have same-day registration. Let's encourage vote by mail, which gives a full opportunity for everyone to participate without having to get to a poll on a day that it is difficult to get there, and let's make sure changes designed to suppress voting are not automatically approved, that we will restore the Voting Rights Act, which said we will protect the voting system, its sacred heart, the Constitution, and we will not let people's rights be stripped away.

If you look back at November 6, and you look at what happened across the country, you see the plot--the plot to prevent the poor from voting; the plot to prevent minorities from voting; the plot to prevent college students from voting. One State went so far as to say you can't vote if your ID doesn't have an expiration date because the college IDs in that State didn't have an expiration date--strategy after strategy, purging people off the voting rolls without their permission right before the election.

So this bill, the For the People Act that the House is working on right now and that we will introduce right here in this Chamber says: We believe in the Constitution of America; we believe in the power of the people, and we will protect the right to vote. The For the People Act takes on campaign finance. It proceeds to say: We will have disclosure of contributions. There is sunlight on the system that disinfects it--a phrase that so many of my colleagues used to say when they were opposing the McCain-Feingold limits. They said: We oppose caps on donations, but we support disclosure. It is the sunshine that disinfects the system. Suddenly, when the bill that provides disclosure was up before this body, the individuals who said that said: ``Oh, I was wrong, I don't want sunlight in the system,'' and voted against disclosure. So the House is saying: Let's do it. Let's create transparency.

There is an honest ads component that says people need to be able to know who is funding the ads they are seeing. I know I have seen in my campaigns, attack ad, after attack ad, after attack ad funded by front groups.

Wouldn't it be better for America if the folks behind those ads actually have to disclose that they are behind those ads?

We have in this bill a small-dollar match so individuals who seek to run for the House or the Senate with small-dollar donations, donations up to $200, get a 6-to-1 match, encouraging breaking the grip of the vast dark money and the money that comes from the most affluent in large chunks, leveling the playing field for participation by regular Americans, freeing our elections from the grip of dark money.

This bill, the For the People Act, says let's improve the ethics. Let's reduce or try to eliminate the conflicts of interest that haunt this Chamber and haunt the House Chamber down the hall.

John Lewis stood on that bridge on Bloody Sunday. Congressman John Lewis, long before he was a Congressman, in 1965, stood on that bridge. He stood, and he was the very first person in line as the troops approached to beat up the protesters. They shoved him, they pushed him down, they struck him in the head, and then they proceeded to beat up and terrify the other protesters on that bridge.

Those protesters were standing for the vision of our Constitution, were standing for voting rights, the most powerful instrument, as Lyndon Johnson said.

They went back to that bridge the following Tuesday, and they marched up and were stopped, and they agreed to turn back--``Turn Back Tuesday.'' Then they reorganized again and more people joined. They came back a third time and they marched over that bridge and they marched all the way to Montgomery, AL, to fight for voting rights because it is the heart and soul of an individual's ability to participate in our democracy. John Lewis has said this:

There is still work to be done. Get out there, push and

pull, until we redeem the soul of America.

The For the People Act that the House will pass and that we will introduce here in this Chamber is the fight to redeem the soul of America. Let's stand together--old-timers and new Members of the Senate, those who sit on the left of the aisle and those who sit on the right of the aisle, those who come from blue-collar communities and those who come from circles of power--to stand behind the vision of our Constitution, the ``we the people'' vision, so this Chamber will do the work of the people. Let's restore the soul of America together.

I yield the floor.